Rail Investment

Guto Bebb Excerpts

Thursday 17th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard]

The hon. Gentleman has anticipated my next point. I take entirely the point that the network of high-speed rail that has been mapped out links areas with a high concentration of service industries, which is key to saying that the predictions for demand are more robust than they were, for instance, in Spain, where Madrid and Seville were linked. Seville had a high level of heavy industry but no service industry, so no demand occurred.

I want to make a number of other points before concluding and allowing as many hon. Members as possible to participate in the debate. May I make a plea to the Minister on open-access rail? We have just seen the sad failure of the Wrexham and Shrewsbury service, which was a good example of open access, but it failed to make money. There are other examples around the country, such as Grand Central, which have shown that open access can work. I urge the Minister unambiguously to state her support for open access in the forthcoming White Paper, and indeed today, because many open access companies are uncertain about their future. In Blackpool, open access is perhaps our only chance of getting a link to London. I urge her, therefore, to make some positive noises on open access.

In conclusion, whenever we write reports, there is always the temptation to come up with a wish list, and I have fallen into the trap myself today by highlighting the northern hub. Wish lists are easy to make, but it is far harder to have a discussion and come to a view on how to prioritise policy making. How do we reconcile all the different competing local priorities that we each have in our constituencies with the apportioning of public money? That is not easy.

[Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Con)]

As a north Wales MP, my question concerns the extent to which there should be a recognition of the economic impact of railway investment, and to what degree the investment should take regional variations into account. My understanding is that investment in railways does not, for example, take into account investment in Wales, so we cannot even compare investment in Wales with investment in other parts of the United Kingdom. Should we have a system that allows us to identify investment in Wales as a percentage of overall investment in the railways?

[Paul Maynard]

It is important that we have more local decision making. It is easy to say such things, and we all do—we all talk about localism now—but we have to realise that it is not a case of build it and they will come. We recently heard evidence about Stratford International rail station, which has no international rail services. Merely building transport infrastructure does not guarantee passengers or even economic growth. Those involved in local government often place too much hope in signature schemes, which they spend public money on promoting. They tell us that those schemes will be transformational, but, 10 years down the road, they are shown to be nothing of the sort.

We need more innovation. Yes, it is easy to say that, too, and we all do. Small local schemes—a passing place here, a passing place there, a slightly longer platform somewhere else—can be cost-effective ways of increasing capacity. However, priorities also need to be decided at the regional and sub-regional levels, as well as at a national level. We have an increasingly complex and dense map of economic decision-making organisations. We have travel-to-work areas, city regions, local enterprise partnerships, strategic transport partnerships and smaller, micro-local organisations. One of the best transport submissions that I have ever seen came from a body called Upper Calder Valley Renaissance. It was incredibly powerful and full of good ideas, with a real understanding of the local transport economy, but it covered a micro-area.

I make a plea to the Minister to somehow grasp that nettle. We have a profusion of expertise out there, which enables us to make good quality, evidence-based decisions at local level. I despair when I hear the Department for Transport arguing the toss over the siting of a vending machine on a platform at Crewe station, because that has nothing to do with the Department. However, the Department has a role to play in ensuring that rail investment decisions are based on the greatest economic benefit and that proposals are evidence based. We can then worry about the politics.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. It is also a pleasure to follow the good speeches that we have heard so far, especially from my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), who is the Chair of the Transport Committee. I have been a member of the Committee for the past few months, and I have much enjoyed that time.

I am a passionate lover of, and believer in, railways. Even when they were unfashionable, I still believed that they would be the transport of the future. I suspect that they will outlive the internal combustion engine and possibly even air flight and that, however far ahead we look, there will still be railways. I have a real interest in passengers and freight, and I would like to think that I have some informed proposals to make.

I should declare some interests. I am the chair of the ASLEF group of Members of Parliament. I am also a member of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers group, and my constituency fund received RMT donations before the last election. However, the views I express today have nothing to do with anyone else—they are purely my own—and I would like to think that I have given them sufficient thought to make them worth while.

Like Eddington and others, I am somewhat sceptical about HS2. That is not because I would not, in the best of all possible worlds, want a superb high-speed line that went everywhere. However, ours is a relatively small, densely populated country, and given that funds are, inevitably, limited, there is, as Eddington suggested, a considerable opportunity cost involved in spending money on HS2 rather than other things. It would also be expensive.

I think I can also make the case that HS2 is not absolutely essential to provide the transport that we need. We need lots more investment in existing passenger routes. Improvements to existing routes could make an enormous difference to their capacity. There are a number of problems on the east coast main line. There are two tracks at Welwyn, and we need another viaduct so that we can have four. That bottleneck causes serious problems, and that would be the case particularly for high-speed trains, especially during peak hours of commuter traffic. We therefore need another viaduct at Welwyn.

Further north, we need a flyover where the Cambridge trains branch off at Hitchin. We need passing loops at Peterborough and a flyover at Newark. If we had those, we could have 140 mph non-stop working between King’s Cross and Edinburgh if we chose to. Indeed, in 1992, a trial run was undertaken between King’s Cross and Edinburgh, with a two-minute stop at Newcastle. The journey was done in three and a half hours based on a standard operating speed of 140 mph, so these things can be done. It is interesting that the proponents of HS2, looking into the future, came up with a time of three and a half hours for services between King’s Cross and Edinburgh—exactly the same time as was achieved in 1992.

We need new signalling and higher running frequencies. We can have much higher frequency running if we have modern signalling. One problem is that we have 50-year-old signalling systems. Geographical interlocking signal boxes were installed in the 1960s and they are now out of date and need replacing. With modern signalling, we can achieve higher frequencies and faster throughput.

[Guto Bebb]

As a Welsh Member, I would be fully in favour of electrifying the south Wales line. As far as the north Wales coast line is concerned, the hon. Gentleman is completely right that signalling improvements could make a huge difference to the frequency and speed of services, and that would be critical to the area’s economic success.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Indeed, and that is true not just of north-south routes, but other routes, too.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of ancient equipment on the railways. It was worthy in British Rail’s time, but we have moved on. One problem with privatisation is that companies have no great incentive to improve investment in such things when they are trying to run as profitably as possible with existing equipment. Some people, including Eddington, suggest that capacity on main lines could be doubled with modern signalling and more frequent running. We could have trains every 180 seconds on those routes if we get the modern signalling.

We have heard a lot about extra rolling stock. In the short term, there are more than 100 unused carriages in Ireland. They are essentially Mark IIIs, and they could be immediately imported, re-bogied and used on main lines in Britain. Actually, they are more modern than our Mark IIIs because they have automatic doors, rather than slam doors. They could be bought cheaply now and installed quickly on our routes. That is a short-term fix—obviously, we want more investment and more rolling stock to be built, particularly by Bombardier—but we can make such changes.

On the west coast main line, the maximum operating speed will be 130 mph because there are tighter curves than on the east coast main line. However, 130 mph operation with modern signalling and high-frequency trains would still be sufficient, particularly if we got freight off the lines. That brings me to my next proposal, which is to get freight off the lines. Those who know me well will know that I have been proposing for a long time that we have a dedicated freight route from the channel tunnel to Glasgow, which would link all of Britain’s main conurbations. Why do we need a dedicated freight line? When it comes to existing freight routes, passengers and freight do not mix. They have different operating speeds and so on. Time and again, when there is a bit of a problem with a passenger train, the freight trains will be parked on one side while the passengers are given priority—people get much more upset than freight when they are delayed. Of course, freight operators get upset, but they have to suffer. However, if we have a dedicated freight line with no passengers, we would overcome those problems.