Railway Expansion

Duncan Hames Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Westminster Hall

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

I add my compliments to those already paid to my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (John Pugh) on securing the debate, and I apologise for missing the early part of his speech. Judging from the part that I caught, however, I am sure that reading his speech in the Official Report tomorrow will be instructive.

Given that the debate is about railway expansion and smaller schemes, the Minister will not be surprised that I wish to talk about several smaller schemes in my constituency about which I have spoken before. Although I support investment in the railway and some of the larger schemes that we have heard about this afternoon, part of the point I wish to make is that there are some very small schemes that do not require new infrastructure, nor even a mile of track, that would benefit the rail network. Decisions taken in previous decades have meant that the network has had to do without such schemes. My concern, and I think the concern of my hon. Friend the Member for Southport, is that in the old plans to which we still turn for our railways, we do not have a decision-making structure that is open to embracing such ideas.

The scheme in my constituency and county that I am keen to advocate first and foremost is the TransWilts project. I have been most encouraged for its prospects in the light of the Government’s announcement late last year on additional rolling stock. Given the correspondence and meetings that I have had with the Department, however, I have been on something of a rollercoaster about how optimistic I should be. On the day that the statement was made, I asked the Secretary of State if the determination on where the additional rolling stock would go would be entirely dependent on the commercial strength of the operator on any part of the network, or on wider economic benefits. I was told that it would not be exclusively about the commercial strength of the franchisee, but following further scrutiny, it has become apparent that getting additional rolling stock is a very competitive process, not least because of the strained public finances and concerns about the viability of the subsidy to what are termed the regional railways. The rolling stock will have to be paid for somehow, and without a source of support or the willingness to contemplate including these operations within existing franchise and support arrangements, it could prove very difficult to get additional rolling stock on to certain services without a franchisee in strong commercial health.

In my case, I am somewhat confident that there will be additional rolling stock on the Cardiff-Portsmouth line, which would address the congested trains on routes in and out of Bath and Bristol. However, it might be rather harder to make the argument—it is probably a much stronger argument from an economic point of view, but it is one that requires time for its case to be proved—for connecting the towns in western Wiltshire with Chippenham and Swindon through a TransWilts service. Given the excellent support that we have from the community rail partnership in Wiltshire and the enthusiasm of at least some of the councillors on Wiltshire council, however, I remain hopeful that between us we will be able to persuade decision makers in the industry about that.

Another long-standing campaign for a small but significant improvement to the railway in my constituency is for the reopening of Corsham station. That seemed very close at hand until around the time of the Hatfield train crash, when something of a retrenchment on the railways led to the withdrawal of plans for services that would have been able to serve Corsham station in a way that current high-speed services cannot. As we no longer have an Oxford-Bristol service passing over that piece of track, the campaign has been very hard to fight. However, moneys have been set aside—through section 106 agreements in relation to the substantial residential development that there has been—for redeveloping that station. We need a more joined-up approach between local government and the funds that it has available in this case, and decision making in the transport sector.

My final example is an extreme case that makes the point about the value that smaller schemes can provide. I am referring to the northern curve at Bradford junction, north of Trowbridge. That is an area where, essentially, tracks heading in three directions meet. At the moment, there is an east-to-south curve and a west-to-south curve. We have a railway line that forks in a Y shape, but traditionally there was a northern curve, which in effect created a triangle at that point. It does not take long to realise the flexibility that that would provide for the diversion of trains. People will know, especially if they travel on a Sunday, as I often do, that there are a lot of engineering works on the Great Western main line, which often mean that trains are not able to travel the full route, such as the one that I take into London from Wiltshire. We might be much better able to deal with that in our rail network if we had the option to divert trains in the way that we could if they were able to travel from Bath and then back up to Chippenham having taken that curve, even if work was being done on the intervening track.

The amount of track that we are talking about is very small. The land is still available for the railway—it has not been developed. I believe that that piece of track was not maintained because of the costs of improving the reliability of the electricity supply to the signalling infrastructure. Now that residential development goes right the way up to the railway line on the eastern side, the costs of improving the electricity infrastructure for that piece of track and the signalling used there would be rather less than they were at the time it was abandoned. I offer that scheme as an example of something that is very small and simple that would not make an enormous difference, but could prove to be of wider benefit to the resilience and flexibility of our rail infrastructure, especially if we are looking to the future following the Government’s decisions on electrifying the Great Western line, given the likely need to divert trains during the engineering works that will be required.

Time and again when I sought to make the case for many of these improvements, I found that if they did not make it into the Great Western route utilisation strategy produced under the previous Government, my hopes of being able to make the case for them were much diminished. However, the current Government have made some very enlightened decisions about the railways in the past 12 months that were not envisaged at the time of that strategy, whether we are talking about the decision that has already been made about the high-speed fleet for the Great Western line, the decision about electrifying the route from London beyond Bristol into Wales, and the decision that I referred to earlier about additional rolling stock that could be available for my part of the country. I hope that those hon. Members representing northern constituencies will forgive me for saying that my area is not part of the blessed London network that they have described and we have struggled to secure additional rolling stock under previous decisions. The fact that those recent decisions have been made calls into question some of the assumptions in that strategy, but they still exist and underpin the problems that campaigners encounter when trying to have decisions revisited.

I shall conclude shortly because I want to leave sufficient time for the Front Benchers to respond to the debate. If we really want to support and embrace smaller rail schemes, which can provide excellent value for money if we have a little confidence in the potential of our railways, we will need to loosen the straitjacket that I have described. We need a little more joined-up thinking between local government and the rail sector, more enlightened allocations of funding streams—be they from parking or from economic development—and perhaps even the ability for local authorities to take more of an equity stake so that it is not simply a matter of responding to a begging bowl.

I hope that some of these ideas will give us the ability to break the current cycle. Those of us who are campaigners in Wiltshire find that if we want to make an improvement to our railways, the Department says that local government should be able to promote those schemes, but local government says that operators need to be able to pay for them themselves, and operators then say that they will need support from the Department—a subsidy—if they are to be able to support a scheme. We therefore all go round in circles and progress cannot be made on our railways. I hope that we can build on the early decisions that the Government have taken and take full advantage of all opportunities, and not just those presented by the big projects of which we hear so much.