Tuesday 26th April 2022

(1 year, 11 months ago)

Westminster Hall
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts

Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.

Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.

This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record

Graham Stringer Portrait Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
- Hansard - -

If William Gladstone, when he was Prime Minister in the 1880s, had organised a debate such as this on the future of the railways and came back today, I imagine he would be shocked. The UK was the great industrial powerhouse, and he would have expected the railways to have improved. However, as the Transport Committee found when it looked at regional railways, the timetables are slower than they were in Gladstone’s time.

There are three primary reasons for that. First, the over-application of public sector borrowing requirements starved the railways of investment for decades. Secondly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) said, there was the privatisation of the railways. The railways were under-sold—the National Audit Office recognised that they had been massively sold at a loss. They were then prey to unregulated rolling stock companies, which hired trains at massive profits. Thirdly, Railtrack—the people running the railways—decided it was a property company, not a railway company, and killed people. That is what privatisation did.

Now the Government are showing some faith in the future, and we are going back to a similar structure to British Rail, but we need integration. The hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) said that we could have different timetables every day of the week. Privatisation meant that when people sat down to work out timetables, there were about five times as many people as there were under British Rail. It was inefficient.

I have three quick points. We need investment in the pinch points in the rail system. In Manchester’s case, we need platforms 14 and 15 at Piccadilly station, which would help the whole of the north of England. We need HS2. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East correctly pointed out that HS2 should benefit the whole of the north of England. In fact, it should go to Scotland. HS2 should be the backbone of our rail system.

Finally, a point that everybody else has made, although it is not necessarily about the future of the railways: the site of the Manchester Exchange Station in Salford, which had the longest platform in the world, going to Victoria Station, should be the home of GBR. This was the home of the first scheduled passenger rail service between Manchester and Liverpool.