Rail Fares

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

No, I am going to make some more progress now.

I ask the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood, or perhaps the shadow Minister who winds up the debate, to come clean and talk about how their spending commitment would be funded. If the hon. Lady wants to go against what the shadow Chancellor is saying about there being no more spending, she must accept that her suggestion represents a spending commitment. It is time to talk about how she would fund it, otherwise she has to accept that it would lead to more debt at a time when we are right in the middle of a debt crisis. There is no point in the Leader of the Opposition promoting responsibility when his own party continues to show absolutely none.

The hon. Lady also has to admit that the flexibility that she wants to take away from train operating companies has meant some passengers benefiting from lower increases or decreases. For instance, passengers on the Birmingham to London route via High Wycombe have seen their annual season ticket price reduced by 7%, and the Gatwick to Bournemouth saver return has been reduced by 28%. She is proposing to raise the cost of those passengers’ travel. Presumably she is quite happy to confirm that—she can intervene if she wants.

The bottom line is that for all the bluster that we heard from the hon. Lady, she would abandon the long-term investment in capacity improvements that depends on continued funding from both the taxpayer and the fare payer. She talks about 11% fare increases, but the last Government also allowed such increases. It is worth reminding ourselves of their record on rail fares and value for money. The Labour-led Transport Committee in the last Parliament stated:

“Neither passengers nor tax payers are getting value for their money…The value for money of rail travel has deteriorated by most yardsticks over the past decade.”

I have listened carefully to the comments of the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood, and I hope that we both accept that the real driver of rising costs for fare payers and taxpayers is the inefficiency of the rail system that we inherited from the Opposition. She mentioned other European railways, and Sir Roy McNulty’s independent review of our railway network found that the system that we inherited from the previous Government is 40% less efficient than those of our best European comparators. Taxpayers and fare payers must shoulder that huge cost burden because of the previous Government’s failure to reform our railways.

Unless we are prepared to get to grips with the underlying causes of the inefficiencies, we will never make the progress that I am so passionate about achieving. That means getting different parts of the industry to work more effectively together, as we are doing through the rail delivery group, which has been set up, as Roy McNulty proposed. It means aligning incentives better and increasing transparency—I absolutely agree with that. However, it also means tackling some of the work-force issues, which, we must all accept, have driven up costs. When we reach those difficult discussions in the coming weeks, months and years to tackle rail industry costs that are too high, I hope that the Labour party will step up to the plate and join us in making the necessary decisions to bring rail costs down for the longer term and relieve the fare rise pressures that we have experienced year after year.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State rightly draws attention to the difference in cost between continental railways and ours. The only major difference between them and us is that theirs are publicly owned and integrated and ours are privately owned and fragmented.

[Justine Greening]

That is an over-simplification. However, the hon. Gentleman is right to point out that Sir Roy McNulty identified in his report a need for the different parts of the rail industry to work together much better. Network Rail is already doing that with many of the train operating companies. That was to be a key way of driving costs down—not through worsening services but by running the system better in the first place.