High Speed Rail (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill
Debate between Lord McLoughlin and Jim CunninghamTuesday 30th January 2018
(6 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Sir Patrick McLoughlin
If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will make some progress.
It is right to say that we have seen a renaissance on our railways since privatisation, and that renaissance continued under the last Labour Government. Indeed, in their 13 years in government, they did not seek to change the franchising at all. They felt that that was the best way to operate the railways. We had the private sector and the public sector involved, and we saw our railways improve tremendously. If we get to a situation—I hope we do not—of the railways going back to a fully nationalised body, what happened in the ’60s and ’70s will happen again. Rail was always at the back of the queue for investment. Hospitals and education took priority; the railways were left without any priority whatsoever. There is no doubt in my mind that privatisation has led to the rejuvenation of the rail industry, and so much so that passenger numbers have increased from something like 700 million to some 1.6 billion, which speaks for itself.
I am pleased that the Bill has been introduced. David Higgins recommended that we should try to bring the investment and benefits of HS2 more quickly to the north. Should this Bill get its Second Reading today, it is worth remembering that we will see high-speed services to Crewe by 2027. In infrastructure terms, and given the necessary planning, that is not that far away, so I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on bringing the Bill forward.
I know that the Government are well aware of this, but I want to talk about the importance of continuing to develop skills in engineering. The National College for High Speed Rail, which is based in Doncaster and Birmingham, will enable people to get the engineering skills that are so important. All that follows on from the remarkable Crossrail project, which will start to open to the public later this year. We saw such skills in the television programmes covering its development across London.
This important Bill is about capacity. There are those who say that the Department for Transport and its Secretaries of State have changed their mind and that they talk about capacity more than speed, but the very first HS2 document that was published referred to capacity, too. The west coast main line is one of the busiest lines in Europe, if not the busiest. We need a massive injection of infrastructure, and this Bill is the answer
Mr Jim Cunningham
The right hon. Gentleman is quite right that we want to speed things up and that the west coast main line is very busy, but to go back to the point that I made to my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), what are we going to do about the bottlenecks? There were cancellations yesterday, and there only has to be one incident for everything to stop. That affects freight as much as anything else.
Sir Patrick McLoughlin
I completely accept that, but the simple fact is that that is one of the reasons for the new line. We want resilience, alternatives and something that is much more modern. We have spent a fortune on upgrading the west coast main line from Birmingham up to Manchester, although I understand that we did not carry out any upgrade south of Rugby. The upgrade was essential, and if the then Government had been a bit more forward thinking, they could have built a new high-speed line then rather than doing an upgrade.
An upgrade has been undertaken, however, and it is very visible near Lichfield, for example, where the bridge has been changed as the line goes through Armitage to accommodate four tracks instead of two. There has been a huge amount of investment in the west coast main line, and that answers the question asked by the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) with regard to the need for greater capacity, more alternatives, and the modern engineering that we will get from HS2. I cannot remember the exact year, but there was a time a few years ago when every single railway line in the country had problems because of weather disruption apart from HS1, which was built to a high specification with modern engineering.