Rail Links: South-west England

Anne Marie Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Ind)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. This is a cross-party issue, and I am pleased to see many hon. Members here to support this cause. We may not be the midlands engine or the northern powerhouse, but we are the great south-west. That phrase is increasingly being used, and I sincerely hope that we can all support it, because we need that branding and that name.

In the great south-west, as many speakers have said, there is significant potential, but that can be realised only with proper investment in infrastructure. My hon. Friends and others have made it clear that that is not just about the railways, but about the roads and buses. I certainly support everything that has been said about that, but I would make the case that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) said, we need to ensure that at least the existing railway line is resilient.

To the Government’s credit, they did ensure that the Dawlish railway line was reinforced, but there is still more work to be done. As has been alluded to, one of the biggest pieces of work that still needs to be done is on the Teignmouth cliffs which, hon. Members will be well aware, are one of the greatest causes of stoppages on the route. When I have spoken to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on that issue, he has assured me that the work will take place—it is not if, but when. The challenge we face is that currently, as far as I am aware, although perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister has good news for me, the money—overall, the work will cost us £200 million—is not included in the next rail control period. As I understood it, the Secretary of State undertook to me that he would go and talk to our friend in the Treasury to see whether that project, or at least the start of it, could be accommodated. I hope that the Minister will let me know that at least a conversation with the Treasury has been had. Clearly, I am not going to ask him about what will be in the Budget, because I will not get a response to that question. However, it is mission-critical that we sort out the Teignmouth cliffs.

There are other aspects to this, because the railway line has to be resilient as a whole. The weir works at Cowley Bridge are also unfunded, but need to be put in place; the railway has also been down because of flooding. In addition, I certainly support the request for the Totnes and Hemerdon upgrade. That is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It will currently cost us £600,000 for the first report, then probably £30 million to get it done, but it seems to me to be a very sensible use of money.

One of the biggest concerns that many of our consumers, if you like, and those in our surgeries bring to us is the lack of proper wi-fi, so I absolutely endorse the call for the great south-west to be the pilot for the GSM-R project. That would mean aligning the masts of the telephone companies with those of the rail company, and I gather that Vodafone might well be up for that project.

In the longer term—it is right, in this House, to talk about the longer term—we must look at the future, and the 20-year PRTF plan does need a response, an acknowledgement. I ask the Minister to go back to his colleagues who answered the question that was put regarding whether there would be a response. It seems to me that at least an acknowledgement of the importance of this and a willingness to look forward would be appropriate.

I said to the Secretary of State that we really needed a long-term strategy for the whole peninsula. Forgive me for looking specifically at the peninsula, but as an MP in the peninsula, it is clearly where my main interest lies. That is not to downgrade in any way the importance of other parts of the line, because together we are strong and we help our tourism industry and our region as a whole, but we do need a proper strategy. At the moment, we have a railway line along the south coast. We talk about an additional line, but the reality is that we need to look at what we can do along the northern coast of the peninsula, because that has never really been looked at. To reopen lines that simply join what we currently have in the south to bits of infrastructure in the north seems to me rather short-sighted.

I am not asking for an immediate response or an immediate pot of money. That will not happen, but I do think it is incumbent on the Government to respond to requests from the House to give the south-west its fair share of attention and funding and to commit to looking at what we need in the great south-west, and at least to be prepared to put in place a proper strategy that we can all have input into and that will give us the productivity that the south-west can deliver and that this country desperately needs.