Transport Connectivity: Merseyside

Conor McGinn Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I know that you are a frequent visitor to the city region, and I was delighted that you were in my constituency at Haydock Park just before Christmas. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley), who secured this debate, and to be part of this formidable red wall from Merseyside, with even a usurper from across the DMZ in Greater Manchester.

St Helens is often seen as being on the periphery of one city region, but we see ourselves as sitting at the heart of two—Liverpool city region and Greater Manchester—and acting as a key bridge between them. Therefore, harnessing every chance for growth and for local opportunities obviously requires transport connectivity.

We have already made important improvements to our road infrastructure along the A580, known locally as the East Lancs road, at Windle Island and Haydock. Newton-le-Willows station is now the second busiest on the Manchester-to-Liverpool line. It is being transformed into a leading regional transport hub. Six hundred kilometres of new cycling and walking networks are planned for the next decade, with a new 7 km route linking St Helens to Burtonwood and additional capacity on the Sankey Valley cycle route, which I and my family use on an almost weekly basis.

Cross-boundary bus services and links to Liverpool, Manchester, Warrington, Wigan and beyond are a particular issue for us. These are all progressing. We want our services to be enhanced and to see an end to the extortionate prices that are driven by profits for private companies. Wider innovations, particularly in green transport, are helping in our fight against climate change. Having Liverpool city region’s publicly owned hydrogen buses on the route between the city and St Helens will mean the first green bus route in our region.

It is important to say that all this is being done by Labour councils, supported by Labour MPs, and the Liverpool city region Labour Mayor, Steve Rotheram, because we are ambitious for our city region and for our constituents. That stands in stark contrast to the Government. The integrated rail plan published in November was, we were told, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to push this agenda forward and transform transport for us in the north. But what did we get? We got a plan that is not even fit for the present, never mind the future.

The plan betrayed us and our communities again. It will sacrifice direct connections from Newton-le-Willows station in my constituency for the sake of a two-minute improvement on journeys from Manchester to Liverpool. There are no plans to improve local services from Garswood, for example by improving disabled access, or Rainford, and there is nothing about the future of the proposed new station at Carr Mill. The plan says nothing about developing the link between St Helens junction and central stations, which would open whole new possibilities for the town and our whole borough. This all comes as revised rail timetables for December 2022 propose reduced services from all those stations, meaning that we will have more overcrowding and constraints on passenger numbers.

In recent months, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and the Mayor of the Liverpool city region, Steve Rotheram, came to St Helens for a transport seminar with our local council and colleagues from Wigan and Warrington. We will continue to press for a better deal—the best deal for our region and constituents—because I and my colleagues are focused on transforming transport for our people. We know that that is critical for our economy and our climate, but also for our connections to each other and our places. I urge the Government to catch up and support us in the work we are doing.