Rail Franchising

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Commons Chamber

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

In the time available, I will confine my remarks to two key points. First, I ask the Minister not to split the Great Western franchise, but instead to focus his time and energy on investing in our train line. George Osborne, the former Chancellor, suggested a Devon and Cornwall franchise. That might have won headlines, but it won few supporters in the far south-west. Splitting Devon and Cornwall off from the Great Western franchise would condemn rail users in the far south-west to a second-class service. Labour and Conservative Members rightly oppose that appalling idea, but it seems that no lessons have been learned in the DFT. Instead of focusing on speed, resilience and affordability for the far south-west, we now have to defend yet another attempt to split our franchise. Splitting the west country services from those that go to Wales would reduce income for the south-west train line, risk investment and fragment our railways even further. I say to the Minister, who will shortly receive and consider responses from the consultation, “Please do not do this.”

I welcome the Minister to his post, however, because I know that in the coming months he and I will speak an awful lot about trains, especially those around Dawlish. The priority for the Great Western franchise is investment, upgrades, resilience and faster journeys, not more fragmentation. The superb Peninsula Rail Task Force report—I encourage him to take it to bed to read if he has not yet done so—recommends investment in tracks, signalling, trains and timetabling from Penzance through Plymouth to Paddington. The full upgrade programme would cost £9 billion. Labour and the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), have committed £2.5 billion from our infrastructure fund to upgrade the track, yet Ministers have not made any such investment or matched our pledge. It seems to voters in the far south-west that only Labour will invest in a long-term strategy for our railways.

I also recommend that the Minister reads the “Speed to the West” report, which follows the PRTF family of reports. It recommends cutting journey times between the far south-west and London from 3 hours 30 minutes from Plymouth to 2 hours 15 minutes. The first intervention on that, which would cost £600,000 and was mentioned by the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), was, sadly, not funded by the Government before the deadline ran out at Christmas.

There is a last chance for the Minister to say that his Department will fund that £600,000. London receives billions of pounds for rail upgrades, but the far south-west was asking for just £600,000 and was ignored. Will he look at that again?

While there is cross-party support for rail investment in the far south-west, there is a sense in the west country that we are ignored by Ministers and this Government. The new trains that First has ordered for our route will come online this year. I welcome that investment, but I would be grateful if the Minister, in his new role, gave us the news that we want and the funding that we need for the train line in the far south-west.