Transport in the North

Lord Walney Excerpts

Monday 6th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) on securing this debate. It is a real pleasure and very worth while to follow not only my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson), but so many Members who are speaking from coastal areas in the north. Very often, this debate is characterised by the need for the main cities to be connected up, but of course there are many areas in urgent need of economic development.

As a Parliament, we have to decide what kind of country we want to represent. Is it one in which certain areas get more and more prosperous while others are left to wither, or is it one—I hope that everyone in the Chamber wants this—in which we value communities that are more cut-off from other areas and in which we want to invest in transport to change that? Other areas are obviously not as enticing and attractive as Barrow-in-Furness in my constituency. Nevertheless, they form part of an important economic case.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) for making the case for economic development. We urgently need the Government to change the way in which they make these calculations. We are not talking about a “Field of Dreams”, Kevin Costner-style, “If we build it, they will come” situation. There are already clear economic plans and potential in these areas, but that potential needs to be unlocked. If the Minister and the Government want to relieve congestion in overheated areas in the longer term, they should bring up the economic development of the north of England so that people have more economic opportunities to go elsewhere, rather than feeling that they must be sucked down into the overcrowded, over-congested hell holes that some Members in the south are unfortunate enough to have to represent.

I will confine the rest of my remarks to the need for transport infrastructure, development and investment in Barrow and Furness, and the south and west of Cumbria. I will take the unusual step of speaking on behalf of the hon. Member for Copeland (Trudy Harrison), who has ironically not been able to get to this debate due to chronic delays in her journey getting down here. She and I are as one in advocating the need for road and rail improvements to connect what can be world-class civil nuclear jobs in the west of Cumbria, with Sellafield and its international decommissioning role, Moorside—the Minister knows from his previous role the importance of keeping the Moorside deal on track—and military nuclear in the submarine programme.

Going back to the Minister’s previous experience, I have met him on the way up to, I assumed, the Moorside and west Cumbria area, so he will know about the appalling transport links between what ought to be a global centre of nuclear excellence. I challenge any other Member to intervene and tell me a worse case than that between Sellafield and BAE Systems. It is ostensibly an A-road going through a farmyard—a single track connecting these two areas of global nuclear excellence. It has to be fixed. We need more clarity from the Government on the major road network, how it will add to the strategic road network and how we will be able to bid.

In my final 40 seconds, let me focus on rail and on the state of the Cumbrian coastal line and the Furness line. We are in utterly dire straits. I have tabled an official question today to deal with one aspect of the catastrophe of the terrible unreliability of the Furness line—the dire need for rolling stock. Almost daily, children are left unable to get home. We need bus services, and we need urgent investment in this line. I hope the Minister listens to us.