South Fylde Line

Debate between Bob Stewart and Mark Menzies

Wednesday 18th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mark Menzies (Fylde) (Con)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, it is a great pleasure to be holding this debate with a fellow Lancashire Member of Parliament in the Chair. In fact, we have gone from one transport debate to another, albeit with a rather large gap in between. As a Lancashire MP yourself, you are more than well aware of the issues on our county’s rail network and of the need for modernisation of the infrastructure and rolling stock. Indeed, you have fought diligently on behalf of your constituents for exactly the improvements that I am fighting for for mine.

Today, I am pleased to be able to raise the subject of the South Fylde line. It is raised repeatedly not only on the doorsteps, but at local events and in written correspondence. Just standing on the platform at Preston station, people come up to me and say, “We need to do better than this.”

Throughout my time as Member of Parliament, I have fought to improve services. In this, we have seen progress. The dilapidated Pacer trains, which used to deposit waste directly on to the tracks, are thankfully a thing of the past. In 2018, I was delighted to reopen the modernised Kirkham and Wesham station following the installation of a new platform and two lifts serving it, providing, at long last, a station that was accessible to all.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I thank my really good friend for allowing me to intervene. May I say that I am delighted to hear that news? I last went to that station in July 1969 when I was going to the nearby Weeton camp. I have to say that it was showing slight age then, and so, some 50 years later, I am really glad that it has been modernised.

[Mark Menzies]

Colonel Bob, not only has it been modernised, but I still speak to constituents who remember you passing through in 1969. Once my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath—

[Bob Stewart]

Beckenham.

[Mark Menzies]

Sorry. Once my right hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) has passed through, he is never forgotten.

The holy grail remains, however, the doubling of services on the line through the installation of a passing loop, and I am concerned that efforts in that area have, frankly, stalled. In June 2020, I submitted a full restoring your railway bid to double train services on the South Fylde line. The bid was one of 50 submitted, with the then Chancellor, now the Prime Minister, selecting it to be taken forward with Government funding to help to put together a strategic outline business case.

The SOBC was submitted in November 2021, and since then there has been no further progress or communication from the Department. My fellow bid partners and I feel slightly abandoned, with even the formal email address of restoring your railway now closed. My purpose today is therefore to seek assurances that the project continues to have the Government’s backing. The years of hard work that went into reaching that stage must not be allowed to fall by the wayside. Earlier this year, I launched the campaign to get the South Fylde line back on track.

I will give some context to where we find ourselves today. First opened in the 1840s, a little over a decade on from Stephenson’s Rocket, the history of the South Fylde line parallels the story of Victorian Britain and our railways more generally. Major expansion came in the latter decades of the 1800s, with new stations opening to serve the booming Victorian holiday industry. That was growing in Fylde, not just in the beach resorts and the residential communities that sprung up alongside them. They provided vital links for those commuting to Liverpool, Greater Manchester and the great mill towns of east Lancashire, where industry was booming.

The post-war era saw our railways enter a period of decline, with the rise of cars and dwindling passenger numbers, and of course Dr Beeching’s cuts would soon follow. Despite that, the South Fylde line survived as a two-track line until the 1980s, when the axe finally fell and the line was reduced to a single track capable of serving one train an hour in each direction. Recent years have seen something of a consensus reached around Beeching and the period of his cutbacks, and the closures that started with his report: they were a mistake. To echo the Prime Minister’s recent words, they were an example of an “old consensus” that favoured cars over public transport.

As the Minister knows from our correspondence on the topic, the South Fylde line falls far short of what is satisfactory, and is even further from being a good service. Reliability is a major issue, with one delay having an impact on services for the rest of the day, and a single track is neither the only issue nor the sole reason for the reliability issues. Be it staff sickness, driver shortages, faulty trains or signalling issues, Fylde’s commuters have heard it all. On a weekday evening, rail replacement services have become an increasingly common occurrence, turning a 20-minute train journey from Lytham to Preston into one lasting almost an hour.

In addition, Northern cut the frequency of weekend services in August, the peak of the summer tourist season, for reasons that remain unclear to me. Recent data from On Time Trains listed St Annes-on-the-Sea as the 2,204th ranked station for reliability, with all stations located beyond the line’s division at Kirkham and Wesham ranking similarly. Remarkably, that is an improvement from August, when the station fell outside the top 2,500, out of just 2,617 open railway stations across the UK. That is miserable reading for Fylde’s commuters and the many people who choose Fylde as a holiday destination. The train, I am afraid, is an unreliable option for them.