Oswestry to Gobowen Railway Line

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Lilian Greenwood)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) on securing today’s debate on the Oswestry to Gobowen project, and I thank her for the thoughtful and important points that she made both today and in her previous campaigning work on the issue. I have read her correspondence with my noble Friend the Minister for Rail and with previous Ministers in the Department.

I understand the hon. Lady’s argument about the problems with connectivity between Oswestry and Gobowen, particularly for those who have no access to private vehicles or do not wish to drive. I appreciate the importance of good public transport connections in the area, including for patients, staff and visitors travelling to the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt orthopaedic hospital, whether from the local area or from further afield. We want to ensure that people can access the public services they need, and they should not need private transport to do so.

My Department is committed to putting transport at the heart of mission-driven government. We aim to support economic growth by transforming infrastructure so that it works for the whole country, and we aim to improve connectivity to promote social mobility, as the hon. Lady said, and tackle regional inequality, particularly in terms of access to healthcare, jobs and homes. She described the difficulties that her constituents face in reaching the places where they can obtain opportunities for work, wider opportunities for study and education, and, indeed, enjoy leisure and culture activities. That is why transport is so important—because of the opportunities that it opens up for people, including to improve their wellbeing.

However, as my right hon. Friend the Chancellor set out in her speech to the House on 29 July, the Government have been forced to address the economic inheritance that we have been left by the last Government, which includes that £22 billion black hole in the country’s finances this year alone. That includes £2.9 billion of transport projects that were committed to despite the last Government knowing, full well, that they were unaffordable. I completely understand that the announcement of the difficult decision to close the restoring your railway programme has caused disappointment. I assure the hon. Member that that decision was not taken lightly.

As the Chancellor set out, individual restoring your railway projects will be considered as part of preparations for the spending review and wider spending decisions for the Department. But as the hon. Member will know from her correspondence with my noble Friend the Minister for Rail, it will not be possible for all transport projects, particularly those not yet in delivery, to continue. I am afraid that that is the difficult reality of the position that we find ourselves in, and I wish that it was not so.

The restoring your railway programme attracted considerable interest when it was launched by the last Government in January 2020, and the Department for Transport received more than 140 individual applications for funding to help to support the development of early-stage business cases. I recognise the point made by the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) that new services can be very popular and successful; there is a real appetite in communities up and down the country for new public transport services, in order to better connect people to the places that they want and need to go to. At the close of the final funding round in September 2021, the programme was heavily oversubscribed.

In the case of the Oswestry to Gobowen project, the previous Government announced, under their Network North initiative, that the project would proceed to delivery, subject to successful business cases. However, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has previously set out, there was a clear gap between promised projects and the money available to deliver them. The previous Government should have been up-front and frank about this, and they absolutely were not.

I want, of course, to thank all hon. Members who sponsored and campaigned for individual former restoring your railway projects for their patience and efforts over the years. I completely appreciate the frustration expressed about the lack of news on next steps—and that is reflected in the hon. Member for North Shropshire’s previous correspondence with the Department under the previous Government—because, undoubtedly, it felt incredibly slow at times. That is why my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has ordered a review of the Department’s capital spend portfolio. That will move quickly to produce recommendations about current and future schemes and end the uncertainty that the previous Government created.

We also need to be clear that this Government’s approach to how transport projects can be funded is based on local leaders and local transport authorities knowing best what projects to pursue in order to further the needs of their constituents. It is absolutely crucial that local stakeholders work together to provide affordable and reliable services for the communities they serve, and that should include better integration between different modes of transport. The hon. Member highlighted the potential of an integrated transport hub and the desire for better walking and cycling provision, which of course would provide not only transport benefits but health and wellbeing benefits. I hope that her local authority can explore those options further.

The hon. Member made strong points about the quality—or rather, the lack of quality—of bus service provision in her area. As we both know, under the last Government thousands of bus services saw reduced frequency or were cut altogether, leaving many towns and villages without adequate, reliable and affordable public transport. We recognise that situation and are determined to do something about it.

I was really pleased to hear the hon. Member’s welcome for the Government’s pledge to deliver better bus services for passengers, which includes making franchising easier and quicker, removing the ideological ban on new municipal bus companies, and reforming funding for bus services to give more control and flexibility to local leaders to deliver their local priorities. I understand what she said about the Conservative-led county council and its appetite for such change, but I am sure that she and her constituents will make their point very clearly to those who seek to represent them at that level.

[Helen Morgan]

Bearing in mind that local councils are a hair’s breadth away from issuing section 114 notices and are only likely to deliver statutory services in their area, what kind of additional funding will be available from the Government for them to be able to franchise their own bus services? I ask that because it seems to me that it is all very well councils having the power to deliver such services, but unless they have the funding to do so, it will not bring about the results that we would like to see.

[Lilian Greenwood]

I thank the hon. Member for her question and of course she is absolutely right to highlight the very difficult position that many local authorities find themselves in after 14 years of Conservative Governments. That is precisely why growing the economy and the ability to improve our public services is one of this Government’s key missions. To achieve that, we need to make sure that the foundations are strong, and setting our economy on the right track is the first part of that process.

However, we will of course say more about support for transport as part of the spending review and we will work with local authorities to understand what is needed to improve and grow their bus networks, learning from their experiences and building on their successes to ensure that local networks can meet the needs of the communities who rely on them.

As we undertake vital reforms to the sector, including through the introduction of the Buses Bill, we will ensure that stakeholders are properly engaged with the proposals, and I look forward to the hon. Member participating in the debates about how we can do that as we go forward.

I thank the hon. Member again for securing this debate and offer her my support and that of my ministerial colleagues to work with her to improve the transport network in her constituency, and right across the country. As she recognised, transport is a vital enabler of jobs, opportunities and growth, and I am sure that we share the desire to see that for North Shropshire and indeed the whole country.

Question put and agreed to.