UK Innovation Corridor

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 30th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, for this debate, because a number of colleagues and I have been discussing the title, “innovation corridor” and some of us thought it was the east-west railway from Oxford. I am obviously proved wrong and it is a much better corridor from London to Cambridge via Stansted, and probably a bit further than Cambridge as well. The noble Lord made some really powerful points about the third-rate status of that line; it has been like that for 60 or 70 years. I remember going up it on a steam train as a student and it was very bad in those days, although it has had more tracks since then.

The noble Lord mentioned that the roads are congested and that there is a continuing problem with emissions. Of course, the Government now have commitments to carbon reduction, but we need a massive reduction in the carbon associated with transport in particular. It was interesting to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, discussing bimode trains last week. The Government have committed to getting rid of diesel trains by 2040 but bimode trains with diesel engines are apparently exempt—presumably except when they run diesels. I can see a time when we are going to be moving towards electric cars, which will hopefully reduce some of the traffic jams the noble Lord was talking about, but there has to be a decent passenger service to go along with that.

There are some new developments on freight which should help. These involve high-speed freight in what are now no longer required as passenger trains—electric ones, obviously. I think that the first service will probably start between London Gateway and Liverpool Street. Customers are very interested and there is money there. Network Rail needs to provide access to the stations, but the key is that the customers want it and it will take some of the road freight congestion off the parallel roads, in this case and many others. Of course, it is very difficult to conceive how long-distance freight in the road freight industry can achieve the carbon reductions, because the weights are so big and the technology for battery lorries is not really there yet.

The innovation corridor needs to start at London and go beyond Stansted to Cambridge, and to Ely. The whole railway sector there is pretty bad and I can see demand going up, as the noble Lord said, quite significantly. I look at rail access to the four main London airports—Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stansted—and all apart from Stansted have four tracks on part of their route into London. It is not on all of it, but it does allow, as the noble Lord said, some fast trains to overtake the slow stoppers.

When Crossrail opens, they will probably have to get rid of the ridiculously priced Heathrow Express, which I think is still £22 for a single now, compared with £3 or £4 on the Underground; it is somewhere in between on TfL trains. The same should happen at Gatwick, because on the Gatwick Express and the Southern services the fare structure is incomprehensible to most people, particularly visitors to this country, and there are so many trains that you do not need the special ones. However, you need some fast services, not just from the capital city but from other places as well. I hope that we can get that to Stansted as well, but as the noble Lord said, it is not just about the track but the tunnel to the airport itself.

There is also a problem around Cambridge, because of the enormous growth in demand, as we know. There are lots of small railways around there which could have services, possibly with a few chords built here and there, to help the communities get into Cambridge to work; that would reduce the traffic congestion in Cambridge itself. Four tracks are therefore essential, as much as we can, between London and the airport. From what I have heard, having talked to some engineers, it is not that difficult. I appreciate that there are level crossings, which will have to be sorted out, but there is space to do it, at least for a good length so you can overtake the slow trains.

That will not happen without some pretty strong pressure from the local authorities all the way up the line, and the users. I understand that Cambridgeshire County Council and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority are keen for public transport offers to Cambridge and Peterborough, an area which stretches as far as Wisbech, March, King’s Lynn, Thetford, Stonemarket, as well as Stansted Airport and Hitchin. There are lots of small routes that could be reinstated, including to Wisbech. The biggest problem is at Ely: stopping trains going north to south—largely the passenger trains—which conflict with the big freight train flows from Felixstowe to the Midlands. A plan to improve that has been around for about 40 years but nothing has been done about it. It is not that expensive but something is needed to enable the freight trains from Felixstowe, whose capacity is constrained by this bottleneck, and passenger trains that may be going on to Wisbech, to get through Ely and to allow the traffic to cross the level crossing there, which is always a problem.

The other issue, which the noble Lord touched on, is new developments. There is one at Mildenhall, a former RAF station. So many of these developments provide lots of lovely housing but with no public transport at all. There has to be a station if possible, and, if not, a commitment to bus services, although they do not usually last very long. Therefore, the whole area needs a good looking at, with the local authorities, to improve the corridor.

The climate change issues are serious at the moment, and I hope that the Government will maintain and strengthen their targets. However, they have to have a credible means of doing so, which is not always there at the moment. Department for Transport figures show that congestion is likely to grow by 55% by 2040—the cut-off date for diesel trains and a few other things—but it is hard to think how congestion can get 55% worse in many places. Maybe the Minister has a solution to that. We have to have a solution, but rail is probably the only one that will work.

This is an innovation corridor. It could be a catalyst for doing it all together: a modern, integrated, green transport system for passengers and freight. I hope that the Government will start taking it seriously. In the meantime, I hope that the Minister will take on board some of my comments about the new type of freight, which is completely different. We must apply it to passengers and freight and get some of them off the road if we are to have any chance of achieving the targets.