London Bridge Station (Redevelopment)

Debate between Gareth Johnson and Heidi Alexander

Tuesday 27th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank you and the rail Minister for allowing my hon. Friends the Members for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd) and for Eltham (Clive Efford) to participate in the debate. I also thank the Minister for organising the session that we had with Network Rail and Southeastern last week—perhaps I should call it a grilling—which was much appreciated. I expect that she will have some idea of my concerns, but I am pleased to have the opportunity to put them on record.

The rebuild of London Bridge station is long overdue. It is a poor relation of King’s Cross, Paddington and Waterloo, but no less busy. I fully support the redevelopment of the station, but I am concerned about the impact of the latest phase of works on rail services and passenger experiences. I know there has been mayhem on Southern routes—my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge might speak about that—but I will focus my remarks on the Southeastern network, given its importance to my constituency.

The new timetable, which has been introduced as a result of the 18-month closure of four platforms at London Bridge, has caused havoc. With no Charing Cross trains stopping at the station, many Cannon Street services have been dangerously overcrowded. There have been reports of fights at stations on lines into London Bridge because people simply cannot get on to a train. The remaining operational platforms at the station have seen scenes of utter chaos due to the volume of people and last-minute platform alterations. What has always been a poor and overcrowded service is now abysmal and yet, as with every year, fares have gone up. How that can be justified when some people cannot even get on a train is beyond me. In my constituency, many trains are full when they arrive at stations and people are paying for a service that they can barely access.

What can be done and what do I want the Government to do? Commuters in south-east London are crying out for longer trains and better communication from the train operating companies. If we cannot find a way to ease the current problems, the Minister will need to look carefully at next year’s annual fare hike and ask herself whether it is acceptable. At the most basic level, we need extra carriages on the Cannon Street services. Those should not be pinched from other overcrowded services, but if any reasonable adjustment can be made, that should happen. Given that, on the Southeastern network, only Cannon Street services will stop at London Bridge for the next 18 months, every rush hour train into Cannon Street should be a 12-car train.

If we cannot get extra carriages immediately, we will desperately need the old Thameslink rolling stock when it becomes available towards the end of the year. Will the Minister guarantee that those old Thameslink carriages will end up on Southeastern services? Is it true that the current plan is to use the Thameslink carriages for services between Manchester and Liverpool? Will she review that, as well as looking at what can be done to source extra carriages in the interim?

Southeastern also needs another communications drive. Rather than waiting for frustrated passengers to work out alternative routes for themselves, a big communications effort is needed that prompts people into changing their journey patterns. It should set out all alternative travel options and ticketing arrangements.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on again securing a debate on rail transport in the south-east. She will agree that the redevelopment is a welcome investment in the infrastructure of our railways that will ultimately benefit her constituents and mine. I am pleased that she mentions communication. Does she agree that communication during this work is crucial? Southeastern has to get that right, but communication is something at which Southeastern has often failed in the past.

[Heidi Alexander]

I share the hon. Gentleman’s view. This is difficult, to be fair to Southeastern, but we need to find a way of raising awareness of the other tube and bus routes that people can use to travel to and from the London Bridge area. If extra buses are needed on some of those routes, they should be delivered. Transport for London has laid on extra buses for the No. 21 route from Lewisham, but is there a case for some express services from south-east London into London Bridge further to ease some of the overcrowding?

The past few weeks have reinforced my constituents’ long-held view that annual fare hikes are not justified. Will the Minister expect Southeastern customers to pay more for their travel next year, too? If the services continue to be abysmal, is it not reasonable to consider freezing Southeastern fares next January to reflect the huge inconvenience that so many are experiencing? The current compensation scheme for delays on Southeastern is almost meaningless to my constituents, as whether or not a train is on time is irrelevant if people cannot get on it.

I could say much more, but I am conscious that my hon. Friends wish to speak, so I will draw my remarks to a close. More capacity and better communication could help to ease the pressures on the Southeastern network. If that is not possible, fair and reasonable compensation should be considered. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Southeastern Train Services

Debate between Gareth Johnson and Heidi Alexander

Tuesday 6th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am aware that the Minister is not in his place. I am told that he is in a car on his way here. I just hope that he is not on a Southeastern train.

Southeastern runs virtually all the rail services that serve my constituency, providing links to a range of central London stations as well as out to Kent. There are seven stations in my constituency: Hither Green, Blackheath, Lee, Grove Park, Catford Bridge, Catford and Beckenham Hill. There are four railway lines, three of which converge at Lewisham station.

Although Lewisham station, which sits on the border of my constituency and that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock), has the docklands light railway, my patch of London remains untouched by the tube map. Extending the Bakerloo line to Lewisham might be the long-term aspiration of many of us, but for the time being the trains operated by Southeastern are one of the key ways in which my constituents get about.

I am conscious that a list of seven stations and four train lines may lead people to think that my constituency is well served by rail links. On the face of it, it is well served, but the reality for many of the 37,000 people in Lewisham who use the trains to get to and from work every day is grim: hot, horrendously overcrowded, late and slow trains, with a hefty price tag to boot. I am not prone to exaggeration, but I honestly believe that in this country we transport cattle better than some of my constituents.

Just last month, I was contacted by a constituent who told me that he had seen

“2 people collapse in the last 10 days due to overcrowded and overheated trains”.

This problem is very serious, and if the Minister had been present, I would have invited him to join me one morning to experience the problem for himself. Trains arriving at stations such as Hither Green and Blackheath at any time between 6.30 and 9.30 in the morning are already full. My constituents squeeze themselves on if they are lucky; if they cannot, they wait for the next train. I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, for being graphic, but people literally start their working day stuck in one another's armpits.

The journey to London Bridge should take between 10 and 12 minutes, but routinely takes between 20 and 30 minutes. There is often a constant stream of tweets from Southeastern, usefully providing the information that a train that was supposed to have eight cars will instead have six or four cars.

To add insult to injury, year on year we are paying more and more for the pleasure. An annual season ticket on Southeastern for zones 1 to 3, a point-to-point ticket that allows travel only from one station to another, now costs £976. It has gone up by £216 since 2010—a 28% increase in four years. Travelcards, which allow onward use of the tube and bus network, cost considerably more. The rising cost of those tickets has massively outstripped the negligible changes that people have seen in their pay packets and it makes a very significant dent in household budgets.

I have lived in the Lewisham and Hither Green area for the past 12 years. In that time, platforms have become noticeably busier, and that is borne out by statistics compiled by the Office of Rail Regulation. In 2002-03, Lewisham was the 55th busiest station in the country, and there were 3.6 million entries to or exits from the station that year. In 2012-13, the last year for which data are available, that number more than doubled to 8.2 million, with a further 1.7 million interchanges, making it now the 38th busiest station nationwide. That is significant growth.

That pattern is repeated at all other local stations and is consistent with the regional breakdown of growth in rail usage, which shows that growth in London is markedly greater than anywhere else in the country. To put that in a national context, Lewisham is a busier station than Newcastle, Nottingham or Southampton; it is comparable to a station like Sheffield. When we talk about increasing capacity on our rail network, we must not forget places such as Lewisham which are neither part of the affluent commuter belt nor on London’s tube map.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate on an issue that she has spoken out about in the past. Does she agree that although poor reliability may be Southeastern’s main failing, it is compounded by the poor communication with the commuters who are her constituents and mine?

[Heidi Alexander]

I do agree. In part, the problem is reliability, but one of the main issues that I want to focus on is the degree of overcrowding that we experience on our train services.

The case for tackling overcrowding on my part of the rail network is irrefutable. The problem is getting worse and is likely to deteriorate further if urgent action is not taken. Thousands of new homes are planned in places like Lewisham and Catford over the next few years, and it goes without saying that future residents will need to be able to get around. They will need to be able to get to work and to get back from other parts of London at weekends. Basically, they need a decent railway service to live their lives.

The population of Lewisham continues to grow. Despite asking various parliamentary questions on this subject, I am at a loss to understand when commuters in my constituency are going to see longer trains. All I know is that, according to an answer I received on 8 April, the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond), who is the railways Minister, does not think there is demand for longer trains on all services. Beyond that, I am afraid that I cannot get much sense out of the Department or Southeastern.

Currently, no 12-car trains serve stations in my constituency during the rush hour, but there should be such trains. Platforms have been extended. I suspect that millions of pounds has been spent on doing that job, although again, despite my asking parliamentary questions, the Department cannot tell me how much has been spent and refers me to Network Rail. When I have asked Network Rail, it has not got back to me. We have spent money on lengthening platforms but we do not have longer trains to stop at them. It is almost as good as the one about the aircraft carriers with no aircraft to use them. Surely in difficult economic times we should not be wasting expenditure in this way—we should be reaping benefit from it.

In the written answer I received from the Minister at the beginning of April, I was told that a study would be done in 2016 and that some capacity enhancements may be forthcoming from 2019. That is at least five years away. It is simply not good enough. The Minister is currently in the process of negotiating a new “direct award” contract with Southeastern. Following the mess that the Government have made of letting franchises elsewhere in the country, they have put on hold the letting of the new Southeastern franchise, deciding instead to award a series of shorter, directly awarded contracts. Is there no way in which they could negotiate longer trains on some services calling at stations in my constituency sooner than 2019? Could some trains not start closer into London?

I would be really grateful if the Minister could explain the issue. Is it the availability of rolling stock? Is it an unwillingness on the part of Government to fund longer trains? Is it that when he looks at overcrowding statistics for services into London he thinks that there is not a problem on services run by Southeastern? If it is the latter, I would urge him to speak carefully to his civil servants about how the standard definitions of overcrowding —passengers in excess of capacity, otherwise known as PIXCs—are calculated. My understanding is that the calculations include an allowance relating to what is deemed to be an acceptable number of people standing in addition to those sitting. The excess passengers figure comes on top of that and, given that my constituents experience the most crowded 20 minutes of the journey, I am not sure that those PIXC scores will paint a realistic picture of the levels of overcrowding experienced by commuters who live in my constituency.

I also understand that Southeastern amalgamates its performance data for all of its services, including its High Speed 1 services from the channel tunnel, which may also skew overall performance scores. Does the Minister look at disaggregated data for each of the different types of Southeastern routes?

Hospital Services (South London)

Debate between Gareth Johnson and Heidi Alexander

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to hold this debate today, Dr McCrea, and I am very pleased that other hon. Members are here in Westminster Hall to take part in it.

In the two and a half years that I have been the MP for Lewisham East, I have not known an issue to cause as much anger and concern as the proposals that are currently on the table to close the A and E department and the maternity department at Lewisham hospital. I know from my colleagues, my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock) and my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd), that in the 20 or so years that they have served the people of Lewisham, they too have not witnessed such outrage and disbelief over an issue.

Lewisham is not the only place in south London where emergency and maternity services are under threat. There has been a long-running dispute about the future of St Helier hospital, and of course changes at any hospital will always impact on neighbouring areas. Patients displaced by the closure of one unit have to go elsewhere. Children who are hurt and elderly people who have had a bad fall do not disappear into thin air; they still need treatment. Mums-to-be still need somewhere to give birth. It is not possible to close and A and E department that sees 115,000 people a year and axe a maternity department in which more than 4,000 babies are born each year and not to expect other hospitals to feel the impact.

This issue affects not only Lewisham but people across south London. The real problem is that there is no free capacity in the other hospitals close by to deal with the demand for hospital services that will be displaced.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, and I congratulate her on securing this debate. She is making a very good point about the adverse effect that closing Lewisham hospital will have on neighbouring areas as well, especially, of course, with Queen Mary’s hospital also shutting both its A and E department and its maternity services.

Does the hon. Lady accept that the closure of Lewisham hospital will also have an impact on my constituency, including at Darent Valley hospital, with people seeking out A and E treatment or maternity services? In a hospital such as Darent Valley that already has its own capacity issues, there will be serious repercussions from closing Lewisham hospital—not only for the area that the hon. Lady represents but far beyond.

[Heidi Alexander]

I very much agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I think that there will be a ripple effect across the whole of south-east London and beyond if the A and E department and maternity services at Lewisham hospital close.