Oswestry to Gobowen Railway Line

Debate between Helen Morgan and Olly Glover

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Oswestry to Gobowen railway line.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Vaz. This is an important subject for my constituents in the lovely town of Oswestry and the nearby village of Gobowen. Oswestry has a population of approximately 17,000 people. It is the second largest town in Shropshire and is of huge importance to the border region, but economic potential there is being stunted by poor public transport, which plagues the whole of Shropshire.

People who live in Oswestry are forced to rely on a bus or car to get to Gobowen railway station just up the road to access connections to larger economic centres, such as Shrewsbury, Liverpool or Manchester. What about someone who does not have a car and works in Chester? They will need to leave home by 7 am to get to the office for 9 o’clock—a journey that takes about 45 minutes in a car. Someone travelling further afield and returning late would need to get a taxi back from the station because the buses do not run outside regular hours, and that is if they can track down a taxi, which is another problem for another debate.

Oswestry was once a proud railway town. The railway station was on the main line of the Cambrian railway and, at one stage, it housed the headquarters of the Cambrian Railways Company. Unfortunately, it was a victim of the Beeching cuts, and there has been no connection to the main line from Oswestry since 1966. That is why the news that the restoring your railway fund would be used to reopen the line between Gobowen and Oswestry was so well received locally; and why the news that the Government wanted to scrap the funding, without even examining the new business case, has been such a huge disappointment. From healthcare and high streets to the environment and the economy, I cannot overstate what a transformational impact reopening the line would have on our area.

Poor public transport removes opportunity. It hinders young people, limiting their options for further and higher education and restricting their access to culture and leisure. In short, barriers to mobility are barriers to social mobility. During a recent visit to the jobcentre in Oswestry, the brilliant staff there told me that the No. 1 barrier to people accessing work is poor public transport. Meanwhile, I have spoken to businesses in Oswestry that have reported real difficulties in recruiting. They need to be able to attract people to work from a much wider area than Oswestry and not just those who have access to a private car. That means we are in the ridiculous situation where employers cannot recruit and jobseekers cannot find jobs to match their skills because of the same problem of poor public transport.

Let us take the outstanding Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt orthopaedic hospital near Gobowen: it has such a fine reputation that it has no trouble attracting high-quality staff, but the problem is that it cannot get people to and from their shifts early and late because there is no public transport, so if they do not have a car, the job will not work for them. Reopening the line would include a halt at the hospital. That would help to swell staff numbers and ease access for patients, many of whom are elderly, do not have access to a car and have to rely on the good will of friends to get to appointments on time. The hospital is a national resource: people come from across the country to access the excellent care there, including from the veterans’ centre, and railway access for them would be a huge bonus.

It is not just me who thinks that this is a great project. Feedback from the Department for Transport on the strategic outline business case acknowledged the importance of all of this:

“Oswestry is the second largest employment area in Shropshire, and unemployment in Oswestry is higher than the average in Shropshire. Productivity—the ability to match jobs with labour across North Shropshire—is a particularly pertinent issue. The growth in vacancies has been significant in Oswestry and Gobowen in recent years, which is exacerbated by the low population density and ageing populations of these areas.”

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that many railway reopenings in the last 20 years have seen significantly higher use than expected? They include the Ebbw Vale line, which achieved year four ridership by the end of year one, Larkhall in Scotland, where demand was 26% higher than forecast, and the Borders railway, which saw a doubling of demand in the first month, compared with plan, and extra coaches and car parking needed.

[Helen Morgan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his really good intervention. It is true that we tend to underestimate the passenger numbers on the newly reopened lines, and the benefits are probably in excess of the business cases that have supported them. I will come to further developments on this line later, so I am grateful to him for making that point.

Public transport is critical to the issue of productivity, growth and matching jobs with people who want to do them, so this line will be really important for job creation, education opportunities and economic growth in a rural area that has huge potential but is currently not meeting that potential. It will also be a huge boost to the regeneration of Oswestry’s beautiful and historic town centre. Oswestry already boasts a large number of independent shops and a relatively low number of vacant units. On the border between England and Wales, the town has a rich cultural history, a large number of native Welsh speakers and the potential to really thrive in the future.

The area surrounding the station is planned to become a transport hub for the town, and the listed station building is undergoing works to ensure that it is structurally sound and fit for the future, but it will need tenants inside it. A fully operating station has the potential to unlock private investment in the area, to regenerate this important transport gateway to Oswestry, only a few minutes’ walk from the centre of town, and to provide crucial facilities, such as public toilets and a café, that would make connecting bus services into the rural area beyond much more viable. One of the big issues that local bus providers have with providing services in the area is that there is not a public toilet for their drivers to use when they stop over. That really hinders the ability for them to provide a decent bus service.

People who live in Oswestry are largely dependent on their car. Linking local bus and rail services will reduce congestion and emissions and open a world of opportunity for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to access a car or drive one. As I said, it is not just me who thinks the reopening is a good idea. The DFT’s feedback on the strategic outline business case was extremely positive, saying that it was a “strong strategic case”, that the

“proposal aligns to various local plans over the past decade”,

and that the

“appraisal outputs presented in the economic case show that all options yield ‘Very High and Financially Positive’ value for money”.

Crucially, the project is expected to bring in more cash than it would cost to set up. That clear value for money is in stark contrast to the three other restoring your railway schemes approved by the previous Government last October, which were judged to offer poor value for money at best. It was the strong business case that persuaded the DFT to commit to funding the project through to delivery. To come to my hon. Friend’s point, when the business case was put together, it did not factor in the likelihood of the new Wrexham, Shropshire & Midlands Railway Company to provide a direct service on the line from Gobowen to London. If that service goes ahead—I very much hope that it will—the benefits for Oswestry will be even greater.

There has been some local opposition. Some people have argued that we could just run a shuttle bus, seemingly unaware that there already is one. But the shuttle bus has not worked: it does not run in the evening or early morning; it is frequently delayed by congestion on the A5, which has to be crossed to get to the station; and sometimes it just does not turn up at all. It certainly will not unlock the economic regeneration of the transport hub in the centre of Oswestry that the rail reopening promises. It is also really expensive to travel by bus and train, because people need two different tickets. Perhaps most importantly, whether it is for an urgent appointment at the orthopaedic hospital or an overnight shift at nearby Derwen college, people cannot trust a bus that will not get them there on time.

I welcome this week’s announcement that local authorities will be given the powers to franchise their own bus services. If that happens in Shropshire, we will see huge benefits across the whole of my constituency—for the many villages that have no service at all, and towns such as Market Drayton and Ellesmere, for which reconnection to the railway is desirable but not realistically possible. But we cannot pin our hopes on that. Given that the funding for all this brilliant new public transport remains unclear and uncommitted, it seems highly unlikely that Shropshire’s Conservative-run council will take on the revenue strain of start-up bus services. The council forecasts that it will balance its books this year by using up all its reserves, unless it can find a further £38 million of cuts, which would be on top of £58 million last year and £30 million already delivered this year.

The ambition should also be to link rail and bus services, so that people can genuinely consider leaving their car at home because the alternative is reliable, convenient and affordable. The Oswestry to Gobowen line uses a railway line that is already there. It obviously needs to be upgraded if it is to be usable once more, but because it has not been built over, there is space for a footpath or cycle path to go alongside. The benefits of active travel are well documented, and they could be exploited here if the scheme goes ahead.

The project has a capital cost of between £5 million and £15 million, and ongoing operating costs of £196,000 per annum. Critically, it is forecast to be cash-positive over the appraisal period. Local critics have highlighted the potential disruption caused by it crossing the A5, but it is important to emphasise that nobody is proposing to run a slow, steam heritage train over a major level crossing. The proposal involves very little disruption and many benefits. Indeed, it is difficult to see any justification for axing the project.

The Government have said that they want to grow the economy, improve education, clear NHS backlogs and clean up the environment, but they are potentially blocking a scheme that would help to achieve all those objectives. Shropshire is one of the worst-served counties in England for public transport, with only one bus route running on a Sunday in the whole county, and the loss of more bus miles since 2015 than any other county in England. There are huge barriers in place to realising Shropshire’s potential, and the project would help to remove one of them. It would enable local businesses to find quality candidates for the vacancies that they cannot fill, it would remove a huge barrier for those without a car who are seeking work beyond the boundaries of their immediate area,and it would enable young people and those wanting to develop new skills to access a far greater range of educational provision.

It would also unlock investment and regeneration in an important regional town centre. We cannot regenerate growth, jobs, skills and investment if a town is isolated from the rest of its region. That is why the previous Government promised to fund the project, and why the new Government should, too. I urge the Minister to come to Oswestry to see the wonderful potential of this historic market town and the additional value that the railway would bring to it. She should urgently reconsider the decision to remove funding from this fantastic project.