Increasing Choice for Rail Passengers

John Grogan Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[John Grogan (Keighley) (Lab)]

I stand corrected and admonished, Mrs Moon. The quality of the debate inspired me to make a contribution.

I consider myself to be a democratic socialist and also a great believer in competition, and I do not necessarily see a contradiction between the two. One good thing that came from the Railways Act 1993 and the privatisation of the railways was the creation of open access operators. I could not say that it was a bad thing, because I used to be the Member for Selby, which previously had no direct rail link to the great city of London. As we have already heard, Hull Trains established itself as the pioneer of open access. It initially ran, I think, four journeys a day to London; it is many more now. In terms of the links between Selby and the world, seeing that direct link from London King’s Cross to Doncaster and then to Selby and to Hull was like having, to reference an earlier debate, a second division football team, in the effect it had on the town’s attractiveness.

The hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) is absolutely right: those who have always opposed open access operators are Governments of both colours, who have never made it easy for the operators—I think the current Government are looking at it afresh—and the franchise holders. I am delighted that the excellent shadow rail Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), is here. The citizens of York benefit from Grand Central train services. I remember, under a Labour Government, going to the Office of the Rail Regulator and saying, “This is your chance to be heroes.” Everyone said that the rail regulator could not possibly find a path on the railway for that Grand Central service, but it stood up and said that there was space, and we therefore had Grand Central services.

I understand that, from 2021, there will be a service on the east coast main line to Scotland from London, calling at Morpeth, promising £25 fares to Edinburgh. Some lines are easier to run open access services on than others, for a variety of reasons, and even though only 3% of services across the country are run by open access operators, the east coast main line has benefited from that price competition. Any dominant provider—to be honest, it does not matter whether state or private—will become complacent and find it hard to innovate. That is as true of the current franchise holders as it was of British Rail. I fully support the Labour party’s policy of taking that franchise back into public ownership, because I am a great believer in a mixed economy. There was a moment under a Conservative Government when the state provided services on the east coast main line, and consumer satisfaction was high, but the open access providers pressed it and kept it honest.

I say gently to my party, as we develop our policy, that it may not be popular. If at the next election it looks as though we are about to form a Government, my constituents will ask whether the policy will mean the end of the Grand Central service from Bradford to London, and people in Selby will ask whether it will mean the end of the Hull Trains service to London. I hope the answer to those questions will be no. With those remarks, I sit down, admonished.