Portsmouth-London Railway Line

Debate between Mike Hancock and Theresa Villiers

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mrs Theresa Villiers)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) on securing this debate. She made her case with great clarity and determination—she is a steadfast defender of her constituents’ interests. The first question that I should like to answer concerns the meeting she requested: I would be happy to meet her to discuss this further.

I fully appreciate how important rail services are for the residents of Portsmouth North—my hon. Friend’s constituents—and I am very much aware of the concerns that have been raised about the provision of class 450 rolling stock on the London-Portsmouth main line, which is an essential artery connecting communities across Hampshire, Surrey and south-west London. The provision of reliable rail services on the line is enormously important for economic activity and growth along the route. Nearly 7 million passenger journeys were made to and from Portsmouth stations in 2009-10.

To answer the questions asked by my hon. Friend, some explanation is required of the contractual history of the SWT franchise. The current Stagecoach South Western Trains franchise was competitively tendered by the previous Government in 2006, with the contract commencing in February 2007. All bidders were required to give a commitment to lease both the class 450 and the class 444 rolling stock for the life of the franchise term, because the Strategic Rail Authority—a body now disbanded but which at the time handled franchise decisions for the Government of the day—gave a statutory undertaking to the rolling stock company that owned the trains. That arrangement, known as a section 54 undertaking, was part of the funding package agreed to replace the older slam-door stock, which had operated in the south-west since the ’60s.

New-build class 444s and 450 electric multiple units were phased in between 2001 and 2007. If the previous Government had not required the operator to lease the trains, the taxpayer might have been left to foot the whole bill. Although the section 54 undertaking requires SWT to lease the trains, the operator takes the decisions on where to deploy the rolling stock across the different parts of the franchise network to address capacity problems as efficiently as possible.

As we have heard from my hon. Friend, SWT deploys a mixture of class 444s and 450s on services between Portsmouth and London. A 10-car maximum formation class 444 provides 598 seats, whereas a 12-car maximum formation class 450 provides 738 seats. My hon. Friend is rightly and understandably focused on the concerns of her constituents, but the train operator needs to balance the competing interests of different communities that use the services provided by the franchise.

[Mr Mike Hancock]

Is the Minister in a position to ask her Department to examine the figures that justified the decision by South West Trains to move the rolling stock away from Portsmouth to elsewhere? Is she able to argue that those figures are somewhat arbitrary to say the least and totally misleading in most cases?