Rail Investment

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I am looking at how the competition and the bids will work, and I believe we can get a lot of learnings from how individual communities and local authorities respond. We can see how the local authority major roads programme worked—it was an effective process in getting local authorities to work with local enterprise partnerships and say what their road network needed. I am interested to see how this pot of money can do the same thing for new stations in communities such as my hon. Friend’s. Once we have got those learnings, there is no reason why we cannot start to pull forward that investment.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, but may I ask her for further clarification of her earlier answers about track improvements? In particular, will the programme include track improvements at all three bottlenecks on the midland main line—Derby, Leicester and Market Harborough —without which we will not get the targeted improvements in journey times?

[Justine Greening]

I will need to confirm that specific point, but I am certainly aware that track improvements will happen at Leicester. I believe that they will also happen at Derby, but I will need to find out about Market Harborough and write to the hon. Gentleman.