Rural Railway Stations: Step Free Access

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Helen Morgan]

My hon. Friend is right: there should be more transparency, but there also needs to be more attention to the issue of step-free access in rural areas. I am about to come on to that in more detail.

Improving the accessibility of Whitchurch station will bring more people to the town via rail. That obviously could boost tourism—Whitchurch is Shropshire’s oldest continuously occupied town and is well worth a visit, along with the other beautiful and historic towns in my constituency—and bring customers to local businesses, workers to job vacancies, critically, and families to their loved ones.

Rural towns and villages have been consistently deprioritised by successive Governments and this Government, I am afraid, are no better, continually focusing investment into mayoral combined authorities’ coffers. Those areas do not face the same fundamental issues that rural areas do. They have regular buses that come within minutes, even on Sundays, and train services that are more frequent than every two hours. If people choose to drive, they can do so without the risk of damaging their tyres because they have bumped into a huge pothole. In a town like Whitchurch, if the bus turns up the round trip to someone’s destination is likely to be more than two hours—even if it is only to Shrewsbury, which is 20 miles away. Investment like the Access for All scheme in rural areas is part of the solution to improving economic growth—to more businesses thriving, more people spending and more money flowing into our economy.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

What the hon. Lady is describing sounds very familiar to the market town of Baldock in my constituency of North East Hertfordshire. Baldock is due to double in size, but does not have any step-free access. Would she join me in urging the Minister to ensure that rapidly growing rural communities receive a fair share of infrastructure funding?

[Helen Morgan]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. Whitchurch, like, I would imagine, many of the towns mentioned in today’s debate, has seen a huge amount of development. The criteria that might have been applied for step-free access some years back probably need reassessing now, because far more people are living there.

The investment would help revitalise our market town high streets, which have withered after years of the previous Conservative Government’s taking rural areas for granted. This Labour Government need to acknowledge the importance of rural parts of the country because they risk pushing the urban-rural divide to breaking point. I welcome the £373 million scheme to deliver Access for All projects over the next five years on a £70 million annual rolling basis, but it is key that that money is distributed to places where access to the railway network is currently poor and where it will have the most impact.

The only criteria that we could find for the provision of step-free access to railway stations come from joint code of practice created by the Department for Transport and Transport Scotland in 2015—a decade ago. It recommends that

“stations that have a daily passenger flow of 1000 passengers or less…are not required to have lifts or ramps”

if a station within 50 km of the same route provides a step-free route. I am sorry, but once someone has got in their car and driven 30 miles to access a step-free station, they may as well drive the rest of the way—I certainly would; that completely negates the point of public transport. Will the Minister please set out whether his Department intends to update those outdated and ineffective criteria to ensure that rural areas are not left forever without accessible stations?

Of course, I understand that installing accessibility upgrades for urban stations may reach more people, but the people there already have other forms of accessible transport, often as well as a usable taxi service. In an area such as Shropshire, that is often not the case. If the Government want to achieve their mission of stimulating growth across the whole country, they should ensure that everyone has proper access to public transport, not just those people who are lucky enough to live in an urban area. I hope that the Minister will ensure that the needs of our rural areas are understood and prioritised to turn the tide on decades of persistent under-investment in public transport and take the first step to making the railway step-free in rural areas, and especially in Whitchurch in North Shropshire.