McNulty Report and West Coast Rail

Marcus Jones Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will have been pleased by the announcement that we made recently about additional rolling stock for the commuter services into Leeds. Sir Roy did not specifically address the question of any form of mutual structure. Network Rail is of course an independent company, and as Secretary of State I do not have any power to direct it. There are issues of the governance of Network Rail that need to be addressed, and I accept that, but I suggest that the urgent need is to look at its operational structure. The issues of governance and the rather theoretical question of ownership can be looked at on a longer time horizon. Right now we need to drive out cost.

[Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)]

Following the work of the last Government, there are no fast off-peak services on the west coast main line to or from Nuneaton station. Many of the fast off-peak trains thunder through Nuneaton station half empty while there is a strong demand for off-peak services to and from that station. Will the west coast main line specification make it possible for franchisees to look, for example, at changing services so perhaps a fast train could stop at Nuneaton station every hour, trading off a small increase in end-to-end journey times for the possibility of maximising revenue on that service?

[Mr Philip Hammond]

I thought, at the beginning of my hon. Friend’s question, that perhaps he had missed what I said about less departmental micro-management, but I saw from how he ended that he had not missed it all. We will not mandate the new franchisee to do what he describes, but we will make it possible by relaxing the rigid timetabling and specification imposed in the past. We will also give operators an incentive to do so. By moving away from the cap and collar revenue-sharing regime, we will make operators much more responsive to the demands of passengers waiting on a platform and ready to pay good money to get on a train. In the past, that has not always been the case, because 80% of what passengers handed over went directly to the Government.