Stoke-Leek Line: Reopening

Jonathan Gullis Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley.

I congratulate my constituency neighbour and right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) on securing this important debate. We are hearing the hymn of us all singing to the same tune. Ultimately, it is so important for the connectivity of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire Moorlands and north Staffordshire that we see not just the Stoke-to-Leek line, but the Meir station bid, which is led by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), and the Etruria station bid put in by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon). I am proud to be a co-signatory and co-supporter of the Stoke toLeek line.

It looks like we want all the sweeties from the jar, but we are saying that Stoke-on-Trent and the Staffordshire Moorlands have been long overlooked. My right hon. Friend lives in Leek, so she knows that it is one of the largest towns in the country, at 21,000 residents, and yet one of the only towns of that size that does not have a rail station in it, which is utterly bizarre in itself.

If we are ever to hit net zero, which is an important agenda that we should be aiming for, there have to be public transport options to enable people no longer to have to use the car. If we are to allow people from Stoke-on-Trent opportunities to work at, maybe, one day in the future, Alton Towers, which supports the bid and has discussed the potential of linking the line to its theme park at a later date, there is a long-term benefit for tourism opportunities. Alton Towers gets about 2.1 million visitors directly and, pre-covid-19 pandemic, Stoke-on-Trent city received about 6 million visitors a year. The problem for Stoke-on-Trent, however, is that 5.7 million to 5.8 million of them were day visitors.

A public transport network can link the Peak national park and, potentially, Alton Towers. It can connect our fantastic cities, so people could visit the fantastic and award-winning Gladstone Pottery Museum in the south or the mightily superior Middleport Pottery museum up in Middleport, where shows such as “Peaky Blinders” and “The Great Pottery Throwdown” have been filmed. We can then start to say to people that tourism is more than just a day visit to the north of Staffordshire; it becomes longer term and creates more jobs. Given that tourism is our second largest employer in the whole of Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent combined, it is an important market. Let us not forget that the pandemic has made it so difficult for that sector, so better connectivity can only help us bounce back quicker in those types of industries.

I am proud to serve Stoke-on-Trent, North. We have fantastic schools, for example, such as the Excel Academy in Sneyd Green, a council ward I share with my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central. A railway line could link that closely, as it could the Birches Head Academy in Stoke-on-Trent Central. Parents would not have to go on already congested roads and the children would have an opportunity to access the city and to get to and from school, pretty much door to door, by the railway network.

That would also mean that the people of Leek and of Milton—a fantastic little village, which again I share my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central—could think about getting to and from Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College, with its UK-leading digital T-levels, and Staffordshire University, which is the UK leader in video games technology. We, the Stoke-on-Trent MPs, want to make Silicon Stoke our real agenda. With our gigabit broadband already in the ground, and with those students, better connectivity will create business opportunities.

There are hectares of brownfield land along that track, waiting to be unlocked, but that requires the railway line back open and the critical rail mass back within north Staffordshire. By doing that, we are more than happy to play our part in meeting the Government’s housing targets.

In Stoke-on-Trent, we are planning for around 14,000 new homes, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South has already said, we are well above our targets. We are building—there are cranes going up everywhere—and we have put in some fantastic levelling-up fund bids to focus on regenerating one of the largest city centre regeneration sites in the west midlands, the East-West Precinct, as it is known. We have also had the fantastic opportunity to partner with Capital & Centric, which has put in £55 million of private sector investment, and with the gap funding from the levelling-up fund, we will unlock hotel space, office space and homes right by Stoke-on-Trent railway station. We also hope that the Home Office will make that location their new HQ for the 560 new jobs that the Stoke-on-Trent MPs and Councillor Abi Brown have secured as part of the Places for Growth programme run from the Cabinet Office.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South always uses this line, and I absolutely love it: getting to Stoke-on-Trent is not the problem. We have the M6, the A50 and the A500, we have the west coast main line, and we have HS2 with the Handsacre link coming, so getting to us is not the issue. Getting around the city is the problem: getting around north Staffordshire is where the problems lie, and when roads such as the A50 and the A500 are at 110% capacity despite the fact that 30% of the people of Stoke-on-Trent do not have access to a private vehicle, there is clearly a big gap in the market for public transport.

We would love to be able to say that we just want the railways, but we need buses as well, because we have had a massive reduction in our bus usage over the past decade, from 15 million to 9.3 million journeys. This reduction means that people in Brindley Ford, which I represent, in Great Chell and Packmoor, which is superbly represented by Councillor Janine Bridges, in Milton, which used to be represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South and is now represented by Councillor Dave Evans, Councillor James Smith and Councillor Carl Edwards, and in other remote parts of the constituency cannot get to and from, or around, the city. We seem to have bus links that do not link up our main retail units, our main business parks, and our main hubs of transport and the city centre. That means that bus fares have become too expensive, and that means that people are not using the buses, as I said. That is why I completely agree with my hon. Friend that we do not just want rail: we need to “bus back better” if we are ever truly going to make sure that we deliver for our constituents in Stoke-on-Trent.

I want to moan a bit about the roads as well, because if we do not get this line, I will be banging on the door of the Department for Transport relentlessly to talk about the funding formula for national roads. I represent Kidsgrove and Talke, which is part of Staffordshire County Council, so I am sure that Councillor Alan White and maybe even my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands will not thank me for this, but large county areas with lots of minor roads, for example, will always benefit from a larger pool of funding when it comes to fixing potholes or resurfacing our roads. The city of Stoke-on-Trent simply does not get its fair share.

I was very happy to have a Westminster Hall debate on this issue, because it is something that my hon. Friends from Stoke-on-Trent have raised time and time again. We want to fix our roads, but we need more money, and the funding formula cannot just be based on mileage of road: it has to take in the usage of roads and the congestion on those roads. If we did that, Stoke-on-Trent would get a fairer share of the money. We are not asking for a U-turn, with Staffordshire Moorlands getting nothing and Stoke getting everything. We are asking for a slightly bigger slice of the cake. We have the fantastic JCB Pothole Pro machine going around our city now. We are the first local authority in the country to procure that machine, which fixes potholes in half the time and at half the cost to the taxpayer, and we are already seeing the benefits in Councillor Abi Brown’s ward, where it is being trialled. However, ultimately, we need more money.

Going back to the important reason why we are here, this is not just about connectivity: it is about the economic opportunity that the Stoke-to-Leek line brings. As I say, the village of Milton has one of the finest high streets I have ever seen. It is a beautiful traditional village, with a local butcher, local nail salon, local card and balloon suppliers, local florist and local café—The Teapot At Milton, which I frequent too often, hence the size of the gut. This is the issue: we have that beautiful little village, but not as many people are accessing it as we would want, because the problem is that parking becomes difficult. It is a very narrow high street, so having the railway line would mean that people from Leek could come and experience the benefits of Milton, just like the people of Milton would go to Leek to experience the benefits there. There are some fantastic markets in the Staffordshire Moorlands that many of my residents would want to access. If this railway line came back, they might even set up a second market in market towns such as Burslem. That town has a market already—Our Burslem—but that could be expanded with a Sunday farmer’s market, depending on what happens in the area.

We want to make sure that at the end of the day, we do not get left behind or forgotten about. We have already seen fantastic Government commitment: we have received £29 million through the Transforming Cities fund and £800,000 for upgrading our bus network, so that 15 of our old buses will become brand new and the rest are going to have newer engines, which means we can improve our local air quality. I have no doubt my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central will mention that in her speech, because she has been a doughty champion on the issue for the city and for her constituents.

Alongside that pot of money, we must make sure that we have Meir station open, get Etruria station open and open the Stoke-Leek line, which has the unanimous support of all four Members of Parliament here today, the fantastic leader of Staffordshire Moorlands District Council, Sybil Ralphs, the fantastic council leader, Councillor Abi Brown, the Staffordshire local enterprise partnership, the city centre business improvement district, local schools and numerous parish councils from the numerous villages in Staffordshire Moorlands—I cannot bear to name them all, as I might forget some.

There is support not just from national representatives, and at local level with local government, but on the ground, from local schools and businesses. I hope we will have the opportunity to get the £50,000 we need to top up the money provided by the city council and Staffordshire Moorlands District Council and that we can then go away, put a really good business case together and, by all means, allow the Department for Transport to decide whether this is a project that is worth investing in in the long term.

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[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) on securing today’s debate. As we heard from all Members, there is plainly a great deal of local support for reopening and re-imagining the Stoke-Leek rail line. What was once constructed to carry limestone, cement and other freight should now be seen as a potential part of a modern, clean and green post-carbon railway. That makes the decision by Government to turn down the bids for funds from the Restoring Your Railway fund for even more frustrating and perplexing. No wonder local MPs and councillors are so exercised on behalf of their constituents, and campaigners are so vocal.

Ministers have simply got this wrong; if they do not allow the rail line to happen, it will be to the detriment of the local area and, indeed, the wider region. We have heard the benefits for local businesses, communities and places such as Norton, Stockton Brook and Milton. We all know that a new railway would help cut carbon emissions and reduce the number of lorries on local roads—particularly the aforementioned A53, A520, A52 and A523—and benefit the communities living along those A roads. It would create new opportunities for local businesses in Stoke, Leek and across north Staffordshire. The reopening would create new jobs in construction and the supply chain.

Most of all, it would tackle social exclusion, open new labour markets and help people in the area travel for work and leisure, particularly since, as was mentioned by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), 30% of local people do not own a car. In some areas of Stoke-on Trent, that percentage is even higher. The railway remains one of the safest, cleanest and most convenient ways to travel.

By creating the Restoring Your Railway fund, the Government have unfortunately set community against community, creating a forced competition with winners and losers. Worst of all, they have abdicated their responsibility for a strategic national plan to reopen mothballed railway lines. We need a strategic plan, not a competition. The Campaign for Better Transport has shown through its research that huge social and economic benefits would accrue from a strategic approach.

[Jonathan Gullis]

I am very grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s full-hearted support, and I hope it puts even more pressure on the Government, but I firmly disagree with the idea that competition is bad. It was entirely appropriate for the Government to make us submit a good bid and to make sure that the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. Ultimately, that is to make sure we are being serious. We could end up getting a very large amount of funding from the Government, and at the end of the day it is Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Moorlands taxpayers’ money, so we need to ensure it is spent appropriately and delivers for them in the long term. While we are here enjoying discussing what we want from the Stoke to Leek line, we need to make sure it is economically viable in the long term.

[Mr Dhesi]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but we must agree to disagree on this issue. Although it is okay to have competition in certain arenas, in this arena what is required is a national strategic policy. As we have seen, in parts of our country there have been accusations of favouritism and of politics coming into play, rather than an overarching policy that would benefit our country.

The Campaign for Better Transport has shown through its research that huge social and economic benefits would accrue from a national strategic approach. It points out that adding 343 miles to the network, including 166 miles of reopened route, would create 72 new stations and 20 million new journeys, bring half a million people within walking distance of a station, create 6,500 new jobs, serve more than 100 of the most disadvantaged wards in the country, enhance air quality, cut carbon, and generate an annual gross value added of between £155 million and £245 million, as well as indirect benefits to our economy.

So many communities, like the ones in north Staffs, are crying out for this kind of investment. We must never lose sight of the need for new freight lines, as the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands said, as well as passenger lines. According to the International Energy Agency, rail uses as much as 90% less energy than road transport per unit of freight, yet the Government have set a high bar of financial sustainability, with predicted fair income underwritten by the scheme sponsor.

Network Rail’s governance for railway investment projects is conservative in its approach, according to the Campaign for Better Transport. That combination of factors explains why progress has been so slow. Ministers’ attempts to expedite projects—in particular, the rail network enhancement plan—contains the fatal design flaw that each scheme is viewed through the lens of local demand, not an overarching strategic approach to meet our national needs. It feels like road is still the Government’s favourite, and rail is still the runner up.

I congratulate the campaigners for the Stoke to Leek line, who have come so far. I appeal to Ministers to clear the leaves off the line and let the people of north Staffs have the railway, but let us be equally ambitious for all communities campaigning for reopened lines. Let us finally bury the Beeching axe. Let us offer a vision of local lines with well-lit, safe railway stations with beautiful architecture, full access for people with disabilities, sustainable energy use and integration with cycling, walking, trams and buses. Let us offer services that are frequent, convenient and on time, and digital ticketing that reflects the new realities of when and how often people want to travel—one national railway, owned by the people and viewed as a vital national asset.

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[Maggie Throup]

It was a long-fought battle, like that which my right hon. and hon. Friends in the room are fighting.

More broadly, investing in transport links is essential to levelling up access to opportunities across the whole country, ensuring that our regions are better connected, local economies flourish and more than half a century of isolation is undone. By building back with a real focus on better connections and supporting left-behind communities, we are delivering our promise to level up this country, as set out last week by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister.

The Restoring Your Railways Fund has three parts, with part of the £500 million fund allocated to the ideas fund. Aimed at early-stage proposals, the ideas fund is helping communities to develop ideas to restore railway lines and stations across England and Wales. These proposals are led by the affected communities, supported by their local Member or Members of this House, giving them an opportunity to make the case for how the railway can transform their area. The Department is funding 75% of the study costs of successful proposals, up to a maximum of £50,000. Over the first two rounds of the ideas fund, 25 promising schemes across England and Wales have been awarded up to £50,000 in development funding to help them get to the strategic outline business case stage.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands has taken advantage of this opportunity and submitted a proposal to restore rail services between Stoke and Leek—or between Leek and Stoke—to the first round of the ideas fund in spring 2020. While the bid had the potential to deliver benefits, it was not successful at that time, and the rail Minister wrote to the right hon. and hon. Members who sponsored the bid to inform them of the outcome. Feedback on the bid was provided at the same time, setting out why it had not quite made it in that round of funding and what could be done to further strengthen the proposals. I know that the rail Minister was therefore pleased that earlier this year—I think it was on 5 March, the deadline for applications for the third and final round of the fund—one of the more than 85 bids that the Department for Transport received was a revised proposal for the Stoke-Leek line.

As my right hon. Friend explained, the proposal details the many benefits that restoring the Stoke-Leek line would bring to the area—she was so graphic earlier about all the benefits—including providing residents of Leek with direct access to education and employment opportunities in Stoke-on-Trent and the opening up of Staffordshire Moorlands to the tourist trade. The assessment process for those bids is currently under way. The Department expects to announce outcomes over the summer. Decisions on bids are made by an expert panel, which the rail Minister chairs. It is informed by analysis from the Department for Transport, technical advisers and Network Rail. The standard of the applications is, as ever, very high.

In nearby Meir, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South, a proposal to reopen the railway station has already been successful in the ideas fund. This scheme used the funding awarded to create a strategic outline business case, which the Department will be considering soon. If delivered, the scheme would reconnect the people of Meir to the rail network for the first time since 1966, giving them access to new educational and economic opportunities, making new housing developments in certain areas viable and levelling up a region that suffers from poor productivity relative to the rest of the UK.

Advance proposals for the second part of the £500 million Restoring Your Railways Fund are being used to accelerate the development of closed lines and stations that are already being considered for restoration and have existing business cases. As a result, certain reopened railways will be connecting commuters again very soon, with regular passenger services set to be restored for the first time in almost 50 years by the end of 2021. The third strand of the Restoring Your Railways funding has been used to provide £32 million for a third round of the new stations fund, which is funding six new stations and providing development funding for a further two stations.

This country has a rich railway history, which puts it on the world stage, with its Victorian pioneers, its commitment to innovation and its engineering achievements. Thanks to record levels of funding, which will help us to build back better as we recover from the pandemic, we will also deliver the biggest modernisation programme to the railways for more than a century.

Of course, new rail lines are not the only way to reconnect our communities. Last week, the Prime Minister announced a £4.2 billion city region sustainable transport fund, which local leaders can spend on projects, such as new tram lines or bike lanes. The west midlands will receive a share of this fund, providing further opportunity for the constituents of my right hon. and hon. Friends to benefit from improved transport infrastructure.

[Jonathan Gullis]

In Staffordshire, we are just on the edge of the West Midlands Combined Authority. Mayor Street does a fantastic job of delivering public transport, but I want to make sure that any money does not come at the detriment of areas, such as Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Moorlands, that are not part of combined authority areas.

[Maggie Throup]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He has put that on record, and I am sure it will be listened to and noted.

Additionally, Stoke-on-Trent has been awarded £34.5 million from the Transforming Cities Fund towards improvements at Stoke-on-Trent and Longton rail stations, new cycling and walking schemes, installation of electric charge points and upgrades to the city centre bus station. The local growth deal is also investing £121 million of transport infrastructure in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, including constructing new highway infrastructure to improve access to business and employment sites around Stoke-on-Trent, new access to the Etruria Valley enterprise area and the new Stafford western access route, which will provide an alternative route to the town centre this year. All this investment will improve transport connections for Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, helping residents access new opportunities.

I conclude by thanking my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands for securing this debate and thanking my right hon. and hon. Friends who represent the area for all their thoughtful contributions. I can reassure the House that there is a tremendous amount of work being done in this area to reconnect smaller communities, regenerate local economies and improve access to jobs, homes and education. I will make it my personal commitment to ensure that the rail Minister is fully updated on the compelling case for the Stoke-Leek Leek-Stoke line, which I have heard loud and clear this afternoon.