Oral Answers to Questions

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ms Ghani]

I can tell the House, on local election day, that we have put in place legislation under the Bus Services Act 2017 to allow local authorities to manage those partnerships with their bus companies to ensure that they deliver good value and good services locally. All local authorities need to do is to work on business plans and timetabling and they can bring those partnerships forward. They have not done that yet.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

10. What discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on improving rail punctuality.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Andrew Jones)]

The Government take performance seriously and understand it is crucial to passengers and freight users, which is why we agreed a Network Rail settlement for England and Wales of £47.9 billion for control period 6 specifically aimed at maintaining and renewing the railway to improve reliability and punctuality for all rail users. The budget in Scotland is £4.85 billion, and I would encourage the hon. Gentleman to make similar representations to the Scottish Government, who have devolved control of railway infrastructure funding in Scotland.

[Patrick Grady]

I am sure the Minister and the whole House will want to welcome Monday’s launch of the new sleeper stock on the Caledonian Sleeper service. I recommend the service to you, Mr Speaker, should you ever want to come and visit us up in Glasgow.

Of course, the first services were slightly hampered by delays and a fall in punctuality as a result of signal failures and problems with Network Rail. Given the success, the ambition and the vision that the Scottish Government have shown with this new sleeper service, should they not now also have the power devolved to control the whole of Network Rail so that we can deal with some of these punctuality issues?

[Andrew Jones]

The whole of Network Rail would include England and Wales, which might be a stretch for the Scottish Government. I obviously also welcome the arrival of the Caledonian Sleeper. I have not seen the service yet, but I understand it is fantastic and I look forward to seeing it, and potentially even using it.

On how this is structured, the Scottish Government, as they should, have control of the spending north of the border in Scotland. I am keen to see devolution across our rail network. Local solutions to local problems is a merit that we should be considering.

I just point out that we have had a good run on punctuality over the past few months in the UK. Performance obviously needs to be constantly improved but, when I checked this morning, 95% of trains were on time, including 94% of trains in Scotland. That is a strong performance from ScotRail and a strong performance across our whole network.