Train-building Industry

Debate between Heather Wheeler and Baroness Beckett

Tuesday 12th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Beckett (Derby South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) not only on securing the debate, but on his excellent speech. In fact, my only criticism would be that he has left the rest of us with not very much to say. He has, effectively and well, used all the ammunition. Significantly, I think I am right in saying that—perhaps not so unusually in this Chamber, but unusually in this place in general—almost every hon. Member present is not here to attack or disagree. We are all here for the same purpose: to raise the concerns so ably set out a moment ago by the hon. Gentleman. If the Minister’s Department and her ministerial colleagues were nurturing the illusion that this is a decision that would go away, that might be an error.

Cross-party interest in this issue has been clear this morning. All the Derby Members here—perhaps almost every hon. Member, as the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) indicated—have constituents with considerable expertise in the rail industry. The plant in Derby is in my constituency, but we all know from our own constituents, wherever they may live, of the very real astonishment among rail industry aficionados. The people who know and understand, who have experience and expertise, are at a loss to understand and explain the decision, and the hon. Gentleman is entirely right to ask for an explanation.

The hon. Gentleman talked about the weight given to the different elements in the procurement process. Like him, I have seen the references that have been made—I believe that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills made one of them. There was a story in the Daily Express over the weekend suggesting that this was a decision based on finance, rather than on the kind of trains in which, as the hon. Gentleman rightly identified, our constituents will be travelling for many a year to come. He identified the fact that in the original procurement process in 2008, the Department reserved the right to hold a funding competition. My understanding is that there were two further opportunities—in March 2010 and January 2011, when further steps were taken in the bidding process—when the Department could have triggered the right, which it had reserved, to look again and separately at the issue of funding, but it chose not to do so. That is a concern to all of us.

The hon. Gentleman asked whether we are looking for a train builder or a bank. As I understand it, Siemens has actually become a bank, which indicates the strength of its balance sheet, but is that what we are looking for? Certainly not, if we are talking about whether there is a future for the train-building industry in this country.

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) on securing the debate. We are talking about the future of train building in this country. The decision to make Siemens the preferred bidder is incredibly disappointing for all our constituents who work at Bombardier, but surely the most important thing is the way forward. The chairman of Bombardier is going out to South Africa with the Government to look at securing contracts out there. It is asking the Government to bring forward tube contracts by a couple of years, so that there is a future for train building in this country, and the college is opening up in Derby for rail contracts. We have great expertise in the area, and in the north-west too. That is where we need to go with this conversation. I am sure that, having heard my hon. Friend’s conversation with the Minister, answers will be given, but we want to talk about the future, and the future will be train building in this country.

[Margaret Beckett]

I agree in part with the hon. Lady. I take her point entirely that we are really interested in the future, but let us not overlook the fact that we have barely started. The procurement process has not concluded. All that has happened is that a preferred bidder has been identified and negotiations have been opened. The hon. Member for Amber Valley referred to the intercity express programme contract. In the hands of the Department for Transport, that went to Hitachi, but the contract for that has not yet been signed. Indeed, just before the election the previous Government ordered a review of that contract, and this Government have substantially renegotiated it. We are very far from the conclusion of this bidding process, so although I share the hon. Lady’s view entirely that we should look to the future—I will come to that issue in a second—to secure that future we must not abandon the prospect of changing the present circumstances and the award of this contract.

One concern about the attitude that the company is likely to take relates precisely to the issue of opportunities for the future. If this procurement goes ahead, we may lose the opportunity of an offer made by Bombardier. As I understand it, it has decided at the highest level to establish a worldwide centre of excellence for the design and manufacture of new cars for high-speed trains, for future procurement—of exactly the kind referred to in the debate. Bombardier was prepared to site that worldwide centre of excellence in Derby. That offer was, in effect, thrown back in its face. That concerns me greatly. We would be talking about more jobs—jobs with even higher skills levels than we see now, and with the potential for new technologies. Although I and many in my party applaud what the Cabinet and the Prime Minister said in my Derby constituency about manufacturing, skills and the need to rebalance our economy, the skills base in our city is not just Bombardier; it is also Rolls-Royce. We are a strong manufacturing base, but that base depends on the interaction between those two companies, among others, on the supply chain, and on their ability to work together to establish and maintain that skills base.