Transport in the North

Laura Pidcock Excerpts

Monday 6th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Laura Pidcock (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) for securing this debate, and not least for the opportunity to be surrounded by so many northerners.

The 1980s Thatcherite initiative of bus deregulation and privatisation has been an unmitigated disaster for my constituents in North West Durham. The model introduced competition between private companies because it was wrongly thought that it would increase the range and regularity of services, but it has done the absolute opposite. Privatisation, taken alongside the 30%-plus bus funding cuts to my local authority and the overall 18% transport funding cut in the region, means that my constituents are paying more than people in other areas of the country, waiting longer and enduring ridiculous travel times just to get a few miles down the road.

Added to that, Consett has been ill-served by central Government transport cuts and the neglect of the region. It is one of the largest towns in Britain without a train station and it has inadequate road infrastructure, much of which is made up of single carriageways in dire need of repair.

The situation with the buses is the most pressing. I never thought I would get so obsessed with buses! One constituent who lives in Stanley Crook got a job in Consett, which is only 13 miles away, but it would take him more than 2 hours and 30 minutes to get there by public transport. Down here, I can get to work for £3 return. I have never had to run for a bus or wait for long. One of my team who works in my Consett office has to pay £6.20 to get there from Durham. He has to pay more than double what I have to pay to get to his place of work. It costs many people in my constituency more than £7 a day to get to Newcastle.

Many of my constituents in Weardale could get to London quicker than they can get to their nearest cities. One bus in Weardale operates to Newcastle on a Tuesday, but if they miss the return bus, they have to wait three days for another return to the dale. In many parts of my constituency, people cannot get a bus after 8 pm, on a Sunday or on a bank holiday Monday. Many older people have to either struggle up hills with their shopping or use taxis, rendering their bus pass meaningless.

[Ian Mearns]

I wonder whether the Minister would be surprised to learn that the same operators who operate in my hon. Friend’s constituency and mine make twice as much profit there as they do in London, yet we are not allowed to regulate our buses.

[Laura Pidcock]

We are not asking for much more than what London already has. I agree with my hon. Friend.

I do not want to politically sanitise this debate. I think that transport and public transport are immensely political. I also think that it is a class issue, because the people who use the services in my constituency are not the type of people who are hiding away millions in offshore trusts. They are hard-working people, many of them on the minimum wage, who have to spend hundreds of hours travelling to their place of work or study, instead of on leisure time, and who pay proportionately so much more for the pleasure.

There is no such thing as the northern powerhouse; it is a fallacy constructed by this Government to divert people’s attention away from the grave inequalities of our region’s funding. There will be no resurgence of the north-east’s post-industrial towns, including those in my constituency, if it is not backed up by funding and a shift in the priorities of the Government about what my constituents should expect from the service. Do the Government think that we are somehow second-class citizens and that because we are used to poor transport and to not being connected, we can just be ignored? We always seem to be second; we always seem to have the oldest stock; we always seem to get less than other parts of the region.

Local authorities must be able to have an area-based strategy that sets out the routes, prices and frequency of buses so that local people are not at the mercy of the profits of private companies who will only fund the most profitable routes. How can the Government justify the £1,943 a person, which other Members have mentioned, being spent in London on current or planned projects compared with just £222 in the north-east? How can that possibly be justified? The people of Weardale and Consett, and all the other areas in my constituency, deserve much better.