Transport Connectivity: North-west England Debate
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Jonathan Hinder
Main Page: Jonathan Hinder (Labour - Pendle and Clitheroe)Department Debates - View all Jonathan Hinder's debates with the Department for Transport
Transport Connectivity: North-west England
Jonathan Hinder Excerpts(2 days, 20 hours ago)
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Jonathan Hinder (Pendle and Clitheroe) (Lab)
It is a pleasure, albeit slightly unexpected, to serve under your chairship this morning, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) for securing this important and clearly popular debate.
I will focus my remarks on the rail network. In Pendle and Clitheroe, slow and unreliable rail services, along with disjointed connections, cause daily frustrations for my constituents. Those issues create barriers to work, education and healthcare, and ultimately hold our local economy back.
In my constituency we have two rail routes. The Colne to Preston line operates just one train per hour, taking an hour and 15 minutes to cover only 25 miles. The Clitheroe to Manchester line is no better—again, with just one train per hour, and taking an hour and 20 minutes to travel just 30 miles. If a train is cancelled in the south-east of England, there is often another coming in 10 or 15 minutes, whereas if one train is cancelled in an hourly service, the whole day is ruined.
Those routes are not fit for purpose; we all know that that level of service would not be tolerated on routes going into London. If we want to unlock the potential of our towns, we need investment in order to increase frequency, cut journey times and improve service reliability. Would it be so impossible to have two trains per hour on those routes and speed them up? Would more rolling stock be required? Yes. Would more staff be required? Yes. But can it be done with the right political will? Of course it can. The economic benefits would be profound.
Right now, the connection times do not even make sense. If someone took that slow train from Colne to Preston this morning, hoping to travel south to the capital city, they would wait nearly an hour at Preston for the next train. For public transport to be a viable alternative to car travel, services and timetables must be co-ordinated and designed around the needs of passengers, which currently is simply not the case.
In the longer term, reinstating the Colne to Skipton rail link would be a game changer for east-west travel and our local economy. Reopening the 11-mile stretch, the track bed of which has been protected—that was a theme of my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley)—would open up huge opportunities for jobs and businesses. The project would dramatically improve economic prospects for deprived areas across east Lancashire, well beyond my constituency, and I will continue to campaign for its reinstatement.
Regional inequality in our country is stark, and nowhere is that more obvious than in public transport. Time and again, we have seen rail projects prioritised in the south-east while towns across the north are left waiting for long-overdue upgrades. I know that the Government understand the issue, but I urge them to be bold, act now and commit to delivering a transport system that truly works for the north-west.
Several hon. Members rose—