Midland Main Line (Electrification)

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me to speak, Sir Roger. I join other hon. Members who have called strongly for the electrification of the midland main line to be unpaused as soon as possible, so that we can have it as close as possible to the original 2020 deadline. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Harry Harpham) on securing this important debate.

Let me say at the start that I understand why the Government felt a need to pause a scheme when they thought costs were spiralling out of control. Those of us who care about the responsible use of public money accept that if things are going wrong and costs are escalating, we have to get them under control and try to get the best value from the amount of money we can spend on such improvements. I therefore do not object to a brief pause to reset Network Rail’s capacity to understand what it is doing, but I do object if that brief pause becomes indefinite and starts to look like a cancellation to those of us who want the line electrified, with electric trains running on it.

As all the other speakers have said, there is a strong business case for electrifying the line, which has suffered from under-investment probably for the whole length of its history. The two competing lines—one to the east and one to the west—have dramatically faster journey times. If I travelled from Tamworth rather than Derby, I could get to London in one hour, rather than an hour and a half. If I choose to go from Newark or Grantham, rather than Nottingham, I can get a journey time of about one hour, rather than one hour and 40 minutes. Those who live east of Nottingham or west of Derby do not use the midline main line, because of the historic under-investment and much slower journey times. There is a clear need for investment in the line to get a service that is comparable to those around it and to give the important cities of Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby and Leicester the sort of rail service they need to attract the economic investment that the area so desperately wants and needs.

As other Members have said, that is a key point for the future of the line. We need to know by 2019 what rolling stock we are buying, because if we end up investing in the long term in diesel rolling stock, it will be much harder to make the case later for electrifying the line. The Government would then be faced with the question of whether to invest in dual-power trains to allow for possible future electrification. That would not be a sensible use of money.

My vision is for brand-new electric trains, built by Bombardier in Derby, operating on this line—I am not sure about those Hitachi things that the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) mentioned—but if we do not get the decision right now, we could find, when the next franchise is let in 2018-19, that this will have been a long-term decision not to electrify the line, and that would be a very bad decision. If we want the east midlands to be the powerhouse of growth, I want the engine room to be electric, not diesel.

I have another little request. The original plan to electrify the line missed out a couple of stations on a bit of the line through Langley Mill and Alfreton, which is on the Nottingham to Sheffield stretch. It seemed bizarre to electrify most of the line and then miss out a bit. I am not sure what that would do for services from Sheffield to Nottingham. I cannot see that it would do much for the direct trains to London from Langley Mill and Nottingham, which are so valued by my constituents. I therefore say this to my hon. Friend the Minister: as we are looking to unpause this, let us actually do the whole line, not most of the line, and get that little branch line added into the programme.

It is already proving quite hard to sell HS2 to my constituents as a great idea because of the pretty low return on the investment—it is certainly much lower than for electrification of the midland main line. If we have to go to people and say, “Look, a return of £4 for every pound that’s spent isn’t enough. We can’t justify spending this money electrifying this line where you could have nice new clean and faster electric trains and faster journey times somewhere in the early 2020s”—I hope—they will probably not understand why we can spend a hell of a lot more money trying to get a line that would be a bit quicker sometime in the 2030s.

We must be consistent in how we evaluate investment in rail infrastructure. If we cannot afford this project—if we cannot justify it—then those of us who do support HS2 will have a much harder job of trying to understand and explain why we are still doing that. I think all our constituents up this line would say, “We would rather have this scheme and these improvements sooner than wait and hope that we might get an HS2 in 15 or 20 years’ time.” The Minister should be aware that we have to be consistent and clear in giving explanations, especially if rail investment is going through the east midlands up to Sheffield. We cannot have a nice grand project that we struggle to sell while we are not investing in the short-term stuff that we really need.

[Mr Betts]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very important point, and I support HS2 strongly as well. The Government have said repeatedly to people, “Don’t worry about HS2. It will not affect the investment in the rest of the railway.” Are people not likely to conclude that if electrification does not go ahead on the midland main line, that promise of no impact from HS2 is not being kept?

[Nigel Mills]

I think that would be the conclusion. People would see money being spent on rail improvements and think that it was all being sucked into HS2 and we were missing out on a much quicker and much more effective scheme, with a much higher rate of return. They would think that that was a somewhat strange decision, at a time when the Government are trying to get more value for money from public spending.

This is a very important scheme. It has a very strong business case. I think that it ought to go ahead. Let us get the pause done, get this re-energised, get a new timetable, which I hope would show completion in the early 2020s, and get the other improvements done. Let us get moving; let us get Network Rail under control, but this scheme should not be cancelled.