Train Services: Telford and Birmingham

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered train services between Telford and Birmingham.

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. It is also a great privilege to be able to come to this place and raise the concerns of the residents I represent, and to have a Minister come and listen to them. In this place, as we have just seen, we often debate issues of great national and global importance, and sometimes we forget to focus on the issues that have the greatest impact on the day-to-day lives of those we serve.

Telford, my constituency, is a vibrant, thriving and rapidly growing new town set in the heart of rural Shropshire, and this year it is celebrating its 50th anniversary. It has a unique identity and a proud industrial heritage as the birthplace of the industrial revolution. It is a shining example of what a successful new town can be. When Telford was designed half a century ago, it was intended to be self-sufficient, with all services, shopping and jobs provided locally. At that time, people were moving to Telford to get out of Birmingham, to live a better quality of life. However, the design of Telford in that way has meant that in many ways we are now cut off and somewhat isolated. Fifty years on, that self-sufficient model is not a model for a successful business centre, which requires excellent connectivity by both road and rail in order to thrive.

Telford has become a significant population centre and a very important business centre in the heart of the west midlands. It has inward investment, enterprise, commerce, advanced manufacturing and all sorts of hi-tech and new businesses coming to the area. Unemployment has halved and apprenticeships have doubled since 2010. With that, we should be experiencing good transport connectivity and rail networks fit for our growing new town, but sadly that is not the case.

Despite being surrounded by a rural hinterland of gorgeous Shropshire countryside, Telford is only 27 miles west of Birmingham, so we should be perfectly positioned for commuting to or leisure activities in Birmingham. We are next to the UK’s second largest city and should be able to capitalise on that opportunity, yet it takes us 47 minutes to get from Telford to Birmingham by train. We have only two trains an hour, and they are spaced so that if we miss the one at eight minutes past the hour, we have to wait 45 minutes for the next train. The issue is not just the spacing. Once we are on the train, the service is slow. It is a stopping service. The train chugs along reluctantly, stopping at every little Shropshire village that it passes along the way, and often it has only two carriages, which will inevitably be full to bursting at peak times.

As Telford has grown, more and more people have chosen to come and build their lives there, and more and more people want to travel to Birmingham for both leisure and work, so overcrowding is all too common, with people often standing for the whole of the 47-minute journey.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Lucy Allan]

I shall be delighted to give way to my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour.

[Mark Pritchard]

My hon. Friend rightly highlights the issues of the track and the capacity of the trains. Does she agree that, in addition, companies such as West Midlands Trains, which won the new franchise, need to look at stations—in particular, Albrighton and access to it, and Wellington, which has 750,000 passengers a year but where there is leaking at platform 1 and no toilet facilities outside opening hours? Some of those basic passenger experiences also need to be looked at—experiences on platforms as well as on the tracks and in the carriages.

[Lucy Allan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He is absolutely right. There is a great deal more work to be done and I feel that we have been somewhat neglected over the years in Telford and the surrounding areas. It is important that we address this now for the future of our area. That is why I have come to this place this afternoon.

The journey to Birmingham from London is one hour and 27 minutes or thereabouts, but trying to go on to Telford is a throwback to a completely different era. There is this slow, crowded stopping service, which takes 47 minutes, as I mentioned, and that is enough to move any commuter on to the road. The infrastructure investment has lagged behind our rapid population growth and our growth as a business centre. As you can imagine, Mr Hollobone, residents are regularly in contact with me to tell me about their struggles and their frustrations on a daily basis, so I want to give a voice to their experiences.

The train service between Telford and Birmingham simply does not meet the needs of a modern, thriving new town. In fact, Telford is the fastest growing new town in the country and the fastest growing town in the west midlands, yet we have had the same train service for as long as I and many others can remember, and it is not moving forward.