Rail Strikes

Jack Brereton Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)]

This strike is a great threat to the ordinary working people who depend on rail services for work and especially to those now undertaking exams. The reason that this action is so unjustified and reckless is that we have already seen the rail sector on life support following the huge challenges faced during the pandemic. Services have become increasingly dependent on taxpayer subsidies, and that trend started before covid. Between 2015-16 and 2019-20, the National Audit Office identified that the amount of Government funding for operating and maintaining the rail network doubled.

Now more than ever, it is important that we get people back using the railways so that services remain sustainable. At a time when rail operators are trying to encourage and convince people back on to the trains, we see the country being held to ransom by the unions and the Labour party. These reckless actions will harm ordinary families already struggling with the cost of living.

Wage levels in the sector are already far higher than in most others. The average rail worker now earns £44,000 a year, compared with an average salary of just over £27,000 in Stoke-on-Trent South. Many working practices in the sector are also stuck in the dark ages. The driver rulebook has changed little since the 1960s.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jack Brereton]

No, I will not.

If anything is to come from the unions’ outrageous actions, I hope that they will influence the Government to finally overhaul those archaic working practices. Unfortunately, I feel that the culture in parts of the rail industry works against the necessary reforms and improvements, particularly in Network Rail, as we have experienced in Stoke-on-Trent in trying to deliver our transforming cities fund to improve local rail services.

The Government are focused on reinvesting in our railways, particularly on making them more accessible to communities across the country. For Stoke-on-Trent, which lost much of its local connectivity under the Beeching axe, improving local rail services through schemes such as the restoring your railway programme and the TCF is absolutely vital for levelling up, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell) said.

Locally in north Staffordshire, I hope that the Government support our levelling-up bids for reopening Meir station and the Stoke-Leek line, which we are working on as part of the restoring your railway programme. But these reckless actions by the trade unions and the Labour party undermine all that and threaten to undermine the levelling up of this country and the investment that we are putting into the railways.