Regional Transport Inequality

Debate between Catherine Atkinson and Joe Robertson

Thursday 11th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Catherine Atkinson]

I am grateful for the support that my hon. Friend, alongside many colleagues, has shown for electrification and the benefits that it can bring. It would be a fitting celebration of 200 years of the modern railway to continue the electrification of the midland main line, which would bring jobs, skills and hundreds of millions of pounds in economic benefits particularly to the east midlands.

I love my region, and like so many in this Chamber I know my region’s strengths and can imagine the possibilities if investment were genuinely equitably distributed around our country. If our regional transport was more equal, it would create more prosperity, economic growth, social equality, regional development and carbon reduction as well as better air quality. Our transport infrastructure is the country’s circulatory system: it connects and enriches wherever it reaches. If someone’s circulation is not great, they feel the cold a little more in their fingers, as I well know. If it is restricted more, their arms and legs get fatigue, numbness and pain. In the extreme, it eventually leads to organ failure. That is where we had been heading for far too long, but over the last year the Government have been getting the blood pumping again.

[Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I am just about to finish.

If the UK is a body, Derby is geographically at its heart and is asking to have the same chance as everywhere else to be connected. We need to maintain our change of direction to reduce the inequality in the spend per person on transport, stay on track towards the reduction, and ultimately the elimination, of regional transport inequality, and deliver fair funding for transport.