Great Western Railway Routes

Debate between Ben Bradshaw and Oliver Colvile

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bradshaw]

I entirely agree. The Labour Government set up an independent infrastructure body—I cannot remember its name—and the hon. Gentleman’s Government have gone on to do something similar. We need to be much more radical in how we manage big infrastructure improvements. Network Rail is currently pleading, in today’s Financial Times, with the Government not to privatise it, but instead to hand over such decisions to an independent rail commission. That is a very sensible and sound idea, and I hope the Government will listen to it. The fragmentation and privatisation of Network Rail would be an absolute disaster. It is worth reading the piece in today’s Financial Times.

[Oliver Colvile]

If we want business to use railways, we also need to ensure a good level of broadband so that people can actually work on them.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I forgot to mention that broadband is terrible in standard class. It never works. I just use 3G, or 4G, if I have it, on the train. I raised this issue with First Great Western a number of times, but it still has not been resolved. I am told that it is fine in first class, but who travels first class? MPs certainly do not; not in my experience, anyway. I never have and since the new expenses system came in we are quite rightly not allowed to.

As hon. Members will remember, two years ago last week we had the catastrophic severing of the line at Dawlish. As the hon. Member for Torbay said, it had a huge impact on the region’s wider economy. Flooding then cut the line on the Somerset levels and this weekend there was flooding between Taunton and Castle Cary. My train was diverted from Exeter because of flooding. There are a lot of resilience problems throughout the network. As we all know, with the growing threat from climate change there will be increasing occurrences of extreme weather events. There has been meaningful and substantial investment in the railways, including in the south-west—although not as much as in other parts of the UK. Following the Hatfield disaster, hon. Members will remember that under the Labour Government there was a major programme of work to make signalling and track safer. That work is ongoing. Improvements at Reading have already made a significant positive difference to the reliability of the service. There used to be regular delays, in particular when coming into Reading on the return journey.

There have been improvements, but we in the far south-west, as opposed to the Bristol-south Wales corridor, where major electrification is planned, still feel the poor relation when it comes to investment. There were a lot of generous—I will use that term rather than grandiose, because we took them at their word—promises made by the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Transport Secretary after Dawlish and particularly in the run-up to the general election. I lost count of the number of times the Chancellor and the Prime Minister appeared in Devon and Cornwall wearing a hard hat and a fluorescent jacket and promising us more than £7 billion of rail and other infrastructure investment. They will be held to those promises. A whole swathe of Conservative MPs were elected in Devon and Cornwall on those promises. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] They are laughing, smiling and “hear-hearing” now, but if those promises are not delivered the smiles will be on the other side of their faces come the next general election. It is up to them to get their Government to deliver.

I feel sorry for my Conservative colleagues. We are friends—we have regional solidarity—and I feel sorry for them. In the past two weeks, we have had an absolute public relations fiasco over a tiny sum of money. The Peninsula Rail Task Force in the south-west is a group that got together after Dawlish. It is run by a Conservative councillor. All the councils have taken part and most of them are Conservative. It came up with a fantastic document, on which the hon. Member for Torbay based most of his speech, about what needs to happen in the south-west. Its very small initial ask is for £250,000 for the necessary feasibility studies into electrification and resilience, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. We were promised that this would happen. There was going to be a press release. It was going to be announced last week on the second anniversary of Dawlish. I hope the Minister will use the opportunity this evening, when she responds to the debate—it is not a very good time to put out such a fantastic news story that our media in the south-west would absolutely love—to come up with this small amount of money. It is £250,000 for two feasibility studies. Nothing has been said about when the work will happen.

Regional Pay (NHS)

Debate between Ben Bradshaw and Oliver Colvile

Wednesday 7th November 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Bradshaw]

Yes, I absolutely agree: the whole thing has been handled extremely badly by the trusts involved.

If the proposals go through, the trusts involved are likely to see an exodus of staff, not only to other regions, but, as the hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) suggested, to trusts in the south-west that are not part of the cartel.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case, but I am curious about one thing. There is a limited amount of money that can be spent in the national health service—the Government decided to increase it, although I seem to remember that the previous Labour Government were considering cutting it—so the choice is simple: we either go for a variation on regional pay or we make people redundant, and I am not convinced that that argument has been thought through. Would the right hon. Gentleman therefore be willing to join me in trying to convince the Government to do something about the tariff that is paid to hospitals in the south-west? We are short of money, and we need to find a way to improve that situation.