Rail Timetabling

Iain Stewart Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

This problem needs to be fixed as quickly as possible. I respectfully remind the Opposition that a private rail company is involved. Opposition Members keep telling me that we should nationalise it and have the Government running the trains, so they cannot have it both ways.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

Enormous investment has gone into the Thameslink programme, with a new fleet of rolling stock and a state-of-the-art digital signalling system. Can the Secretary of State assure me that these new systems are working as planned and that the cause of the problem is not a technical failing?

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The real frustration is that this is a consequence of major investment programmes and the delivery at the end of those programmes has gone wrong. The thing I find most frustrating about all this, and I absolutely feel for every single passenger who has waited for a cancelled train in the past week—I get the train every day, and I am as fed up with this as everyone else—is that this is the consequence of a change that resulted from a massive investment programme in the railways. We should now be seeing the fruit of that investment programme. We are not yet seeing it, and we have to make sure that we see it pretty quickly.