North of England: Infrastructure Spending

Esther McVey Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Esther McVey (Tatton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray, and I thank my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Southport (Damien Moore) for securing this important debate. The topic is broad, but I will confine my remarks to Tatton and Cheshire, and will look at cost viability and prioritisation as a good Conservative should. I want to bring a good dose of public common sense to Parliament for the Minister to hear and hopefully take back to the Chancellor and the Cabinet.

I want to talk about High Speed 2, whose cost is like a runaway train, rising and rising. We have that grandiose scheme—some might call it a white elephant—but in Tatton we do not have local infrastructure. We are waiting for local train routes that are meant to have been delivered, and while we focus nationally on just one line, many small lines across local regions have not happened. People commuting from Knutsford to Manchester off-peak are waiting two hours for a train. That is one train every two hours off-peak, although it is one an hour at peak times. However, when the bid for the franchise was made, we were promised that we would have two trains an hour—not two a minute, but two an hour—which is not a lot to ask for and does not involve huge amounts of investment. Just two trains an hour, but that has never been delivered.

Bus routes are another local transport issue to look at. It is hard to find a bus or bus route in Tatton and people are crying out for buses. Buses are not often used during this covid period, but soon that will change and people will not be able to get around, for example, from Wilmslow to Handforth, and then maybe travelling further afield to Warrington, Liverpool or Manchester. I would be remiss if I did not mention my constituents Mr and Mrs Sunderland, who stopped me the other day in Handforth as they were shopping at the Paddock and asked, “What is happening to the 130 bus?”

I ask the Minister to please think about these local transport routes, the bus service, the tram service, the train service—nothing is happening. We also need investment in the mid-Cheshire line, as was mentioned by my friend the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury). We have been talking about that year after year and we are here for every question and debate in the House to ask what is going on, but it is being overlooked. We are talking about levelling up. We are talking about not just the north, although we are all here from the north, but the regions, towns and villages, and we all need our local transport.

The final bit of infrastructure we absolutely need and must have is the digital infrastructure to have us all connecting and connected. I admire and praise our Government’s vision for a 1 Gbit capability and the money they have promised to achieve that. It is vital—now more than ever, as people work from home, learn from home and socialise from home—that we have the digital connectivity we need. Therefore, I say stop HS2 with its runaway expenses—it should have hit the buffers a long time ago—and put that money into digital infrastructure to benefit the whole country, and into local transport.