Future of Rail

Justin Madders Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Charles. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for introducing the debate. I am also pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) here, because I want to talk about the journeys that we used to take together when we were first elected in 2015. Those hourly direct services from Chester to London have all gone during the pandemic and are yet to return. I understand that we are due to get some back next month, but not all of them will be restored. I have to ask the Minister, why are we waiting longer than everyone else to get a lesser service restored? Who is accountable for that decision? Will we ever get back to what we had before? What evidence are those decisions based on?

Those questions are important because the Department is also planning to award a new 10-year franchise to run the line later in the year. How can decisions be properly made on future service provision when the service is not yet back to pre-pandemic levels? What evidence base will the Department be working on for that decision? There needs to be a crystal-clear commitment that the new franchise will restore hourly direct services from Chester to London. I would like the Minister, when she responds, to say that is exactly what will happen. If she cannot do that, will she at least meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester to discuss what we would like to see in the new 10-year deal?

We cannot continue to have decisions made about our rail services without reference to Members in this place and our communities. I have suggested to Avanti already that if it does not want to run the service at the previous level, it should not only not bid on the current franchise but give the current one up. I am due to meet Avanti on Friday, and I will be interested to hear what it has to say. In the meantime, I hope that we have the Department’s support in restoring services to pre-pandemic levels.

Perhaps when I meet Avanti I will be told that it has been unable to restore services because of a lack of demand. Of course, if it does not put the services on, we do not know what the demand is. It may be the case that a huge increase in home working as a result of the pandemic has affected travel patterns, but I would not be surprised if there were other issues at play. If there is a feeling that businesses are using rail less, perhaps the answer may lie in the eye-watering costs attached to such travel.

Let us look at journeys of a similar distance between cities in England, Germany and France: Chester to London is 165 miles; Hamburg to Berlin is 159 miles; and Calais to Paris is 147 miles. The cost of a single rail ticket for the morning to arrive by 9 am for each of those journeys tells its own story: Hamburg to Berlin is £26; Calais to Paris is £39; and Chester to London is £155. Travelling from Chester to London costs nearly six times more than a similar journey in Germany and nearly four times more than a similar journey in France. In fact, I can get to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt or to Tel Aviv in Israel for less money than it costs me to get to London by train before 9 am, so I can actually get to another continent for less money. Therefore, if we are going to do something about rail travel in future, let us make it affordable for everyone.