Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

Wednesday 14th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing this debate. We have heard from colleagues, and indeed a former colleague, on the Transport Committee. I agreed with much of what they said, but not necessarily the conclusions they drew.

We are two years on from the publication of the Williams review, and in that two years we have seen any prospect of high-speed rail serving north of Manchester removed completely. Even the remaining parts of HS2, when opened, will now terminate near Wormwood Scrubs rather than travel into central London to Euston. That is a boon for prison visiting, but hardly useful for connecting to the centre of the city, which was one of the original points of HS2.

Cities such as Leeds and Bradford have been kicked off the HS2 map and offered trams in return. Like Scotland, they will be stuck at the end of what, in high-speed rail terms, will be branch lines. Even the crown jewel in the review—the formation of GBR—has been kicked into the long grass, as if the Government here have an exhaustive and time-consuming legislative programme to get through in this place, and days were not collapsing early, which we frequently have.

Answers to my written questions published this week show that £64 million has been spent over the last two years on the GBR transition. If GBR is being mothballed until after the election—if there is a change of Government, we will be looking at long after that for any action—those costs will continue to accrue and we will be left with a bill into the hundreds of millions for an organisation that, essentially, or officially, does not exist.

The former Secretary of State intervened at the last minute to slap his name on the front of the report. Given that he is now firmly in the sidings and stuck with no route in sight, I wonder whether he regrets his burst of self-publicity, although I think we all know the answer to that. It has been left to his successors to pick up the pieces and make the case for the review and its recommendations, but No. 10 and the Chancellor are clearly not listening, because by their actions—and inaction—they are showing just how low down rail and transport more generally is on their list of priorities. I feel for the Minister because his Department is being targeted by the Treasury for swingeing cuts. The Williams review called for a 30-year strategy for the rail network, but that simply cannot happen when the Treasury sees transport as an easy target for cuts.

Williams ruled out public ownership and public control, yet as we have seen with ScotRail and the Caledonian Sleeper, the Scottish Government disagree. The UK Government insist that the private sector railway works efficiently, but it clearly does not. The review said:

“Simplification is more important than nationalisation”,

but while the rest of the UK continues to have passenger services under private operation, that simplification cannot happen. Those who receive the new passenger service contracts envisaged by Williams will still extract profit from the system, and the profit will still come from the public one way or another, whether it is from unregulated fares or direct via the DFT contracts. It is not simplification; it is just a tweaked continuation of the present system.

Scotland was the last part of the UK to see its railways privatised and the first to bring them back under full public control. We have heard many times in recent years that Scotland’s railway and the partnership between ScotRail and Network Rail in Scotland has provided much of the template for the GBR operation—if indeed it comes to pass. However, the semi-integration of track and train is despite Westminster, not because of it. Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government are, as per, trying to operate with one arm tied behind their back, with the operator being fully devolved but the track and infrastructure network still reserved.

What is needed now to complete the integration in Scotland is for Network Rail to be brought under the control of the Scottish Parliament, with a Government that are committed to rail in the long term, regardless of the mindset of the Treasury. That is in part being driven by the target to decarbonise Scotland’s railway by 2035—a target that we are well on the way to meeting, showing how a Scottish Government with control over services are marrying their policy objectives with that of the railway.

Thirty years after the Railways Act 1993, which began the privatisation of the system, we are still seeing the same mistakes repeated and the same political ideology standing in the way of a real plan for our rail network over the next 30 years. The truth is that, while Williams-Shapps may have offered the possibility of a sea change on the network down south, we are now likely to see its demise by a thousand cuts, with its core ideal delayed for who knows how many years.

To conclude, we have GBR on the back burner, possibly indefinitely; HS2 curtailed; the north of England bearing the brunt of cuts yet again; a Treasury on the warpath ahead of any election promises; and no end to the fragmentation and profit-driven structure that has demonstrably failed over the decades. It is time the Government went back to the drawing board, looked again at Williams’s integrated rail plan and their 13-year track record of cuts and more cuts to improvement programmes—cuts that never seem to affect Greater London to the same extent as they affect everywhere else—and started building a railway fit for the future, rather than patching up the work of the great engineers of the Victorian era who built our railways.