Great Western Railway Routes

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the routes of the Great Western railway are not just a transport system, but the heart of the regions they serve; and calls on the Government to ensure that plans for further electrification and improved resilience of the Great Western railway routes are progressed urgently.

I thank hon. Members from both sides of the House who supported the application for this debate at the Backbench Business Committee. I also thank my colleagues on the Committee for agreeing to allocate the debate to this slot in the Chamber, rather than Westminster Hall, where it would have ended up. We have three hours for this debate, and it is encouraging that we are starting almost bang on time, given that we are discussing trains and railways.

It must be said that this is an apt day for such a debate, as Storm Imogen has hit Devon and Cornwall. One hon. Member, who I hope will join us later, texted me earlier to say he was hoping to get to Westminster but that there was a tree on the line at Bodmin, which sums up the issue of resilience.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend aware that three trees have come down on the line?

[Kevin Foster]

I thank my hon. Friend for sharing with the House his superb knowledge of the vegetation on the Great Western main line in Devon and Cornwall. His point absolutely rams home the message that a tree falling over, a cow breaking out of a field, or a small amount of earth moving at a critical point can close huge parts of the network. That is why it is so important to hold this debate about resilience. In addition, the cross-country services have been cancelled at Dawlish again today. I must say that that is not due to the line but to a fault with the trains, but that again brings home to us the vulnerability of some key routes and networks on which many people depend.

I hope that this debate will not be about being negative and having a moan. We could all spend the next few hours whingeing and sharing our stories about various poor train journeys. One that sticks in my mind was when I and my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) got on a train that had what was charmingly described as a “toilet spill”, which was particularly interesting. Being negative will not achieve anything: it may make us feel a bit better to get a dreadful journey off our chests, but it will not actually make a difference.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bradshaw]

I entirely agree. The Labour Government set up an independent infrastructure body—I cannot remember its name—and the hon. Gentleman’s Government have gone on to do something similar. We need to be much more radical in how we manage big infrastructure improvements. Network Rail is currently pleading, in today’s Financial Times, with the Government not to privatise it, but instead to hand over such decisions to an independent rail commission. That is a very sensible and sound idea, and I hope the Government will listen to it. The fragmentation and privatisation of Network Rail would be an absolute disaster. It is worth reading the piece in today’s Financial Times.

[Oliver Colvile]

If we want business to use railways, we also need to ensure a good level of broadband so that people can actually work on them.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I forgot to mention that broadband is terrible in standard class. It never works. I just use 3G, or 4G, if I have it, on the train. I raised this issue with First Great Western a number of times, but it still has not been resolved. I am told that it is fine in first class, but who travels first class? MPs certainly do not; not in my experience, anyway. I never have and since the new expenses system came in we are quite rightly not allowed to.

As hon. Members will remember, two years ago last week we had the catastrophic severing of the line at Dawlish. As the hon. Member for Torbay said, it had a huge impact on the region’s wider economy. Flooding then cut the line on the Somerset levels and this weekend there was flooding between Taunton and Castle Cary. My train was diverted from Exeter because of flooding. There are a lot of resilience problems throughout the network. As we all know, with the growing threat from climate change there will be increasing occurrences of extreme weather events. There has been meaningful and substantial investment in the railways, including in the south-west—although not as much as in other parts of the UK. Following the Hatfield disaster, hon. Members will remember that under the Labour Government there was a major programme of work to make signalling and track safer. That work is ongoing. Improvements at Reading have already made a significant positive difference to the reliability of the service. There used to be regular delays, in particular when coming into Reading on the return journey.

There have been improvements, but we in the far south-west, as opposed to the Bristol-south Wales corridor, where major electrification is planned, still feel the poor relation when it comes to investment. There were a lot of generous—I will use that term rather than grandiose, because we took them at their word—promises made by the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Transport Secretary after Dawlish and particularly in the run-up to the general election. I lost count of the number of times the Chancellor and the Prime Minister appeared in Devon and Cornwall wearing a hard hat and a fluorescent jacket and promising us more than £7 billion of rail and other infrastructure investment. They will be held to those promises. A whole swathe of Conservative MPs were elected in Devon and Cornwall on those promises. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] They are laughing, smiling and “hear-hearing” now, but if those promises are not delivered the smiles will be on the other side of their faces come the next general election. It is up to them to get their Government to deliver.

I feel sorry for my Conservative colleagues. We are friends—we have regional solidarity—and I feel sorry for them. In the past two weeks, we have had an absolute public relations fiasco over a tiny sum of money. The Peninsula Rail Task Force in the south-west is a group that got together after Dawlish. It is run by a Conservative councillor. All the councils have taken part and most of them are Conservative. It came up with a fantastic document, on which the hon. Member for Torbay based most of his speech, about what needs to happen in the south-west. Its very small initial ask is for £250,000 for the necessary feasibility studies into electrification and resilience, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. We were promised that this would happen. There was going to be a press release. It was going to be announced last week on the second anniversary of Dawlish. I hope the Minister will use the opportunity this evening, when she responds to the debate—it is not a very good time to put out such a fantastic news story that our media in the south-west would absolutely love—to come up with this small amount of money. It is £250,000 for two feasibility studies. Nothing has been said about when the work will happen.

--- Later in debate ---

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

Thank, you for calling me in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I will try very hard to do that. I hope that if I do make a mistake, you might forgive me. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) on securing this debate. Obviously, he has something more important than I have, because I have tried for five years to get a debate on the future of the railway down to the south-west and have always failed; he obviously has something more alluring and has therefore delivered. Also, let me say that I hope I will not get accused of being a fat controller at the end of my speech. [Hon. Members: “No!”]

Last week, we had the unwelcome second anniversary of the Dawlish line being swept into the sea, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) has pointed out. That was a huge wake-up call to the Government and to all of us in the south-west region. Interestingly, we have all worked together to make one common cause: to make sure that the Government understand the importance of this issue. If there is one thing we have been successful in doing, it is in ensuring that we have spoken with one voice, as have done this evening. We need only look at what happened today, when trains on the line out of Cornwall were once again delayed, because of the appalling weather and the three trees that fell on to the line at Bodmin, to see how fragile our railway line is. As chair of the all-party group on south west rail, I am fighting, alongside my fellow Devon and Cornwall MPs, for better train and other transport links to the region. I have campaigned for that over the past 15 years, initially as a Conservative candidate and more recently as the Member of Parliament for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport.

[Neil Parish]

This is very much about the resilience of infrastructure into the west country, because we have not only the Great Western line but the Waterloo to Exeter line, where we could make big improvements by, for example, using loops around Honiton. We could also open Seaton Junction and bring back the trams to meet the service. This is also about carrying on from Exeter down into Cornwall with a second line, because although it is absolutely right to keep the Totnes and Newton Abbot line, we need that second line so that we have resilience. We seem to be having more and more bad weather, so the first line will get blocked and we have to have a second route into Cornwall.

[Oliver Colvile]

My hon. Friend is 100% right about the need to have that second line. My personal preference is for it to go through Haldon Hill, as that would be ideal, but I understand that it may be too expensive. We therefore need to make sure that we have one that has the potential to go through Okehampton and Tavistock, purely because we have to make sure there is increased capacity and we can put freight on the line, too.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot said, two years ago the line at Dawlish was washed away, and for the following six weeks there were no trains west of Dawlish to the biggest conurbation west of Bristol—Plymouth. Having lost our airport and our trains, the only way anyone from Plymouth could get to London and the midlands was by using the partially dualled A303 and the M4 and M5—we are talking about the only single dual carriageway at the moment. I very much welcome the Government’s commitment to dualling the whole of the A303. I, like my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), would like to see it go through the Blackdown hills as well, but I may be being too greedy in that.

In the aftermath of the Dawlish disaster, the Prime Minister visited the Laira depot in my constituency, and I was very reassured to hear today, when I met people from Great Western Railway, that the company is going to be seeking to make full use of Laira and it is not going to be closing. The Prime Minister’s persistence ensured that the orange army worked tirelessly to fix the line before Easter 2014, which of course was the start of the tourist season. This time last year, the Prime Minister met my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter), the chairman of the local enterprise partnership and the leader of Plymouth City Council, and he warmly supported the setting up of the Peninsula Rail Task Force to undertake research into what needs to happen to deliver a resilient railway line. Although I understand that much progress has been made, I was slightly dismayed to learn two weeks ago that Network Rail did not have the money to deliver on the research into journey times and electrification. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to help me on that this evening and make sure that that work happens.

Last Monday, nearly all my fellow Devon and Cornwall MPs met the Chancellor and set out our concerns. We were all elected on a promise to try to make sure that we could deliver a decent railway line to and from the west country, and to improve other transport links. I am very grateful that he met us at such short notice and that he understands what our peninsula’s needs are. On Tuesday, we met the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry)—we hope she is soon to be our right hon. Friend—who is both responsible for rail and a south-west MP. She told us she would do everything she could to find the £300,000 for this work, and I am delighted that it seems she is going to be able to find that for us.

Let me remind the Minister what we in Plymouth and the far west want. She may be bored with hearing this, but I have been saying it for the past five and a half years and I am going to say it one more time. We want more three-hour train journeys from London to Plymouth and vice versa; and we want trains getting into Plymouth from London before 9 am, so that business people can do a full day’s work in Plymouth. We are the largest urban conurbation west of Bristol—bigger even than that in Wales—and it is important that we be an economic motor to deliver the growth that my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot talked about.

Never again must Plymouth and the far west be cut off from the rest of the UK. I was delighted when the Transport Secretary came to Plymouth before the general election and announced we would get the new high-speed Hitachi AT300 trains in 2018. It was very positive news. I am concerned, though, that it could be subject to further delays, given that the electrification to Newbury is delayed and over-budget. If I have got that wrong, perhaps the Minister will correct me.

We need more three-hour train journeys between Plymouth and London and more trains arriving before 9 am; we need to straighten the tracks and improve the signalling between Totnes and Cornwall; and we need an additional line to the one at Dawlish so that never again can the far west be cut off. Plymouth can only play a significant part in growing our economy if we have a decent transport system—and skills base. I am acutely aware, as is my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), of the low-skills and low-wage base in our city.

In 2020, an important event will take place in Plymouth, when we commemorate the Mayflower’s leaving the city in 1620 to found the American colonies. To make that a success, people need to be able to get to Plymouth to see where that great ship sailed from.

Just in case the Opposition think they have got off lightly—as I slightly hold the Minister’s feet to the fire—I remind Labour that it does not have a particularly good record on delivering in the peninsula. It announced in its manifesto that it would cancel the dualling of the A358, which would move the bottleneck from Stonehenge down to South Chard. I am delighted that we are continuing with the dualling.

Without the south-west, the Government would not have an overall majority. We have done our bit to ensure a Conservative Government, whom I am delighted to support, so will they please help us deliver for them?