Train Operating Companies: Yorkshire

Debate between Diana Johnson and Paula Sherriff

Wednesday 19th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

It is always a delight to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (John Grogan), and I particularly agree with his comments about Northern, which were very well made. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) on securing this timely debate. She set out very clearly the appalling statistics of what has been happening over the past six to nine months in Yorkshire and the suffering that passengers have had to endure.

I want to talk specifically about TransPennine and First Hull Trains. Both companies are part of FirstGroup, which made millions in profit in the last financial year. I will give some experiences of passengers. The first reads:

“Happy Bank Holiday weekend, TransPennine Express. I’m sure we’ll have a good one too when my husband eventually gets on your train service from Leeds to Hull. He’s still sat on the platform. It’s the fifth night in a row, and he has missed his son’s bedtime.”

I have also had constituents write to me to say that they are moving away from Hull because of the unreliability of the service when they want to commute to Leeds. On overcrowding, which has become an issue over the past year:

“If you want intimacy but you’re too scared to seek it out, take a TransPennine Express train instead, and press yourself against four strangers for two hours.”

TransPennine Express decided earlier this year as part of its timetabling changes that it would increase the length of the journey from Hull across to Manchester by adding four additional stops. When questioned about this by the Hull and Humber chamber of commerce, TransPennine apparently said that the

“timetable development will enhance connectivity to and from Hull.”

It actually adds about 15 additional minutes to the journey. There was no consultation or discussion—TransPennine just decided to do this themselves. This does not fit with the northern powerhouse—connectivity between the great cities of the north. It should be reducing journey times, not increasing them.

When we three Hull MPs asked to meet Leo Goodwin, the head of TransPennine Express who has a pay package of £360,000, he would not. In fact, when we had the meeting with the chamber of commerce, we empty-chaired him: we had a chair with his name on, because he would not come and talk to us. We shamed him into coming to explain to us why TransPennine had taken that action. It is clear that there are cancellations and there is late running, and people are being squashed in like sardines on the service from Leeds.

In Hull, we feel like we are the end of the line and often forgotten. We are not getting new trains; we are getting refurbished trains as part of the TransPennine refurbishment stock. The city of Hull does not have a direct train to Manchester airport, but Scarborough—a small and important town—does. We now have longer journeys across the Pennines due to the changes that TransPennine made, and we do not have a direct service from Hull to Liverpool—the area that we know is the spine of the northern powerhouse.

I would like the Minister to respond to our requests. We think that we should have a half-hourly additional express service from Hull and a direct link to Manchester airport. I also want to mention TransPennine Express, because it runs Hull station on behalf of Network Rail. We have been voted the ninth-worst station in the UK by Passenger Focus. We had £1.4 million spent to improve facilities that were supposed to be for city of culture in 2017, but which did not finish until 2018. We have smaller waiting rooms, smelly toilets and gaffer tape over the signage in the station. We have a Christmas tree that was put up and then surrounded with bollards and hazard tape. The lack of pride that TransPennine has in our station just beggars belief. We have had no station manager for months; we have had remote management from Huddersfield.

[Paula Sherriff]

I have a similar problem at Dewsbury. We do not have any toilets in our stations, and TransPennine Express have suggested that my constituents and passengers using the station should use the pub nearby. For cultural and other reasons, many people are not comfortable going into the pub to use the bathrooms. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is a disgrace that a very busy station should not have any toilet facilities in this day and age?

[Diana Johnson]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. There are real questions for the Department for Transport about whether TransPennine is meeting its franchise specification.

We were really proud in Hull to get the open-access operator Hull Trains in September 2000—we had to fight to do so. It has been a brilliant flagship open operator service since 2000, but it has really deteriorated in the past 12 months. It has only four trains, which are constantly being taken off to be repaired. They are class 180s—people who know about these things have told me that they are not fit for purpose for the route that they travel every day on the east coast main line. Customers are so frustrated at the cancellations and the services that stop at Peterborough or Doncaster. They do not feel that Hull Trains is giving them fair information in good time.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), who unfortunately cannot be here this morning, has asked me to say that Hull Trains is due to get new trains at the end of 2019, which is very welcome. However, we think that First Group needs to put pressure on to get those trains to us sooner. The past 12 months have been disastrous for Hull Trains’ customer relations. We need those trains in Hull as soon as possible. The managing director told me that she might be able to get an additional train from somewhere else after Christmas. That is welcome, but Hull Trains really needs to sort itself out. I am pleased that the Minister, a Yorkshire MP, is in his place, and I hope we will start to see some real changes over the next few months in rail services in the north.

Abortion Act 1967: 50th Anniversary

Debate between Diana Johnson and Paula Sherriff

Monday 6th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

Fifty years ago, the noble Lord Steel and thousands of brave campaigners brought about a momentous change in women’s reproductive rights. It is hard to overstate the benefits that their campaign brought to women. Abortion has gone from being a leading cause of maternal mortality, shockingly responsible for 14% of maternal deaths—a fact that organisations such as the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children do not address when they call for the abolition of the 1967 Act—to being the most common medical or surgical procedure in the UK, one that a third of women will have had by the time they reach 45. We used to be a country where an estimated 87,000 to 100,000 illegal abortions took place every year and where unwanted pregnancies changed the lives of desperate women. Now, 200,000 women a year can access safe, free and legal services on the NHS.

The 1967 Act was a landmark piece of legislation. For a time, it made Britain one of the world leaders in reproductive rights, when this Parliament introduced a humane piece of law. I am disappointed that no Minister from the Department of Health or the Government Equalities Office has attended any of the events marking the enactment of this piece of legislation. I am also disappointed that Ministers have chosen to award funding raised from the tampon tax to Life, which argues for restricting women’s choices on reproductive rights, when so many wonderful charities could have benefited and used the money to empower women and support their choices.

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. When I debated with the pro-life charity Life on the radio recently, I was told that if a women it was helping went on to decide to have a termination, it would withdraw support, including housing, from that women. Does she agree that that is incredibly concerning?

[Diana Johnson]

Yes, that is incredibly concerning and I think it is a really bad decision of the Government to award money from the tampon tax to that organisation.

As this House tonight rightly marks the milestone of the Abortion Act, we should also reflect on whether the Act is still fit for purpose. The Abortion Act was never intended to be the end of the campaign for women’s reproductive rights. That point was put succinctly by the late Madeleine Simms, a former campaigner at the Abortion Law Reform Association and one of the architects of the original law. She said:

“The 1967 Abortion Act was a half-way house. It handed the abortion decision to the medical profession. The next stage is to hand this very personal decision to the woman herself.”

I want to turn to why the abortion law needs reforming. Britain’s abortion laws are governed not just by that 50-year-old Act, but by the 88-year-old Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 and the 156-year-old Offences Against the Person Act 1861. Taken together, this is the oldest legal framework for any healthcare procedure in the UK. It is a framework that, astonishingly, still treats the act of abortion as inherently criminal and punishable by life imprisonment. As I have mentioned, one third of women, and the healthcare professionals who support them, are stigmatised by these laws. As Madeleine Simms highlighted, the 1967 Act did not give women authority over their own abortions; it merely handed that authority to the medical profession, subject to the consent of two doctors. No other medical procedure requires the sign-off of two doctors, and nor does that requirement exist in most other countries in which abortion is legal.

While other healthcare areas have moved towards more patient-centred provision, with a better doctor-patient relationship, the provisions of the 1967 Act are, despite the best efforts of healthcare professionals, holding back similar progress in reproductive healthcare. Furthermore, as Professor Lesley Regan of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said:

“No other medical procedure in the UK is so out of step with clinical and technological developments”.

Since 2014, the majority of abortions in England and Wales have been carried out medically, using pills. The 1967 Act was not designed with medical abortions in mind; it was passed when the overwhelming majority of abortions were carried out through surgical techniques.

I regret the fact that, in the 50 years since the Abortion Act was passed, Parliament has mostly shied away from debating issues such as those I have just set out. In March, the House of Commons heard the First Reading of my ten-minute rule Bill on the decriminalisation of abortion in England and Wales. In the 50 years before I introduced the Bill, previous MPs had introduced 11 Bills to amend our abortion laws—seven were private Members’ Bills and four were, like mine, ten-minute rule Bills. All 11 attempted to restrict abortion in some way; not a single one was about improving provision or better supporting women. It seems peculiar that for a procedure so common—one that affects a third of women—the overwhelming parliamentary focus has been on ways to restrict the practice. Had this procedure affected a third of men, it is hard to imagine that we would have debated it in the same way.