Martin Vickers
Main Page: Martin Vickers (Conservative - Brigg and Immingham)Department Debates - View all Martin Vickers's debates with the Department for Transport
(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady will be pleased to hear that, if anything, we are ahead of schedule on the bus target, with 900 already on their way—in production—so I hope that we can go even further.[Official Report, 20 July 2021, Vol. 699, c. 5MC.] Our £3 billion bus strategy is by far and away the largest for generations, and I look forward to it helping her constituents. I will certainly mention her point about junction 33 of the A6 to the Roads Minister and ask her to come back to the hon. Lady.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con) [V]
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. Decarbonising our roads will be greatly assisted if we transfer more freight to rail. What progress is being made on delivering an east-west rail freight corridor from the Humber ports across to Liverpool and the west coast ports? As well as being a boost to the economy of my constituency, that would result in a massive reduction in HGV movements on the M62, resulting in less congestion and the accompanying pollution.
Grant Shapps
I am very excited about the opportunities to take traffic from ports and put it on to rail. It is known as intermodal, because it requires the delivery of gauge capacity enhancements in order to make that flow. We are spending a lot of time on getting containers, biomass and the like to operate on the trans-Pennine routes, principally between the west and east coast ports of Liverpool, Immingham and Hull, and Tees inland terminal. We are working very hard on exactly my hon. Friend’s suggestion, as we recognise that it can take a lot of traffic off the roads.