Regional Transport Infrastructure

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Ryan, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) on securing the debate.

I chair the all-party group on the east of England. Although I fully understand the arguments made by colleagues about disparities in regional funding, and I know that some will argue that the south in general does well, I ask people to look a little deeper, particularly at the east. The east of England region has enjoyed significant growth over the years and is a net contributor to the Treasury, with great innovation hubs, but there are substantial challenges, almost all based around transport and housing. Despite considerable effort in different parts of the region, that continues to be a struggle. I pay tribute to those who developed the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough independent economic review, but still the answers often depend on unlocking the investment levers that sit in the Treasury.

I want to flag up a couple of positive suggestions that might help. Since coming to the House, I have strongly supported the London Stansted Cambridge Consortium and the West Anglia Taskforce, which has made a powerful case for rail improvements in the corridor, including sections of four-tracking. The case remains strong, but there are still considerable challenges to achieving it, so it is worth looking at other options.

I have been told that digital signalling across the eastern region could make a huge difference. The cost is £1 billion—a lot of money—and this does not necessarily make old, unreliable infrastructure any more reliable, but it can make better use of what we have. I am told that it could increase reliability and frequency, such that it could take up to 10 to 12 minutes off the Stansted to Liverpool Street journey: completely transformative in terms of our transport connections within the region.

For understandable reasons, I take Cambridge to be the centre of our transport hubs within the region, and I want to see better connectivity to the east. I also want to look west, having already looked south. There is much debate about the Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford corridor, or CaMKOx, as it is likely to be called. To make the best use of it we will need much better regional co-ordination, but observers as esteemed as Sir John Armitt have pointed out that the plethora of organisations along the arc makes that extremely difficult.

I am grateful to England’s Economic Heartland, which has suggested that a geographically-specific national policy statement might be considered. Such statements were established by the Planning Act 2008 and are introduced for major projects. It might be innovative to use a geographically-specific NPS to bring together infrastructure requirements, but that is not without precedent and there is a sound legal basis. As a member of the Transport Committee that looked in detail at the Heathrow NPS, I really can see the value of such a process. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that suggestion.

As we see the northern powerhouse, the midlands engine and other regions of the country come together to campaign on these issues, it is clear that this is a question not just of investment, but of how the investment is made. I do not want to see the south and the east get left behind in this new world.