Seaborne Freight

Debate between Chris Grayling and Grahame Morris

Monday 11th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. I have heard nothing from Labour bar attempts to disrupt the Brexit process. There has been no support for contingency planning or for a deal. All Labour Members seem to want to do is to act against the national interest, which is typical of the Labour party today. Its Members are more interested in themselves than in the country.

As for the other two contracts, they are proceeding according to plan. The routes will be ready, but I hope that they will not be needed, because I hope that we will leave the European Union with a deal. However, we must be ready, and we will be ready.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State spent a great deal of time maligning the RMT union, which had simply been asking that Ministers ensure that the Brexit ferry contract ships are crewed by British seafarers on decent pay and terms and conditions negotiated through the recognised trade unions. Can the Secretary of State answer a straight question? In answer to the previous urgent question, he talked about the advantages of developing a facility at Ramsgate, so will he confirm whether Ramsgate will be now be used at all in the event of a no-deal Brexit?

[Chris Grayling]

I believe in competition, so I would like Ramsgate to operate a ferry service whether there is a no-deal Brexit or not, and I know that the leader of Thanet District Council would like to see the same. It is a good port that has played an important role in the past. However, we will continue to work with the council not only to secure the short-term needs of the port of Ramsgate, but to help it promote the port as a viable option for the future.

Seaborne Freight

Debate between Chris Grayling and Grahame Morris

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

It is my belief that Operation Brock will prevent the closure of the M20. That is my prime concern—what happened in 2015 should not be repeated. I think there is sufficient capacity to ensure that that will not take place. We have completed the infrastructure works that are necessary on the motorways to ensure that the flow in both directions can continue, and we are now doing the detailed testing to understand flows of traffic and how to manage them to make sure that we do not see the kind of disruption we saw in 2015. I am hopeful that we will move quickly from the consultations we are having now to being able to decide a permanent location and get the thing dealt with once and for all.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

Any members of the public watching this debate will be absolutely amazed. They will think it is bizarre that we have a Transport Secretary who signs a shipping contract with a shipping company with no ships. Given that the company is going to hire in ferries, does he have any idea what plans it has to crew its ferries and whether UK crews would be used?

[Chris Grayling]

There is a complete lack of understanding of business models on the Opposition Benches. Opposition Members should understand that when they go on holiday next summer there is a fair chance they will be flying with an airline that owns no planes. The reality is that transport operators do not always own their own assets; they contract or charter them in and they operate the service. I do not think that Opposition Members understand that. As to the crewing of the ships, that is a matter for the company itself.

Rail Timetabling

Debate between Chris Grayling and Grahame Morris

Monday 4th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

The work on Dawlish has already started, as the hon. Gentleman knows. In terms of the infrastructure period that is about to start, delivering that work is, in my view, the most important capital project in the country. The most important priority on my desk now is self-evidently to get this sorted.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

My constituents are also experiencing their share of misery. The hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) said that trains serving her constituency had four carriages, but most of the trains serving mine only have two carriages to begin with, so they are already overcrowded even before any cancellations. It is clearly a failure of planning and co-ordination and a lack of integration. Will the Secretary of State or his successor give an assurance to the travelling public that a similar fiasco will not occur with the next timetable changes in December?

[Chris Grayling]

We are working extremely hard to make sure that this does not happen again. We have to deal with the short-term problem. We also have to make sure that this is not repeated with the December timetable change or future timetable changes. Where major investment leads to a major change in services, we cannot have a situation where that causes chaos on the network again.

Transport Secretary: East Coast Franchise

Debate between Chris Grayling and Grahame Morris

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Any franchise that runs its full term is expected to pay the full premiums, but when National Express went under and there was a further £1.5 billion of premiums to pay, that money continued to be paid by the new operator, in the same way that the premiums that we are expecting will continue to be paid by the operator in this instance. This is my point: the hon. Gentleman does not understand how the finances of the railways work, and that is why the Labour party is so unfit to be in opposition, let alone to govern.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

rose—

[Lilian Greenwood]

rose—

[Chris Grayling]

I will give way first to the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) and later to the Chairman of the Transport Committee.

[Grahame Morris]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State. I hope that he will clear up that point about the last Labour Government and National Express. As a member of the Transport Committee, I heard a former Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis, explain that sanctions had been applied and that that particular operator was not permitted to bid for other franchises, which was a significant sanction.

[Chris Grayling]

If I am not mistaken, Lord Adonis actually accepted before the Select Committee that that did not happen. He thought that standing up in Parliament and saying that there would be a ban meant that there actually was one. I assure the hon. Gentleman that my Department looked very carefully at this and no evidence of any ban has been found. Moreover, a report from the National Audit Office stated that it had found no such evidence.

East Coast Main Line

Debate between Chris Grayling and Grahame Morris

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I give my hon. Friend an assurance that the Azuma trains will be joining the network later this year. They will deliver a fantastic new service for passengers, and they will indeed be LNER Azuma trains instead.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State said that he was not aware of any problems with other franchises. Perhaps he was not in the House during Prime Minister’s questions, when problems with the Northern franchise were identified. Private companies are walking away from franchise bids in Wales and the east midlands. Is this not clear evidence that the rail franchising model is broken, and that the answer is a truly integrated railway under public ownership?

[Chris Grayling]

First, the number of firms asking for passports to apply for franchises is actually increasing, not decreasing. As I keep explaining to Opposition Members—they are causing as much trouble as they can for the Government over the European Union, instead of working together in the interests of this country—what they are proposing is illegal under European law.

Rail Franchising

Debate between Chris Grayling and Grahame Morris

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Chris Grayling)]

May I begin with the one thing on which we agree this afternoon? I thank the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) for his generous comments about my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), who has been a great servant of my Department and other Departments for a very long period. He has been on the Front Bench for 19 years, in government and in opposition. That is an epic career, and we all very much appreciate the work that he has done, particularly on legislation and on building bilateral discussions and so on, so I pay tribute to him for all that he did. I am grateful for the warm words from the hon. Member for Middlesbrough.

Apart from that, we have just heard about 25 minutes of complete nonsense from the Opposition. I suspect that you would say it would be unparliamentary of me to call them hypocritical, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will not do so, but I have no doubt that others in the know will be astonished by the gall with which they simply forget their actions in government; with which they pretend that their ideas will not cost a penny—I keep hearing that, but it is absolutely untrue—and with which they make inaccurate claims based on a lack of facts about subjects they appear not to understand.

Let me set out why the Opposition’s ideas do not stack up and why their positions do not add up.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

rose—

[Chris Grayling]

I will make some progress and then take interventions.

I shall also set out why the Opposition’s policies make no sense for the travelling public and why their pronouncements on the east coast main line are wrong. I shall also explain why it is this Government who have set about the task of modernising and upgrading our railways—the biggest programme of investment since the steam age—after 13 years of a Labour Government who quite simply failed to deliver the infrastructure improvements that this country needed. It has taken Conservatives to begin to change that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

I will take one more intervention and then make some progress.

[Grahame Morris]

It is an interesting concept that the travelling public have got a good deal that is paid for by the private train operating companies. I just checked what it would cost me if I left the House of Commons and went to Durham now. It would cost me £153 standard class—or £236 first class, but of course we are not allowed to do that. A similar journey at the same time of day from Frankfurt to Munich in Germany would cost £39 and tuppence. How is it that our travelling public are getting a good deal from this fragmented privatised system?

[Chris Grayling]

In this country, under Governments of both persuasions, we have taken decisions about the right balance between the cost of the railways being borne by those who use the railways and those who do not. Yes, the hon. Gentleman may be quoting walk -up fares, but he can go and buy an advance ticket for the east coast route at a fraction of the cost that he described.

Rail Update

Debate between Chris Grayling and Grahame Morris

Wednesday 29th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I know that the hon. Gentleman is after not just the hors d’oeuvre but a second course. That second course will probably be the Crewe hub, on which we are working carefully at the moment, but I thought that he at least deserved an appetiser. I buy the argument that the present situation as trains head north from Wrexham is not right, and I am therefore delighted that the Chancellor agreed to fund the development work for that scheme.

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

I give the Transport Secretary credit for acknowledging the failure on at least two occasions of the private franchise running the east coast main line. My recollection is that when it was operated by the UK state-owned Directly Operated Railways it generated more than £100 million in profit for the Treasury, which could be used for vital public services. What assessment has he made of the additional costs of the private-public sector partnership, and would it not be better to use the profits to extend the Tyne and Wear Metro into Easington rather than swelling the coffers of privately operated train companies, often German, Dutch and Spanish Government-owned?

[Chris Grayling]

There is a curious conundrum in this. We hear so much uncertainty from Labour about what they think about Brexit: they seem to want to stay in the single market and continue to operate in the traditional way, but they do not want to work with train companies from other countries. That is a bit illogical.

I am delighted that we as a Government are finally investing—in a way that the hon. Gentleman’s party did not—in rail in the north-east. The investment in trains on the Metro and the plans to extend it are the right things to do to help his constituency and the economy of the north-east, and I am very proud to be able to deliver them. It is also worth saying that the private sector franchise on the east coast main line has been contributing more to the Treasury than the public sector one did.