Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail

Jack Brereton Excerpts

Wednesday 14th June 2023 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) on securing this much-needed debate. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder).

I very much supported the enthusiasm of the former Secretary of State for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), when he launched the Williams-Shapps plan. I particularly supported the commitment to ensure that we saw a reversal of some of the damage done by the Beeching mindset. That was why I was somewhat concerned that a Beeching-esque mindset could see some revival under William-Shapps, although it is not inevitable that that will happen.

The Beeching mindset is that where there is a bus, there is no need for a train, and that where there is a train, there is no need for another train in competition. Beeching called competition duplication, as though a competing service and consumer choice were redundant or inefficient. He was wrong, and the nationalised railway continued to decline. However, thanks to privatisation, we have seen competition return, and record numbers of passengers with it. For example, Birmingham New Street to London Euston faces excellent competition from Moor Street to Marylebone, which has helped to keep fares low on those routes, while other places—such as Stoke, unfortunately—face disproportionately higher fares. On the road, there is also the National Express service from Digbeth to Victoria and of course the soon-to-open service from Curzon Street to Euston or at least Old Oak Common.

That is competition, convenience and choice, not duplication; it puts passengers first, and we need more of it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes said, it is noticeable that, where we have seen more effective competition, with open access on the east coast, performance has been better and fares have remained more competitive. Unfortunately, following the pandemic all risk and reward now rests with the Government. With our railways put on life support, they are more nationalised than ever before, with zero incentive for operators to grow revenues or deliver for passengers.

Our railways are facing an acute revenue crisis, but not really a passenger numbers crisis. The Office of Rail and Road’s estimate of 1.4 billion journeys for the financial year 2022-23 is historically high—it is not back to the 2018-19 peak but, mainly due to increased leisure travel, it is well above 2010 levels, and it has increased to where it has been for all but half a dozen years in the post-war era.

Season ticket sales unfortunately plummeted with lockdown and have not recovered. People who previously would have travelled at peak times, paying the highest fares for business meetings, now find it far more convenient to move to Zoom or Teams. It is good, then, to see operators such as East Midlands Railway introducing a new form of season ticket that allows eight days of travel within a four-week period. I just wish that EMR would restore all the services it cut during the pandemic, particularly on its route through Stoke-on-Trent, and add more to serve revived passenger numbers, which, on EMR, are now at 101% of pre-pandemic levels. There is certainly a demand that is not being effectively met by the barely hourly service throughout the week between Crewe and Derby, with only an afternoon service on a Sunday.

Across the national network, the latest quarterly figures, published last week, show that passenger numbers are 88% of what they were in the same pre-pandemic quarter four years ago, but revenue is only 70%. The rail plan needs to inspire innovation and incentivise operators to win back fares. It also means our railways need to up their game in winning an increased number of lucrative freight contracts.

When it comes to the make-up of GBR, there must be the flexibility for operators to provide services over and above the contracted minimum in response to consumer demand. It would be a mistake for the whole timetable to be decided centrally and inflexibly by the Department in London. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) said, we cannot just see a transfer of all the bad practice and cultural problems we have seen in Network Rail. The headquartering of GBR in Derby is therefore welcome, as is the commitment in the plan for more regionalised management. We must see a much lighter-touch and decentralised GBR that allows the needs of local economies and communities to be properly reflected.

However, those regions must be got right. Currently, Stoke-on-Trent endures being split over two Network Rail areas, in a farce that has forced us to seek intervention from the ORR and No. 10 to compel Network Rail to engage with the transforming cities fund projects as a single organisation and to stop dragging its heels over the TCF infrastructure works that had already been agreed. Even now, I await the unacceptably overdue progress on improving access to Longton station in my constituency. At the very least, having GBR in Derby would put it on the same line as Longton—the Crewe to Derby line—which would hopefully focus minds on improving services in stations through north Staffordshire, including reopening a station in Meir, in my constituency. Indeed, it would be a great commuter base for GBR staff working in Derby, adding urgency to getting the TCF programme delivered.

GBR will need to make serious studies of the Crewe to Derby route and the impact of High Speed 2. Unfortunately, current designs for Crewe threaten to take away capacity for local trains rather than opening up the promised capacity for more local trains. More capacity was supposed to be the rationale for the whole upheaval that HS2 is causing. What is the point of having HS2 services that no one can get to or use if local and regional services are completely hollowed out as a result? We should use the pause of phase 2 to look again at whether money could be far better invested in upgrading existing rail infrastructure to better provide the enhanced connectivity that is needed.

In conclusion, delivering the rail plan urgently requires more detail of what the plan actually is. It needs opportunities for open access to be prioritised. It needs to enable tangible benefits for passengers and to bring back the intangible glamour of rail travel that helped make it the preferred mode of transport, adding to revenue by adding consumer value. The focus has to be more competitive services to drive up standards for passengers, support economic growth and put our railways on a much more stable footing for the long term.