Rail Disruption: Social and Economic Impacts

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

Unfortunately I missed the question, but I hope to provide some colour to what the noble Lord was saying. Indeed, there are two different types of crack. One is found on the yaw damper; those cracks were found three weeks ago and are not the reason for the withdrawal of the trains from service. The second cracks are on the lifting lugs and have led to the withdrawal of trains from service. I would like to reassure the noble Lord that there is a very stringent engineering risk assessment in place. These trains are checked every 24 hours and are being returned to service from today; we expect to have up to 25 coming back today. We hope that 60 GWR trains will be back by Monday and we believe that services will significantly improve.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con) [V]]

The current situation has brought about an intolerable level of stress and inconvenience to the travelling public, not least here in Wales on the GWR routes. It is a relief that Hitachi has issued a statement this morning advising that a significant number of the IETs can return to service. What inquiries have been made of train leasing companies, such as Angel Trains and Porterbrook, to establish the possibility of recommissioning some of their redundant and in-storage HST 125 fleet to provide some alleviation of the current problem and possible future issues?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I would like to reassure my noble friend that I spoke to Mark Hopwood, the MD of GWR, this morning. He told me that the major routes of particularly high priority include those from south Wales and the south-west. We recognise that getting those services back is important. He is looking at other ways of procuring modern, clean rolling stock, although he pointed out that the return of HSTs is unlikely and he would hope to get more modern stock from elsewhere.