Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail

Chris Loder Excerpts

Wednesday 14th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Chris Loder (West Dorset) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate; I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on it. I am delighted to follow the chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart), and I am even more delighted to have the Minister here, so that we can have this discussion.

The Great British Railways initiative emanated from what was nothing short of a timetable disaster in May 2018. It affected large parts of the country significantly, and it led my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) to take that first step and say, “Actually, this does not work. This system does not click together, and it needs proper reform.” Of course, that led to the Williams review. If I recall, that piece of work commenced at the beginning of 2019, and we are now four years on. Admittedly, we have had covid in the middle, which has made things more difficult, but the progress has been unclear.

In the Bradshaw lecture mentioned by the Chair of the Transport Committee, the Secretary of State described the railway system as broken, and I agree with him. There are many reasons why it has become so fractious. We have allowed the trade unions to have much more influence than they should have. During covid, trade unions told train companies they would not allow the training of train drivers. That generated a deficit in the manpower requirement, and it meant that many train companies—including TransPennine Express, I suspect, and many others—have to cope with fewer train drivers than they require, and therefore have a requirement on overtime. That has meant that the influence and power was with the trade unions, particularly the train drivers’ union. We know that that is the case even today.

Having been a member of the Transport Committee since 2020—indeed, under the then chairmanship of the Minister—we have had much debate and discussion about this with successive Ministers, commencing in May 2021, March 2022 and October 2022, and with senior officials, including the permanent secretary. We have got to a place where the industry, as well as the passenger and taxpayer, now needs to see real progress on what can and will happen to improve our railways rapidly. We have talked a little this afternoon about the need for legislation. That is one way, but—not to be too sceptical—I do not think we will see the legislation immediately. Even if we did, with the timescales we have to contend with before the end of this Parliament, its impact would be limited.

I will focus my remaining remarks on what is actually feasible to do, rather than being concerned too much with what is unfeasible or unlikely to take place in what remains of this Parliament. We know very well that the DFT is able to specify the core timetable that operators run today. That is part of the contractual arrangements. I am a huge advocate of releasing some of that specification to allow the private sector to bring back to our railways the innovation and commercial capabilities that we have seen previously. We see it currently; I recall reviewing the statement by FirstGroup that its open-access operations, such as Hull Trains and Lumo, have performed very well. I am a huge advocate of enabling that to happen because my great concern, as someone who worked in the railways for 20 years before I was elected to this place, is the enormous uncertainty in this huge industry, which affects both the economy and the passenger experience.

In my own constituency, I have two operators, South Western Railway and Great Western Railway, both of which have had extended management contracts from the Department to deliver train services. It is of great regret to me and my colleagues locally that there was no consultation about the needs of the community when those contracts were leased. When the current contracts come to an end—if it is in this Parliament—I hope we might have that discussion.

However, in the absence of that consultation, I have an ask for the Minister to consider. Once upon a time, we ran summer Saturday trains, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes mentioned, from the Salisbury-Sherborne-Yeovil line down to Weymouth. That service was removed without consultation, and I would be very appreciative if the Minister would ask his Department to consider putting it in the service specification for South Western Railway.

The county town of Dorset—Dorchester—has suffered terribly over the last two or three years. The whole county has been cut off from London on numerous occasions for a number of reasons, whether it was covid or otherwise. The journey time to London from Dorchester is almost three hours; if I recall correctly, it used to be two hours and 15 minutes in years past. I would very much appreciate it if my hon. Friend the Minister would consider such improvements to the railway and ask Network Rail to consider them.