Croydon Area Remodelling Scheme

Debate between Natasha Irons and Rupa Huq

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Order. I will call Natasha Irons to move the motion and then I will call the Minister to respond. Other Members can make a speech with prior permission from the mover of the motion, which I think on this occasion has already been secured. As this is one of those 30-minute wonders, there is no time for a winding-up speech at the end.

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for the Croydon Area Remodelling Scheme.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq.

As the Minister will know, this is the second time that I have secured a debate on this topic; it is great to be reunited with him today. It is really important to return to the subject, because the Croydon area modelling scheme is not just about driving billions in economic growth across the east and south-east, or capitalising on key infrastructure projects such as the expansion of Gatwick and Luton airports, or the opening of the Universal Studios theme park, but about something far greater. It is about getting a lift at Norwood Junction station.

The Croydon area modelling scheme, or CARS, is a Network Rail plan to add capacity and resilience to the most complex part of Britain’s rail network, and improve services not just on the Brighton main line but on the wider Thameslink growth corridor, which runs from Peterborough to Brighton.

The lack of capacity at East Croydon station and the complex series of junctions north of Croydon—the Selhurst triangle—means that trains across the Brighton main line and the wider Thameslink corridor, including those that run between Gatwick and Luton airports, have been vulnerable to delays and cancellations for many years. Thameslink and the Brighton main line are integral to economic growth in the east and south-east, and the demand for services will only increase.

Around 18% of national passenger journeys take place on the Govia Thameslink Railway network, and south of London it is already the most congested part of the rail network in the country. The Brighton main line is 5% of the southern region network, but delivers about 25% of its revenue, which helps to sustain and subsidise the wider rail system. About 1.7 million people live in areas served by the Brighton main line outside of London and more than 30,000 passengers a day already depend on this corridor.

Across the local authorities served by the Brighton main line, around 34,000 homes are required to be delivered every year, and on the Thameslink line Luton airport wants to nearly double passenger numbers to 32 million by 2043, while Gatwick is seeking to grow from around 40 million passengers today to as many as 80 million in the late 2030s. The new Universal Studios theme park in Bedfordshire, which is due to open in 2031, is expected to attract 8.5 million visitors a year and support 28,000 jobs.

That is a genuine growth and opportunity corridor, and it all flows through the bottleneck at East Croydon. East Croydon station already handles more trains in a day than all the inter-city operators from Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross. It is a critical pinch point, where limited platforms, constrained tracks and complex junctions restrict the number of trains that can flow through it.

It is because Thameslink is such an interconnected system that delays here do not stay here. A problem at the Croydon bottleneck quickly spreads across the Brighton main line, through the Thameslink core and across the wider network. Around 67% of trains passing through East Croydon are late or cancelled. For the people who rely on that vital route every day, that means missed connections, unreliable journeys and longer commutes.

The issue is made even more pressing because every rail service between London and Gatwick passes through East Croydon. Gatwick’s northern runway expansion is a £2.2 billion project that is expected to support around 14,000 jobs and deliver an estimated boost of £1 billion a year to the economy. However, that could all be held back by poor rail infrastructure.

Gatwick plans include a commitment to have 54% of journeys to the airport made by public transport, so rail is not an optional extra; it is a fundamental element of Gatwick’s success. Without remodelling at East Croydon and in the wider Selhurst triangle, the Brighton main line is expected to reach 100% capacity by 2030. Addressing the bottleneck could unlock around £5.1 billion in economic value over the next 20 years, and provide the resilience and growth that this corridor needs to succeed.

Fly-tipping

Debate between Natasha Irons and Rupa Huq

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Dr Huq]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point, and the idea of the community skip, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall raised in her speech, sounds like a good one. Why not take the solution to the people, rather than expect it from them? We know that all our local authorities are cash-strapped, so I wonder whether the Minister might propose a trial and give that idea a whirl everywhere, because it is free. I now have two boroughs in my constituency—Hammersmith and Ealing—and bulky items collection is at a charge. When I suggested the community skip, I was told, “But it would fill up with builder’s waste.” Great! Surely that is better than having it on every street corner. When I put to an officer the idea of CCTV, which I had received from people who email in with solutions, he answered:

“In order to carry out the sort of enforcement your constituent is asking for with cameras, we would need an infrastructure and network the likes of which one finds in novels by George Orwell.”

There is literally a “computer says no” attitude that comes back. Let us be a bit more creative.

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

Local councils battling this torrent of fly-tipping tend to deploy CCTV, but it then takes people to watch the CCTV to find the culprits. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should give councils the funding to staff that CCTV surveillance but also make use of the footage, such as by creating an online wall of shame, as we did in my previous council? That might put that footage to good use.

[Dr Huq]

It sounds like a panacea, but we do not know who these people are, so there are a lot of issues. But yes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall pointed out, having more funding from central Government would be great after 14 years of cash-strapped councils. If we get rid of the booking system, the possibility of spontaneously mowing the lawn and taking the waste down to wherever would also be opened up.

I think we are running out of time and there are lots of Members present, but I want to praise LAGER Can and Kathy Swift on tirelessly doing community clean-ups. It terms of the necessity of having such groups, it is a bit like food banks: the fact that we have more food banks than branches of McDonald’s in this country is really a sign of state failure. It should not be Kathy who is cleaning up every unofficial dump in a borough of 360,000 people.

This has been a great debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall. Let us install some community pride in areas, because well-maintained areas are less likely to become hotspots for dumping. I hope our suggestions do not fall on deaf ears. In a similar way to the Jubilee 2000 debt campaigners, let us make fly-tipping history.