Redhill, Reigate and District Rail Services

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Lord Johnson of Marylebone

Thursday 18th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Joseph Johnson)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) on securing this debate and on continuing his tireless campaign on behalf of his constituents in Reigate. He and I have discussed these issues on many occasions over the months I have been in this role. I understand his frustration at his relatively poor progress over the years on behalf of his residents, and I am pleased to say that I will have good news for him later in my remarks. His core concern is the Redhill hump, but, before I come to the meat of that, I will touch on some of the other issues he mentioned.

Thameslink performance through Redhill has improved, as I hope my hon. Friend will acknowledge, since the introduction of an amended timetable on 15 July. Services on the Brighton main line were some of the worst hit following the introduction of the timetable on 20 May, and I am glad that things are now improving. In fact, we have seen a public performance measure above 80% on Thameslink services through his constituency. Of course there is always room for improvement, and the Department is carefully monitoring the performance.

I am aware that services from Reigate have been affected by external issues, including trespass incidents in recent weeks. None the less, the long-term signs are moving in the right direction, which is why it is important that we are seeing the progressive reintroduction of services that were withdrawn from the proposed May 2018 timetable.

In a couple of months’ time, in December, GTR will bring in a further 200 additional services every weekday across its network, including, as my hon. Friend will be pleased to hear, 18 services calling at Redhill and 14 calling at Merstham. I have made it clear to GTR that its improved performance has to be maintained as those services are introduced and that we must not see any slippage or return to the disruption associated with the past introduction of new services. I am confident that continued good performance, and those additional services from December, will allow passengers from Reigate to start feeling the benefits of the new timetable.

My hon. Friend also mentioned the constraints imposed by the current infrastructure, which we are in the process of addressing through the £300 million upgrade to the Brighton main line. One of those limitations is the short platforms at Reigate. The Reigate works will form an important part of the potential range of interventions in the Brighton main line upgrade programme, and they would allow the station to accommodate direct Thameslink services and provide greater operational flexibility for Thameslink. A study to investigate the feasibility and cost of this eventually necessary infrastructure has recently been completed by Network Rail.

Stoats Nest junction, to the south of Coulsdon, is also recognised as a constraint, and it is a potential part of the Brighton main line upgrade programme. We will look to future opportunities to progress the programme, subject to the development of positive business cases and the availability of funding.

My hon. Friend raised the question of compensation and special compensation. I certainly appreciate his points about the special compensation scheme following the May disruption for people travelling from Reigate, and I understand that passengers interchanging on to Thameslink services also suffered disruption—a point he made very forcefully to me in our meeting last week. However, to ensure that passengers were treated fairly and so that those who were most affected by the disruption received appropriate compensation, it was inevitably necessary to put in place clear criteria to define the scope of the scheme.

Passengers travelling from Reigate who would normally change on to Thameslink services were still able to travel on the less disrupted Southern services to Victoria and use the tube network to reach London Bridge. Ticket acceptance on the tube and between Thameslink, Southern and Gatwick Express services was in place at the height of disruption. As a result, as I said to my hon. Friend last week, there are no plans to amend the compensation scheme for passengers who change trains at a level 1 station or who buy tickets from a station not served by Thameslink or Great Northern services.

My hon. Friend has also been campaigning relentlessly for Reigate to be included in an extended Oyster zone. The Department set out in its strategic vision for rail, published in November last year, that its goal was to ensure that across regional and urban commuter areas smart ticketing can deliver the kind of pay-as-you-go structure that is used in London, with a system to automatically charge fares at the appropriate level.

We are actively exploring options for how that might be achieved, and I hope that my hon. Friend’s constituency will, in time, and hopefully not within too much time, be one of those that benefits from the broader approach we will be taking.

We want to deliver pay-as-you-go travel across regional and urban commuter areas rather than singling out particular stations, such as his own, at this point. Pay-as-you-go travel and the associated simplified fare structure will bring substantial passenger benefits and the Department will be working very hard to achieve that.

Finally, let me return to what my hon. Friend rightly described as his core issue, the Redhill fares hump. Historically, this has arisen because separate operators on the Brighton main line have put in place specific fares that were intended to make their service more competitive. Now, all services on the Brighton main line are run by the same operator. This has led to a situation where the fares in his constituency are unnecessarily complex and unhelpfully perverse, with fares from Gatwick airport into London at a lower price than those in all surrounding stations. This is a truly exceptional situation. I made a commitment to him that we would work on this issue and provide a solution, and I am pleased to say that we have done exactly that.

Today, I can make a commitment that we will see this issue resolved by the end of the current franchise in 2021, with a reduction in fares coming into effect from this coming January. I hope that my hon. Friend will welcome that news, which results directly from his tireless and effective campaign on behalf of all his constituents.

[Crispin Blunt]

I have managed to scrape in before the Minister’s last word. Obviously, his concluding remarks are immensely welcome, and it would be ungracious of me not to be delighted on behalf of my constituents that he has had the opportunity to reflect and put a plan in place to get this issue addressed. I am immensely grateful. I am afraid that we will continue to have meetings on the merits of the other issues, but I am delighted that we will get Oyster as it is rolled out across the piece. He will probably continue to be lobbied by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), I am afraid, as his constituents who travel to the further education colleges in my constituency are caught by this problem, but, overall, I am very grateful to the Minister.

[Joseph Johnson]

I am delighted that we have a happy customer in Reigate and Redhill. I am always ready to receive further lobbying from my hon. Friend on the points that he raised.

Question put and agreed to.

Govia Thameslink Franchise

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Lord Johnson of Marylebone

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

The important questions that the hon. Lady raises will be answered by the Glaister review and the departmental hard review. We need to establish what responsibility GTR had for the disruption that passengers have experienced, while recognising that other actors are involved that also have a share in what has happened, including Network Rail.

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

As the Opposition spokesman implied, Mr Speaker, you probably could have granted this urgent question on any day in the past four years, since the London Bridge investment work began and the timetable fell over after new year 2015. Will my hon. Friend the Minister warn the Opposition, who focus simply on the GTR franchise, that there is a complex set of overlapping responsibilities in this area that mean that a simple solution is almost certainly the wrong one? Will he and his team address the complexity of the structure that started with the privatisation of this service back in 1993? Will he do what is within his power and address the grotesque unfairnesses in some of the fare structures and significantly improve the compensation deal, so that people who access the Thameslink service get compensation as well as those who are lucky enough to go on to a Thameslink train straight away?

[Joseph Johnson]

My hon. Friend raised the issue of the fare structure. He has been a tireless campaigner on this question on behalf of his constituents in Reigate and Redhill, and we take his concerns extremely seriously. He also made the important point that we should not leap to simplistic solutions, as the Labour party has done by thinking that there is a quick-fix answer to this in nationalisation. We have to remember that there are many actors in what has gone wrong, including Network Rail, which is, of course, in the public sector.