Rail Links: South-west England

Lord Swire Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered improving rail links in south-west England.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. I am proud to secure my first debate as an MP on the urgent need to improve the train line in the south-west of England. I am grateful for the cross-party support I have received ahead of the debate, and I will try to make my remarks as cross party as I can because I know the sentiments are shared by Labour Conservative Memberss.

I am proud to be a Janner—someone from Plymouth. Having been born there and as we live there, we all know that there is one thing in which we can instinctively believe: our train line is not good enough, and other regions get more money. As a region we have been given, and have accepted, a poor deal from Government for too long. Across nearly all areas of Government spending, the south-west, particularly the far south-west, receives below-average spend. In education, health, housing, road and rail the south-west lags at the bottom of the spending league tables. We need to change that, and we need to do it together. I am pleased that so many hon. Members from all parts of the House are here to debate the topic, and I hope the Minister will recognise that these are not just my concerns, nor those of my constituents or my party, but those of our region as a whole, presented on a cross-party basis.

I have three simple objectives that I encourage the Minister to take on board to help us in the south-west. We must realise the vision contained in the excellent recommendations of the peninsula rail taskforce, so we can have a railway to be proud of—an economic asset and not a liability. I encourage the Minister to help us to cut journey times from Plymouth to London from an average of three hours and 30 minutes to two hours and 15 minutes. Journey times are quicker to those regions lucky enough to have snazzy monikers such as northern powerhouse and midlands engine; I am afraid that the far south-west gets no such snazzy moniker, nor the spending that normally accompanies it. I encourage the Minister to help us to achieve our third objective: a railway that is resilient, with connectivity that will survive storms, and wi-fi and mobile connectivity enabling business to be done on the train.

With those objectives in mind, I have three simple asks of the Minister, his colleagues in the Department for Transport and those in the Treasury. First, will they look at how we can invest in quicker journeys and shorter journey times? The Minister will know that there is an opportunity to look at speeds on the Devon banks, the parts of the track between Plymouth and Exeter that are being repaired next year. While that work is going on, for a bargain price of £30 million, the track can be straightened, rails replaced and the speed limit lifted from 60 to 75 miles per hour. That would cut the journey from Plymouth to Exeter by three minutes; Great Western Railway trains would do it in just under an hour, and CrossCountry trains would do it in around 55 minutes. That would be a huge improvement on where we are now, and considering the billions being spent on High Speed 2 to cut journey times to the midlands for those in London, it is a bargain.

Secondly, I ask the Minister’s support for a pilot project in Devon and Cornwall, using Network Rail’s global system for mobile communications-railway, or GSM-R, masts for public mobile signal to power calls on trains and proper, full-distance wi-fi. I hope that my neighbour, the hon. Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter), will pick up on that later. Finally, I ask the Minister to recognise the enormous amount of work put in by the peninsula rail taskforce, the councils, Network Rail, businesses and hon. Members, and to look again at his Department’s decision not to respond formally to the report. It is a first-class piece of work and deserves the benefit of a considered response from the Department.

Mr Evans, you will be aware that the far south-west is a beautiful part of the world, full of ingenious businesses, a superb tourism economy and the potential to deliver much more, but we need greater investment in transport. Plymouth has neither an airport nor a motorway—that ends in Exeter—and despite being the largest city on the south coast, larger than either Portsmouth or Southampton, our journey times to the capital are slower and our transport spend smaller. Post-Brexit Britain must not ignore the talent and potential of the regions. The far south-west is a region eager to deliver, but it requires strategic investment, especially in transport, to really motor.

The funding gap for transport in the south-west is real. The Treasury’s country and regional analysis publication shows that, in 2015-16, the total identified Government expenditure on transport in the south-west was £277 per head. In London, the figure was £973 per head. Spending in London is three and a half times that in the south-west, relative to population size. Spending in the south-west is the second lowest of all English regions, with only the east midlands being lower at £260 per head. These figures are greater when spending on transport infrastructure is factored in.

The Treasury’s figures on public expenditure on rail by year and region from 2015-16 state that the figure for London is £5.16 billion, while the south-west gets £357 million. That implies that, per head, people in the south-west are worth less than those in London. Let me be clear: people in the south-west are not worth less than those in the capital. As a member of the Select Committee on Transport, I asked the Secretary of State for Transport about these figures during our session last week. He encouraged me not to look at the figures. I am afraid that the figures are what I look at, because they tell a story about investment and political priority.

In 2014, as many hon. Members will remember, our poorly equipped train line suffered immensely during the UK storms, which literally washed away and left hanging parts of the track at Dawlish. A short distance down the track, the cliffs failed and fell on to the tracks, as has been happening for decades. The train line through Dawlish was closed for a number of months, costing the economy more than £1 billion. In the wake of the storms, the then Prime Minister David Cameron came to the south-west to visit Dawlish and see the damage for himself. In a press conference afterward, he said that

“money is no object...Whatever money is needed…will be spent. We will take whatever steps are necessary.”

Those are fine words, but the reality has often been quite different.

The problems were not just in 2014, when the precarious train line at Dawlish gave out. Each time there are storms, CrossCountry, which runs Voyager trains, must cancel the last leg of the journey from Scotland to Penzance at Exeter, because its trains short-circuit at Dawlish if they are hit by waves, blocking the track and requiring removal, effectively closing our rail line. It is not a historical injustice, but a regular occurrence. The recent Storm Brian meant that CrossCountry trains through Dawlish were cancelled yet again in the last week, raising the question whether anything has been learned in the three years since the floods. It is lucky that Great Western, which for the time being is still driving its so-called high-speed trains, can still go through Dawlish when the tracks are open. In no other part of the country would such a precarious train line or such a broken franchise commitment be tolerated by Ministers, so why are they tolerated in the south-west?

In the aftermath of those storms, the largely Conservative councils in the south-west, together with largely Conservative Members of Parliament, created the peninsula rail taskforce. It produced a series of excellent pieces of work, which my party supports, setting out a long-term programme of work to invest in our railways. I pay tribute to all those who contributed to and funded the PRTF reports and studies, and who continue to serve and contribute to that regional undertaking today.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

I fully understand that the hon. Gentleman is concentrating mainly on Dawlish and the Plymouth to London line. Will he also take the opportunity to support the existence of, and continuing investment in, branch lines such as the Avocet line, which plays a vital role between Exeter and Exmouth in my constituency?

[Luke Pollard]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that branch lines are important in the region. The PRTF report talks about not only investment in our main line, but creating wider Devon metro services and the importance of connecting not only Devon’s great cities, but its smaller towns as well.