Restoring Your Railway Fund

Jack Brereton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Westminster Hall

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

It is an absolute pleasure to follow my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis). I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) on securing this important debate on a topic that he knows we very much share an interest in.

The restoring your railway fund is one of the best policies of this Conservative Government, and it should be a model for future public policy. The involvement of local Members of Parliament as sponsors, and other key local stakeholders, has been an excellent way of developing high-quality bids that democratically garner local support. Infrastructure projects can often be imposed and attract controversy, so this grassroots-up approach is far more desirable and more likely to deliver economic and social benefits.

As the Minister will know, the fund has provoked interest across the country, especially in north Staffordshire, which I will focus on. Poor transport connectivity in Stoke-on-Trent and wider north Staffordshire is a major barrier to employment, skills and general quality of life. A third of households in Stoke-on-Trent have no access to a car, yet people depend on car transport because, for many, public transport is non-existent, which severely holds back opportunities. The strategic road network through the city is operating at around 110% capacity and parts of the local road network are far worse, resulting in terrible journey reliability. Local bus operators now say that they are often unable to run reliable services due to the levels of congestion, and we have major air quality problems.

As I have said in this Chamber before, it is important to recognise that north Staffordshire is one of the few parts of the country that were not only hit by the Beeching axe but by further reductions in rail services under the last Labour Government. Services to Barlaston and Wedgwood ceased as part of the west coast main line modernisation in 2004. Such was the short-sightedness of the last Labour Government that Etruria station was permanently closed in 2005, with the platforms completely removed in 2008, to shave but a few minutes off high-speed Pendolino services. Thankfully, times have changed and we now recognise the benefits of encouraging more people back on to our railways, but much needs to be done to restore much of our local connectivity.

The Conservative Government have been extremely supportive of improving local transport for Stoke-on-Trent. As we heard, we have secured £40 million through the transforming cities fund for local bus and rail improvements and £31 million through the bus service improvement plan, as well as funding towards our restoring your railways projects. The first of these to reopen—Meir station, which was closed in 1966—is now progressing to an advanced stage, having secured a further £1.7 million to develop the full business case and detailed delivery study. I was pleased to meet representatives from DfT, Network Rail and the city council just before Christmas, and it was great to hear how well our plans are progressing.

Reopening a station in Meir could have a transformative impact on the local community. Both wards in Meir are identified by the all-party parliamentary group for ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods as being in the top 225 most left-behind neighbourhoods in the entire country. A key problem in Meir is poor transport. More than 40% of households in Meir North do not have a car; public transport is non-existent in parts of the area, and Meir suffers from significant road congestion and air pollution. The lack of effective public transport in Meir is a major barrier to employment and skills opportunities and severely restricts quality of life. Reopening the station in Meir would make a huge difference to a part of the country where levelling up matters most, by opening up a wealth of skilled employment opportunities and massively enhancing access to local colleges and universities. If we secure the full backing of the Government, work could start on site in 2024, and our plans would be relatively easy and cheap to deliver.

Alongside that, I have been working closely with my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent North and for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon), as well as my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), to reopen the Stoke to Leek line. The project is not as advanced as the Meir project, but we were delighted to receive funding from Government that enabled us to submit our excellent strategic outline business case in November. The project would see not only the restoration of rail services to Leek for the first time since 1965, but the reopening of a number of stations throughout Stoke-on-Trent and the Moorlands, including one at Fenton Manor in my constituency. It would significantly help to level up opportunities and massively enhance access to work and skills, as well as tourism. The extremely poor local transport connectivity would be transformed, addressing significant road congestion and air pollution.

Currently, the fastest train journey from Stoke-on-Trent to London Euston takes around an hour and 24 minutes, which is quicker than travelling the 12 miles from Leek to Stoke station by public transport at peak times. That journey time would be improved with further HS2 services connecting us into London, but the benefits will be severely limited if we do not address our chronically poor local transport. Train services from Stoke to Leek would only take between 23 minutes and 25 minutes—around a third of the current peak-time journey times on public transport.

Reopening the line would make a huge difference to communities along the route, opening up major new employment opportunities and helping to deliver the economic growth our area needs, as well as taking vehicles off our roads. I strongly encourage the Minister and the Department to back the Stoke to Leek line moving to the next stage—a full business case and detailed delivery study.

The restoring your railway fund projects to reopen Meir Station and the Stoke to Leek line are taking place alongside the work being done by the West Midlands Rail Executive to look at reopening Trentham station, and the vision of Stoke-on-Trent City Council—led by the excellent Councillor Abi Brown—for a properly integrated light rail network for the Potteries, creating a properly integrated public transport network. I urge the Government to give us their full backing to ensure we can properly level up opportunities in Stoke-on-Trent and wider North Staffordshire.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Huw Merriman)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Cummins. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) on securing this important debate on the restoring your railway fund. Like me, he has a passionate interest in the future of our railways, and I pay tribute to him as my predecessor.

My hon. Friend and other hon. Members will know that the £500 million restoring your railway fund was announced in January 2020, with the aim of delivering on our manifesto commitment of levelling up and beginning a process of reopening lines and stations in England and Wales that had previously been closed. This investment is being used to explore and deliver on how we reconnect communities, regenerate local economies and improve access to jobs, homes and education opportunities.

We have already seen that in action, as many hon. Members have mentioned—not least those who represent Devon. I was delighted to travel to Devon last November to help celebrate the first anniversary of the restoration of the Dartmoor line between Exeter and Okehampton. That was the very first reopening under the restoring your railway manifesto commitment. It was delivered on time and on budget, and I am pleased to say that the restored service has been hugely popular. Over 250,000 new journeys have been recorded on the Dartmoor line in its first year. I was heartened to meet members of the local community and to hear how the reinstated line has improved their lives and is boosting local businesses, college numbers and tourism.

Another restoring your railway scheme, which I plan to visit in the next month or so, is the Northumberland line. It received £34 million of funding in January 2021, which has enabled track to be upgraded for passenger services. Once open, the Northumberland line will reintroduce direct passenger trains between south-east Northumberland and the centre of Newcastle, improving access to jobs, leisure and learning, with services likely to start in 2024. The area has been identified as being in the top 10% of most deprived areas nationally, and it has the lowest rates of regional car ownership, with poor public transport options into Newcastle.

[Jack Brereton]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Huw Merriman]

I will give way briefly, but I want to take time to respond to every hon. Member.

[Jack Brereton]

I thank the Minister for giving way. On the point about levelling up communities, will he ensure that projects such as Meir station, which has so much potential to level up communities, are considered favourably and that that ability to level up areas is considered in the assessment process, to ensure that levelling-up factors determine which projects get the go-ahead and move forward to full development?

[Huw Merriman]

I thank my hon. Friend for his point and for his work on the Transport Committee. I will indeed look at the issue in that regard. It is important that the business case has a good cost-benefit ratio, but it is not just the direct return on money that matters; following the reform of the Green Book rules, one also needs to consider—this is great news—what projects do for regeneration and decarbonisation, and these projects deliver on both fronts.

As hon. Members will appreciate, the restoring your railway fund is heavily over-subscribed. My Department received nearly 200 bids—200 excellent bids—to the ideas fund element of the programme alone. We also reviewed proposals whose business cases were already in their advanced stages, such as the Northumberland line and the Bristol to Portishead line, along with existing proposals to introduce a number of new stations under the new stations fund element.

On the points raised by the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), I gently remind him that eight schemes under the restoring your railway fund are being delivered; 13 are progressing past the strategic outline business case towards their full business case; and 23 projects have been taken through the ideas fund stage. So I did not recognise the part of his speech where he said that not much appeared to have been delivered. And one of my hon. Friends said, the beauty of this fund is that one gains the buy-in of the local community, local Members of Parliament lead things, and schemes are decided from the grassroots up, not from the top down, which I dare say would be more the line of thinking of the hon. Member for Slough.