East Coast Main Line
Debate between Grahame Morris and Martin Vickers(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea. I congratulate the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) on securing this useful debate. We can sing the praises of East Coast—I am happy to do so as someone who uses its services every week; it does not provide a bad service at all—but the idea that this is some way towards being a golden age compared with GNER, which first took over the line and provided an excellent service, is a myth.
As I have said, I am happy to congratulate East Coast, which gets us here every week, usually on time. Passengers want a clean, reliable, safe and reasonably priced service. When they sit back in their seat, they do not care whether the track is operated by Railtrack, Network Rail or a private operator, or whether their seat is in a private coach or a publicly owned one.
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
To set the record straight, is it not the case that both GNER and National Express had to hand back the franchise, but this nationalised, directly operated rail service has handed £602 million back to the Treasury?
Martin Vickers
The fact that there is one failure—whether in the private sector, the public sector or wherever—does not automatically indicate a flaw in the system. The hon. Member for Jarrow (Mr Hepburn) said that the change would be privatisation for privatisation’s sake, but the opposite is equally true: do we want nationalisation for nationalisation’s sake? That is certainly what Opposition Members seem to want.
In his opening remarks, the hon. Member for Middlesbrough referred to Northern Rail, but to compare it with East Coast is to compare apples with oranges—a regional operator with an inter-city one. Northern Rail provides a perfectly adequate service in my constituency, between Cleethorpes and Barton-on-Humber, but it does not serve such great metropolises as York, Darlington and Doncaster. The station at Thornton Abbey—in a beautiful, idyllic setting—actually serves two farms and an ancient ruin, and I think it had 13 passengers during 2009. East Coast is fine; it provides a perfectly adequate service, but it does not dash up and down between Newcastle and King’s Cross, so there is no comparison whatever.
I am happy to criticise East Coast when it makes mistakes, which it did when it redesigned its timetable last year.