Rail Services: Portsmouth and the South-West

Jonathan Reynolds Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your stewardship in this Chamber, Sir Roger. I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond) on securing today’s debate. Having previously brought similar debates to this House for my own area in Greater Manchester, I know just how important rail travel and public transport are to constituents and how appreciative they are when their Members of Parliament raise such matters.

I am pleased to see the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), responding on behalf of the Government. When this debate was first announced, it caused considerable excitement in Her Majesty’s Opposition’s transport team. Would, we wondered, the debate be responded to by the rail Minister or the Minister for Portsmouth? I can only conclude that that decision was made at the highest levels of Government, but I am delighted to see the rail Minister here today.

As the hon. Member for Portsmouth South made clear in her opening speech, rail services in Portsmouth and the south-west face several issues. When the Minister replies to the debate, I am sure that she will have been left in no doubt about where improvements are needed, and I hope that the hon. Member for Portsmouth South receives the answers that she requested.

Some of the problems that have been raised in this debate are simply down to poor levels of service, whereas some are down to poor decisions that the Government have made. Others, however, are due to the poor system we have for running rail services in the UK, and I will say something about all those issues in my reply.

The record of this Government, and indeed, of the previous Conservative-led coalition Government, is much less favourable than they like to make out. I often find that the rhetoric that we hear in the House of Commons on rail matters simply does not match the experience of our constituents and passengers, and often shows a real disconnect from their everyday commuting reality. It is one thing for us to sit here in Westminster and debate the performance of rail services in Portsmouth and the south-west, but perhaps those who are best placed to judge it are the rail users themselves. Unfortunately, the results do not make for good reading, with a steady decrease in passenger satisfaction, which the hon. Lady referred to, and which I hope the Minister will address in her reply. We have seen decreases in passenger satisfaction across the board in Portsmouth, with perhaps the most striking statistic being that just 21% of commuters believe that their services are good value for money. When taxpayers are making a net payment of nearly £4 billion a year to the railways as a whole, on top of ever rising fares, the fact that passenger satisfaction is decreasing should cause great alarm to the Minister. I look forward to hearing how she intends to rectify that.

Rail users in Portsmouth and the south-west have not been immune to the trend of rising fares either, with commuters in particular being hit hard. By next year, the cost of a season ticket from Portsmouth to Eastleigh will have increased by 25% since 2010, and the cost of a season ticket from Portsmouth to London by 26%, a rise of more than £1,000. The mixture of rising fares and decreasing satisfaction in Portsmouth is clearly not a good combination and suggests that real change is needed.

The Government have announced plans to increase fares only by inflation during this Parliament, with the Minister herself saying recently that that policy would cost about £700 million a year in lost revenue, but we have not been offered an explanation of how the Government will make up that significant fall in revenue. My fear is that it will be another broken promise after the electrification fiascos. I hope that at the very least she can give us a guarantee today that services will not be cut to pay for that panicked pre-election announcement.

Labour Members think that passengers should simply have access to clearer ticketing and be able to get a better deal than they can currently. Fares and ticketing structures in this country are some of the most complex in Europe, and it is passengers who often pay the additional price.

There is, of course, as we have heard today, another scourge of train passengers in the south-west—overcrowding. That problem is faced by many services around the country, including in my own area in Greater Manchester. Clearly, extra capacity is desperately needed. The previous Labour Government invested more in the railways in real terms, especially in Portsmouth and the south-west, than any previous Government. In 2013, two Portsmouth commuter trains were named as among the 10 most overcrowded rail services in the country; both had load factors of more than 150%. Since then, services to and from Portsmouth have not featured in the top 10. However, before we start celebrating, it would probably be safe to assume that Portsmouth’s non-inclusion reflects greater levels of overcrowding elsewhere rather than better services for Portsmouth commuters.

Franchising fiascos have also become a theme under this Government, as they were under the previous, Conservative-led Government. We saw the shambles of the west coast main line franchising process, which had a knock-on effect on other services, and the disappointing decision not to keep the profitable east coast service publicly owned. Yet again, Portsmouth and the south-west have had experience of this problem. In July of this year, just two months after the Government took office, the Minister’s Department announced that negotiations to agree a direct award for South West Trains with Stagecoach had broken down. As a result, the franchising timetable has had to be redrawn. Most concerning of all is that the Department for Transport spent more than £800,000 on contract negotiations with Stagecoach, yet failed to reach a satisfactory outcome. I hope that the Minister, in her reply, can confirm whether the Department has recovered those costs and can expand some more on why the negotiations broke down.

It appears that the Minister has not seriously considered the possibility of using Directly Operated Railways. She should need no convincing of DOR’s record, given that it delivered record passenger satisfaction and punctuality scores on east coast services and there was a public outcry when the franchise was handed to Virgin. The Government simply do not have a good record on franchise negotiation. I suggest that to avoid the problem, they could simply come round to the Labour party’s way of thinking, which is that we should bin the franchising system altogether, because it is simply too costly and inefficient and creates an inflexible railway unable to meet the needs of passengers.

Another recurring theme under this Government has been the troubled approach to electrification—something that the south-west has also suffered from. The Labour Government committed to the electrification of the Great Western main line in the south-west back in 2009, but under this Government the cost has escalated drastically and the project is now delayed. Labour Members have repeatedly warned that the Great Western main line electrification is in danger because of rising costs. The estimated cost is now three times higher than in 2011. It is currently a staggering £1.74 billion. The Government have attempted to lay some of the blame at Network Rail’s door, but the Minister must also take responsibility for not confirming the project until July 2012, meaning that essential planning work was delayed. Even Network Rail’s head of long-term planning and funding has alluded to that, saying that it did not have the level of confidence that it might have wished at the start.

All this is becoming too usual, and it is rail users who will suffer because of the delays and cost increases. The faster trains and increased capacity that south-west rail users want and hon. Members have requested here today will not be delivered on time. What will particularly irk passengers will be not seeing improvements in rolling stock. The Government’s plans to replace uncomfortable and inaccessible Pacer trains on branch lines in the south-west depend on the success of the electrification programme. If the Great Western electrification project is significantly delayed, passengers in the south-west are likely to suffer with poor rolling stock for years—stock that the Government have agreed is unacceptable for my constituents in the north of England.

I do not expect the Minister to offer any solutions to that today, as the Government have previously said that until the Hendy report is published they cannot give any credible promises on the delivery timetables of any other projects. I would be grateful, however, if the Minister could confirm in her reply the date on which the Hendy report is due to be published, as one would hope that it would be available in time for the comprehensive spending review.

I again congratulate the hon. Member for Portsmouth South on initiating today’s debate. I completely understand why she and her constituents are unhappy with aspects of rail services in Portsmouth and the south-west. Clearly, the Government have much work to do to tackle overcrowding, to stop drastic fare rises, to improve rolling stock, to combat decreasing passenger satisfaction and to deliver planned infrastructure projects. Labour Members want answers from the Minister as to how the Government intend to address those matters. In the Labour party, we believe that there is a better way of running our railways—we put passengers at the centre of the network and learn lessons from successful rail networks in other countries. I look forward to continuing this conversation with all hon. Members in the future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Claire Perry]

Yes, and I will race through my final comments and come on to what I think are some of the solutions. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton pointed out what a balancing act we face, because train usage across the country is rising, and trains that start off empty become crowded. Indeed, I have travelled on some of the top 10 most crowded trains, because I tend to go out and mystery shop them. It is not encouraging to be unable to sit down on the journey into London at 6 o’clock in the morning, work for 12 or 14 hours and then go home. People deserve better.

What are the possible solutions? I will abandon my speech now—when I do so, it always makes my officials incredibly nervous—and talk about what could be done. There is a cascade of things that can be done to increase capacity. We can work on existing lines, and do the sorts of work talked about in the Wessex route Study. Such work is important, and it is being looked at, reviewed and prioritised. We need to ensure that everybody understands the costs and benefits of such work for economic value added, not just for transport users. Such works are always expensive and difficult, because they involve so much disruption.

We can do things such as digital enhancements on the railway. When it comes to the number of train paths, the railways are now full, but if we can use digital technology to reduce the time between trains, we will be able to run more of them. That is a big long-term investment plan for Network Rail. Building new lines is often cheaper than expanding existing lines. We heard a lot of mention of Crossrail 2, a vital project that will help to alleviate congestion—as will Crossrail 1—in the metro and suburban areas.

We can buy new trains. Indeed, many new trains are being delivered to the South West franchise, but what tends to happen is that they are built to satisfy demand at peak times, and they run empty for much of the day. Is that an effective thing to do? Would it be possible to use those trains better? That brings me to the point about part-time season tickets. Providing incentives for people to change their journey patterns and move around outside peak time can be cost-effective and help us to use train capacity better.

Finally, we can, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire mentioned, change stopping patterns. It is completely possible to run a very high speed, non-stop train to Portsmouth if it does not stop anywhere else. As we move forward and consider the consultation, we have to ask ourselves that sort of question. What is the right journey pattern for the demand? Is it right to devolve more services to TfL, to deal with some of the inner-London metro demand and outer-London demand, in order to run services that are better fitted for long-distance users?

What are the right solutions? I do not know, and I do not think that we, individually, know. Part of the problem in the industry is that people work in silos when they make decisions, so there will be an operational solution, a solution for passengers and perhaps a political solution. We need to get the right people in the right place to make those decisions, to make sure that the money is there and that organisations can deliver. That is why the Hendy review is so important. We need to take politics out of the process, which is why I so welcome the appointment of Lord Adonis; I think he is a good man to do the long-term infrastructure planning. We need to work together to solve some of the knotty problems. There is a huge amount of financial commitment to the railways, and we are committing to the biggest investment programme since Victorian times, which is a vital part of delivering economic growth. Collectively as Members, working with our local communities, local businesses, my officials, Network Rail and the operators, we can come up with the right solutions.

What do we need to do? First, we need to keep all the information coming in in response to the route study. That will determine the near-term investment plans, which cover the next five to 10 years. Secondly, the consultation on the franchise process will start before Christmas, and it is absolutely vital that we have a real, in-depth analysis of what we want. Is this the right time to start putting in some express services that do not stop between some of the big conurbations, with a consequent possible loss of services in terms of stopping patterns? Can the network collectively work that out? Following that consultation, the invitation to tender will go out before April 2016, and the franchise will start in 2017.

I do not know what the right solution is, and I do not believe that any individual holds it. Collectively, however, working together across the boundaries that have built up in the railway sector between operators, the network and regulators, we can come up with a better solution. The experience of passengers must be put front and centre, because the railway is not about boxes running about on rails. I was told by somebody who has left the industry that if it were not for the passengers, the timetabling would be perfect. I found that both amusing and incredibly offensive, because it suggested that we were talking about somebody’s train set rather than a transport system that millions of people rely on to get to work and to get back home to their families.

My plea to team Hampshire—I am delighted that it has an identity—and also to team Somerset, team Wiltshire, team Stalybridge and Hyde—

[Jonathan Reynolds]

Team Isle of Wight.

[Claire Perry]

And to team Isle of Wight. My plea is that I hope that, by working together, we can come up with a better solution. We want to invest in the railways. They are a vital part of delivering local, regional and national economic growth. We are in an exciting place, because we have finally realised the importance of railway investment in delivering the economic growth that we want for our constituents.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South once more. With her eloquent and intelligent speech, she auditioned extremely well for my job. I commend her for securing the debate.