Transport: North-east

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) on securing the debate on an important subject for her and her constituents. We have had many good contributions from my hon. Friends, with substantial speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) and for North Durham (Mr Jones) and a good speech from the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mrs Trevelyan). We had good interventions from my hon. Friends the Members for Jarrow (Mr Hepburn), for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott), for North Tyneside (Mary Glindon) and for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop). Given the lack of time, I will try to be as brief as possible.

As others have pointed out, transport in the north-east has suffered from consistent underfunding from the Government. Figures from the Department for Transport show that since 2010 the north-east has received the lowest level of public spending on transport compared with any other region in England. As a consequence of that underfunding, bus patronage in the north-east has declined faster since 1986 than in any other region. It has fallen by more than a half, and is now about 50% lower than before deregulation, declining from 426 million bus passenger journeys in 1985 to just 180 million last year. That deregulation, far from increasing competition and improving services for consumers as the Conservative Government at the time promised, has created damaging bus market monopolies. In fact, recent statistics published by the Department show that in Tyne and Wear just two operators—Stagecoach and Go North East—accounted for 87% of market share. Arriva had a market share of more than 97% in Darlington and more than 91% in Redcar and Cleveland, while Stagecoach has 91% in Hartlepool. Monopolies mean that passengers lack alternatives and have to put up with fares rising faster than wages, while we also see allegedly unprofitable routes consistently being axed.

It does not have to be like that. While in Government, Labour introduced legislation to enable local authorities to re-regulate the bus market in their areas. The Transport Act 2000 introduced quality contract schemes and in 2008 there was an attempt to simplify that process, although it is fair to say that we all now recognise that that legislation was overcomplicated.

As we have heard, the North East combined authority came closest to implementing a quality contract scheme, but that fell at the last hurdle just over a year ago. One of my first trips as a member of the shadow Transport team was to Newcastle to meet key members of that team. I pay tribute in particular to Tobyn Hughes, the managing director of Nexus, and the team who tried so hard, and I remember their account of why they did. They gave an account of a local travel system that had been integrated, as hon. Members have explained, and that was one of the most effective public transport systems in the country—it is still fondly remembered—with the metro opening in 1980, providing a seamless integrated link, and one ticket taking people across the city on bus, metro or ferry. Of course, back then we had passengers and citizens, not customers and commodities.

Despite that, the metro is still the busiest light-rail system outside London and the backbone of the transport system, with the public authority specifying fares and frequencies, as we would like to see for buses. However, as we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, it certainly needs overhauling. We will support Nexus in that process. It is extraordinary that if a passenger crosses the river and boards a bus, they now need to buy another ticket. Unsurprisingly, the result of all that fragmentation is that despite support from the local authorities—dipping into reserves to try to help—bus patronage is still falling, and the familiar cycle of declining services and cuts to services locks in future decline. The system simply is not working.

That is why we strongly supported Tobyn and his team in their Herculean effort, and we were deeply disappointed by the rejection of their proposal by the board. In fact, we were astonished by the board’s implication that bus operators ought to be compensated by local authorities for financial losses they might incur. We were more than astonished by some of the comments from some of the bus companies.

We hope that the situation is calmer now, and it was a welcome surprise when the Government followed Labour’s lead, recognised the shortcomings of the current arrangements and introduced the Bus Services Bill, which has its Third Reading in the other place today. The Opposition want a constructive relationship with all bus operators, large and small. However, we worry that there is a danger that the Bill will have insufficient impact in the north-east because of the linkage to the demand for a combined authority and a mayor. Of course, discussions are going on in that part of the world, but it appears that with a devolution deal “off the table”—in the Government’s words—local people are to be denied the services they should be entitled to. We worry about the future of bus services, but there is a solution and we hope that the Minister will give some thought to making sure that it is available to those people.

I will turn briefly to roads and finally to rail, where we also feel the Government are also in danger of breaking their commitments. We recognise how important the “laddering” is—the road connectivity between the parallel north-south highways of the A1 and A19—by way of improvements to the east-west A66, and of course the A19 Tees viaduct is currently a key constraint on the strategic road network.

On rail, the Minister said last week that improving northern transport infrastructure is vital to the success of what the Government have termed the northern powerhouse, and that the Government are committing £13 billion to transport improvements in this Parliament. However, it was promised in 2012 that projects that would benefit the north-east would be delivered between 2014 and 2019, such as maximising the value of the north trans-Pennine electrification through capacity enhancement at Huddersfield station. Much of that has now been delayed until after 2020. There were also hopes for improvements to transform Sunderland, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central, and to improve capacity at Newcastle.

To conclude, the recent history of transport in the north-east has been less than inspiring. It is a story of hard-pressed local authorities doing their best for their communities, but in our view they are too often thwarted by rules imposed upon them from the outside. I very much hope that the Minister will confirm today that the Government will give the North East combined authority the power needed to plan its own bus network and regulate bus services, the support needed to continue to improve transport for everyday passengers and the freedom to unleash the full potential of the north-east of the country.