Easter Adjournment

Martin Vickers Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams), who outlines a case typical of many that all of us face and typical of the bureaucratic complexities that we all have to deal with.

The right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who is no longer in his place, referred to Leicester City and the team’s good fortune this year. As someone who has always had a soft spot for Arsenal among the premier league teams, I am somewhat reluctant to praise Leicester, but as Arsenal is almost certainly not going to get the top spot, like most people I want to see Leicester triumph. That gives me an opportunity to talk about the triumphs of Grimsby Town. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) is nodding. Last Saturday the team secured a place at Wembley in the final of the FA Trophy, when yet again the players will march towards what were the twin towers. We hope for victory.

Grimsby Town—not that Members need reminding—play in Cleethorpes, which is in the headlines yet again. We have even more culture than Southend. We are the premier resort of the east coast. Cleethorpes pier has just been named as pier of the year. It is worth putting on record our congratulations to Bryan Huxford and his team at the pier, who have just carried out a multimillion-pound restoration, which has been a great addition to the resort. It secured some resources from the regional growth fund, so we have all made a contribution to the renewal of Cleethorpes pier. We can compare the recent multimillion-pound investment with the £8,000 that it cost to construct the pier, which opened in 1873.

The main part of my contribution is, yet again, about transport connections in northern Lincolnshire, highlighting a recent report produced jointly by the Department for Transport and Transport for the North. It is entitled “The Northern Powerhouse: One Agenda, One Economy, One North”. The problem is that it does not seem to refer to northern Lincolnshire.

I have been a great supporter of the northern powerhouse initiative. Ministers have repeatedly emphasised that northern Lincolnshire and the Humber estuary are very much a part of that. In particular, the Humber is referred to as the energy estuary and it is important to the economy. As we are reminded time and again, in order to maximise local economies, good transport connections are needed.

Devolution is fine, and I have been a great advocate of it—particularly the Greater Lincolnshire deal that has been secured recently—but the problem is that, although the Government have many ideals, they are reliant, as those ideals cascade through the system, on organisations such as Transport for the North, local authorities and health trusts, which may have slightly different priorities.

The foreword to the report, which is jointly signed by the Secretary of State for Transport and Richard Leese, the chairman of the Transport for the North partnership, states:

“Creating the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ of economic growth, driven by a flourishing private sector and supported by innovative local government requires us to harness and unify the people power of our city regions and the wider North…The North has many centres of excellence increasingly recognised on the global stage”.

The report goes on to list those, beginning with Liverpool and ending with the Tees Valley, but there is no mention of Lincolnshire.

When Sir David Higgins took up his post as chairman of HS2, he said that

“there is huge untapped potential for much more trade and commerce across the Pennines”.

We hear repeatedly about trans-Pennine connections that emphasise the northern trans-Pennine route, but my constituency, in northern Lincolnshire, depends on the southern trans-Pennine route. We are served—on the whole, reasonably well—by TransPennine Express, although the word “express” is used loosely, I think, since it takes three and a half hours to get from Cleethorpes to Manchester. Covering the 50 miles from Cleethorpes to Doncaster—as the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and I have to every week to get our connection to King’s Cross—takes one and a quarter hours, which, in 2016, is quite a long time.

The report says that transforming city-to-city rail connectivity east to west, as well as north to south, is one of the main aims of Government policy and of Transport for the North. However, to maximise that connectivity, we need much better rail connections. I have campaigned repeatedly for a direct service between Grimsby, Cleethorpes and London King’s Cross. An application to run such a service has been with the rail regulator for two years now, but—I talked of bureaucracy earlier—does it really take two years to assess whether it is viable? I realise that the problem facing the rail regulator is that open-access operators such as Alliance Rail, which made the application, have to show that they are creating new business, rather than taking business away from the main franchise holders, but I urge the rail regulator to come to a speedy conclusion. Even if it is negative, we can then move on and renew the campaign through a different route.

Road connections fare slightly better in the report, which acknowledges the importance of access to our ports. The port of Immingham is, measured by tonnage, the largest in the country, and 25% of rail freight starts or ends there. Yet, when it comes to road connections, we have struggled, in as much as the M180 ends about 20 or 25 miles from the port. We urgently need an upgrade of the A180 to motorway standards. We need to improve the road surface, which causes no end of problems. The A180 has one of those awful concrete surfaces, and it is possible to sit in the front rooms of people in villages two miles away and hear the constant rumble of vehicles on the road. I have been campaigning on that issue—indeed, my predecessor and her predecessor campaigned on it—and it really does need urgent attention.

The report refers, quite reasonably, to the upgrade of the A160, which provides new access to the port of Immingham, but I have to tell the House that that upgrade is almost complete—it will be completed by August or September—so this is hardly a vision for the future.

The report also states:

“Many rail journeys in the North—particularly east-west—are too slow and take far longer than journeys of equivalent distance elsewhere in the country”.

As I said earlier, a three-hour journey from Cleethorpes to Manchester cannot exactly be described as a trans-Pennine express.

May I urge my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House to pass on my comments to the appropriate Ministers? I look forward to a detailed response from them in due course.