Old Oak Common Station

Olly Glover Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) for securing this important debate. I agree with colleagues that it is important that we look predominantly to the future, but I want to reflect a little on how we have got here and on how Old Oak Common station even came to be.

As I understand it, Old Oak Common was intended as a substitute for a direct link from HS2 to Heathrow airport, which remains one of Europe’s busiest. What a bizarre solution, given that Paris Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt, Copenhagen and Amsterdam Schiphol airports are all served by direct connections to their high-speed or inter-city network.

The decision to stop all trains at Old Oak Common is also bizarre, but it will be necessary if there are only to be two fast-line platforms with no relief line. I understand from a timetabling perspective why that is necessary, but we continue to lack a direct western link to Heathrow airport that enables inter-city trains from the south-west and the west to connect to Heathrow directly. That is a scheme that has been on and off more times than I can count.

Having said all that, as is so often the case with British infrastructure schemes, we are where we are. There is no point in crying over spilt milk, or in this case spilt concrete. What else can be done to ease the disruption impact? Colleagues have asked whether there may be an opportunity to improve the construction schedule to reduce the impact. I also call on the Minister to ensure that the train operators properly examine options for more or longer trains on alternative routes. For example, between Reading and London Waterloo four trains an hour could easily be accommodated in the timetable. There could also be longer and more frequent trains between Oxford and London Marylebone.

Given that we are going to have this station, how can we make the most of it? I would like to add to the wish list of my colleagues for compensatory improvements, which, it must be said, probably exceeds in length the Christmas lists of all of the offspring of Members of this House. I would like to see electrification completed to Bristol and between Didcot and Oxford. Bi-mode trains are not very reliable in comparison with all-electric trains. We are constantly afflicted by five-car trains—even on long-distance routes, for example between London and Swansea—stopping at Didcot Parkway in my Oxfordshire constituency. As colleagues have eloquently outlined, we need Sunday to be part of the working week. Sundays can no longer be treated as some sort of bizarre and exceptional time for people to travel.

My colleagues in the south-west have articulately made the case for investment in the resilience of the Dawlish sea wall to improve the reliability of the only rail connection south-west of Exeter. In my constituency, I am campaigning hard for a new railway station at Grove and Wantage, serving the growing population in that area.

My colleagues are quite right to say that we should make the most of Old Oak Common’s location to improve connectivity to north and south London on the west London and north London lines. We must also make the most of its potential to create a much easier connection between GWR trains and Elizabeth line trains, which would ease passenger congestion at London Paddington. On the face of it, the new station will provide limited benefit to users of GWR in Oxfordshire and elsewhere, but I hope that the Minister will use every opportunity to make the most of it.

[Several hon. Members rose—]