Tyne and Wear Metro

Debate between Emma Lewell-Buck and Chi Onwurah

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the performance of the Tyne and Wear Metro.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I secured the debate because my constituents are quickly losing patience with the Metro service, which is unreliable and overdue for investment. Barely a week goes by without me being contacted by people who are fed up with delayed or cancelled services making them late for work, preventing them from getting their kids to school, or keeping them from important appointments. A quick glance at Metro’s Twitter feed shows why. On most days, some sort of delay or cancellation is reported, not to mention the numerous other faults that disrupt passengers’ journeys, such as broken ticket machines—that happened again today—and information boards that give out misleading or incorrect information. Last winter, the service was so poor that only 64.5% of trains arrived on time, which means that more than one in three trains was late.

These problems occur so frequently that commuters have created a Facebook group called “Sort out the Metro”, which attracted hundreds of members in only a couple of weeks. Nearly 3,000 people have signed a petition calling for the Department for Transport to begin an independent review of our Metro services. These are not just annoyances; people rely on public transport to get them to where they need to be, and there are real consequences when the network fails them. One woman from my constituency wrote to me to explain the effect that delayed services have on her family. She explained that her husband uses the Metro to travel to his job in Gateshead, but failed trains mean that he can never guarantee that he will arrive on time. When he is three minutes late for work, he is docked 15 minutes’ wages. When he is 15 minutes late, he loses half an hour’s pay. Those may seem like relatively small sums of money individually, but when multiple journeys are delayed each week, the amounts soon add up.

The problems do not end there for my constituent. She explained that she works evening shifts, so if her husband’s train home is delayed, there is no one to take care of their young child. Either she has to be late for work, or she has to find a last-minute babysitter. Public transport is supposed to make people’s lives more convenient, but for her family it is doing just the opposite.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate and on the excellent points that she is making about the importance of the Tyne and Wear Metro. I am probably showing my age by saying that I remember the Tyne and Wear Metro launching. I remember how proud we were that it was the first light rail system in the country to be entirely disabled-accessible. Looking back, can we not see that the current problems are testament to a failure of investment, which we need right now in the Tyne and Wear Metro?

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, which I will come to later. When the investment is there and our Metro is working properly, it is brilliant and it serves our area well. At the moment, however, the lack of investment really shows, and it has an impact on all our constituents.