Great Western Main Line

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on bringing forward this debate. I represent Truro and Falmouth, which is in the heart of Cornwall, so I have the opportunity to experience the rail network myself on a weekly basis, as I often go all the way from Paddington back to my constituency. My constituents and I all have tales of unreliability on GWR’s longer-haul services. My inbox has received several complaints from those who have to commute out of Cornwall for work and from plenty of students who go to and from Penryn back to their families each term. Any additional support we can give to these rail lines would be appreciated.

However, it is important to acknowledge the improvements that have been made to our railways since 2019. I always try to make this point to remind our really talented students at the University of Exeter and Falmouth University that their journeys today are actually an awful lot better than they were about five, 10 or 15 years ago. It just would not have been practical for many of them to come and enjoy being a student in my constituency at all.

Since May 2019, we have had a half-hourly service between Plymouth and Penzance, which has greatly boosted passenger numbers and had a positive impact on the Cornish economy. GWR has also worked to improve reliability with its new rolling stock of inter-city express trains. There is also the Night Riviera Sleeper service, which I have used many times. The sleeper lounge at Truro station in my constituency has encouraged more people to travel to London by train rather than plane. We have seen an exponential rise in passengers since covid. Many people have now moved to Cornwall and can commute to London for a couple of days a week using the Riviera service. I believe it is out of service for refurbishment at the moment, but it is very popular.

I know that my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), will come on to this in greater detail, but I am proud that the Government are working with Cornwall Council, and its delivery partners GWR and Network Rail, to build the Mid Cornwall Metro. It will do exactly what it says on the tin: ensure that people can commute from Newquay via Par and Truro down to Falmouth, so that students do not have to live close to the university; we can all spread out and enjoy both coasts. We will see £50 million of levelling-up funding injected directly into Cornwall’s rail links. Hopefully, we can expect to see that up and running in 2025-26.

Our communities in Truro and Falmouth are incredibly mixed, with a large number of car owners. It is incumbent on the railways to recognise that we are dualling the A30 all the way through my constituency. That means that at the moment, with the service unreliability that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) has just set out, more people will choose to use their cars, which is not the direction of travel that we want. The dualling project will be completed early spring, and we want to ensure that the railways remain competitive. Getting the Mid Cornwall Metro over the line will transform connectivity for the groups—students, tourists and communities alike—who are most reliant on public transport, and hopefully alleviate pressure on parking in our town centres, particularly during the summer months.

I will not go on for too long, but changing our infrastructure for the better and levelling up our communities in the south-west is always going to take time. However, if we do not do it, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) said, we will get cut off. The sheer amount of investment from the Government, Cornwall Council and Network Rail into the railway lines in the south-west has given us a real leg-up in the last few years. It is our job now to continue to work with those partners to keep the current projects on track, and to promote other value-for-money schemes that can help our towns and villages get that little bit closer. We are very precarious, and if we do not keep investing, it is easy for Cornwall to fall off the map.