Rail Ticket Offices

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Huw Merriman]

If we like seeing station staff when we access our journey and like the fact that we will be seeing more of them because they will be freed up, then I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. Rather than gutting the railways, this Government, and indeed the taxpayer, have provided £41 billion of support since the pandemic. That does not sound like gutting the railways to me. I truly believe that we will end up with a better station experience, one that better reflects modern usage, which is why we are happy to support the train operators with these proposals. As I say, 10% of transactions are purchased across the ticket office counter—10 years ago, it was one in three. The railway is adapting to the manner in which consumers have changed their habits.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

Disabled, elderly and other vulnerable passengers have been troubled by today’s announcements, but does the Minister share my weary exasperation at the fact that people do not understand that the best way to help disabled and elderly passengers is for staff to come out from behind their screens to assist them in using a ticket machine, to help them on and off trains, and to help them to move around the station? Does he agree that for more than a decade Ministers have sought to improve services for passengers on the stations but have been blocked at every turn? Does he not see an opportunity to improve accessibility on our rail network here? It should be welcomed, not rejected.

[Huw Merriman]

My hon. Friend speaks with experience, having done this role himself, and he is absolutely right in what he says. I find it patronising to be told constantly that those who have disabilities or those who are elderly cannot access things online and cannot do this. That is not the case at all. At the moment, we do not have enough products online, and, as part of this process, I have been pushing to ensure that we have more online. It will mean that people do not have to go to the station beforehand to pick up a travelcard because they need a photo that they have to take. The idea is that this move should make things better for those who have accessibility and mobility challenges, not just in putting more tickets online and into a place where they can buy them from the comfort of their own home and phone, but in making sure they have more help at the station. So I thank him for the points he makes; he speaks with expertise.

Industrial Action on the Railway

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I wish the hon. Lady’s relation well in his job, and I hope he can get back to it very soon. I have just explained that this Government are putting £96 billion into northern powerhouse rail, £35 billion into upgrades and more money into the restoring your railway fund. There has never been a more pro-rail Government, as far as I can see, in history. However, it is also the case that, during the pandemic, we pumped in £16 billion, equivalent to £600 per household in this country or £160,000 per railway worker, to keep them in their jobs. We love the railways, and I like the people who work on them as well—I just want them to work, that is all.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I am sure the Secretary of State will join me in thanking the wider members of the railway economy who will have to come together to sustain a skeleton services over the coming weeks. Will he draw a conclusion, though, from the 2016 Southern and Thameslink strike, where a lack of familiarity with the Passenger Assist service for disabled passengers meant that many could not complete their journeys and in the worst-case scenario were left abandoned on deserted station platforms after the last service of the day? When he discusses contingency planning with the many train operators, will he bear that very salient point in mind, because it was forgotten last time and had to be relearned yet again?

[Grant Shapps]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who is a distinguished former Rail Minister and knows a great deal about the service. He is absolutely right about Passenger Assist. We are expanding that service by, for example, speeding up response times and introducing things like apps and standards to make sure that people can use our trains. We will shortly complete the work that we have promised on putting in tactile pavements around station platforms to remove another potential risk of using our railways. I am fully on board with everything that he said—we just need our railways running, though.

Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Morton]

We had an amazing 42 bids for the Great British Railways headquarters and all have been carefully considered. The shortlist will be out shortly and I wish them all success.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

We have heard a lot today about the restoring your railway scheme, and I remind the House that it was launched by the Prime Minister at the Fleetwood to Poulton line. Can the Minister say where the scheme is at, what the next stage is and when that decision will be taken?

[Wendy Morton]

I know that my hon. Friend is a passionate advocate for all things Blackpool North and Cleveleys. The next round of submissions for our restoring your railway programme—I was at the Dartmoor line just last week—is currently being considered, and we will be updating and announcing in due course.

Blackpool Airport and Levelling Up

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Scott Benton (Blackpool South) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Blackpool airport and the role of commercial passenger flights in levelling up.

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. The recent levelling-up White Paper rightly identified the areas that need to be addressed if we are to transform the UK and bring prosperity to left-behind regions. The UK Government have set themselves 12 national missions that they must achieve if this country is to level up. There are two areas, in particular, that I believe are pertinent to regional airports, including Blackpool, and I will demonstrate how they can play an important role in supporting the Government’s broader aims.

The Government’s first emphasis is on the restoration of pride of place. Regional airports are often important symbols of pride for local residents, offering a unique link to a town’s history and representing modernity and wealth. For example, on the grounds that are now Blackpool airport, Squires Gate hosted the UK’s first official aviation meeting in 1909, when 200,000 people gathered to watch Henri Farman set the first official British flight record of 47 miles. That would be the start of Blackpool’s long and proud aviation history, with a fully fledged aerodrome opened in 1931, offering passenger flights to the Isle of Man.

During the second world war, RAF Squires Gate was established as a training wing for the No. 3 School of General Reconnaissance, and over 3,000 Wellington bombers were constructed next to the airport, with the factory buildings still in existence. This history is celebrated in Blackpool and continues today, with a Spitfire visitor centre, our brilliant annual air show, and the development of military aircraft at nearby BAE Systems in Walton. I know how important the airport is to my constituents and those of my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). In 2019, I started a petition urging the local council to restore commercial passenger flights, and I was delighted by the brilliant response it received, with over 8,000 local people signing it.

The second area I want to highlight in the case for levelling up is improving connectivity and infrastructure. The levelling-up White Paper makes clear the importance of connectivity and better transport links across the regions of the UK. Regional airports offer quick and easy connections, often at a fraction of the time and cost of rail travel.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on raising the important issue of Blackpool airport—a real jewel in the Fylde crown. Does he agree that one challenge the airport faces is very high fixed costs for air traffic control, fire brigades and security, which larger airports do not face? Does he also agree that the Government need to look again at repeating the airfield fund that a certain previous aviation Minister launched on his last day in the job? That would match funding for investment in meeting these fixed costs.

[Scott Benton]

I thank my hon. Friend and neighbour for his intervention. He has been a brilliant friend and advocate of Blackpool airport over many years, and during his work as aviation Minister. From speaking to him in the past, I know that a number of the things he was looking at while in post could support regional airports and help Blackpool to grow, benefiting the local economies of both our constituencies. I know he will be a brilliant advocate and supporter of this campaign going forward.

Regional airports offer quick and easy connections, often at a fraction of the time and cost of rail travel. They are also able to connect us to the furthest corners of our United Kingdom.

Rail Investment and Integrated Rail Plan

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow, on this side of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones). We both have the distinction of having had two stints as Ministers in charge of HS2 and major rail projects, and we both bear the scars on our backs. One of my first duties as a Minister was to cancel the electrification of the midland main line, so I am delighted to see that the integrated rail plan reverses that. Who knows, my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) might get a surprise in five or six years’ time. Who is to say?

[Lilian Greenwood]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Paul Maynard]

Only if I get another minute!

[Lilian Greenwood]

Does the hon. Gentleman not think that this decision to reverse the previous decision to cancel the electrification of the midland main line shows that the Government do not have a proper strategy for delivering net zero or for delivering rail investment? Is this not the most inefficient way to electrify the railway? Should they not have a proper rolling programme rather than this stop-go approach?

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Maynard]

I have to disagree with the distinguished former Chairman of the Select Committee. I am about to set out why I think there is perhaps an understandable flaw in the system of rail investment.

There is a political problem with rail investment when justifiable ambition on both sides of the House runs into the hard, cold reality of the public finances and the practical reality of enhancing rail networks in a sustainable and timely fashion. Since around 2008, we have seen plans for HS2 come along in differing fashions and HS3 being rebranded as Northern Powerhouse Rail to serve a shifting cast list of northern cities, although no one could quite agree on the full list. Then Midlands Connect came along because it did not want to miss out on the party that the northern powerhouse was having, and all the while in the background there was a threnody of upgrades for the east coast main line, the west coast main line and the trans-Pennine routes.

The Oakervee review progressed in the latter part of 2019. I was the HS2 Minister at the time, and it became increasingly clear to me that there was no proper understanding either here or more widely in the country of how any of it should best be sequenced, built and delivered in a timely fashion. It was deemed sensible and appropriate to ask the National Infrastructure Commission to look in detail at all the plans that were in circulation, which led to the rail needs assessment for the midlands and the north.

None of those criticising the Government today has engaged with the analysis from the National Infrastructure Commission on the feasibility, rather than the desirability, of delivering all these schemes. Indeed, it instructs the Government not to overpromise and underdeliver but to underpromise and overdeliver—it is easy to mix up the two.

As a Minister, nothing made my heart plummet more than when groups of people came to me from across the country with lengthy lists of projects they wanted. It is much better to set out the conditional outcomes we wish to achieve, in terms of both capacity and journey times, preferably set within the country’s economic objectives, and to let the transport planners come up with suggestions and answers. Instead, we get named projects that acquire almost mythical status, brands in their own right. This obscures whether those conditional outcomes can be achieved sooner by other, more affordable means, which is what we see with the integrated rail plan.

There is an underlying importance of continually asking the right questions, rather than identifying marquee projects that can be trumpeted politically but may supersede less eye-catching but more deliverable short-term projects that would have greater economic impact.

The integrated rail plan does not contain everything I might wish and, like my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, I would rather see phase 2b, the eastern leg, go ahead. I would rather see Bradford served much better than it will be, but that does not make the integrated rail plan an incoherent and unrealistic package. As schemes and projects mature, and as we know more about the conditions in which they will be built, a few may turn out to be easier and cheaper than predicted; others will be more complex than expected. The nature of building railways is that we cannot predict how easy it will be. Plans will change and details will alter, but at least we now have a baseline for what can be delivered within a specific budget and a specific timeline and, to some degree, against a range of desired outcomes.

The construction of new railways takes decades, not months. It is the work of many Governments, not just one. Transport planning is not inherently politically exciting, but I hope we can now move away from the feverish branding of specific projects and understand how we can create capacity, rolling stock, station enhancements and a much wider range of interventions to identify and remedy the inadequacies that we all know exist across our rail network.

The IRP, as my hon. Friend pointed out, is a £96 billion investment in our rail network, and it should be welcomed on both sides of the House. It will bring benefits far sooner to many of our communities across the north, so it should be welcomed and not turned into a political football.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Transport for the North

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Stephenson]

Dear oh dear. It is clear once again from what the shadow Secretary of State has said that Labour want to stick to the outdated plans that would give the east midlands and the north nothing for 10 years. Our plan delivers the same, similar or better journey times to almost everywhere, with eight of the top 10 busiest rail corridors in the north and midlands benefiting, and it starts delivering those improvements 10 years sooner.

Labour wants to focus solely on the biggest cities in the north, ignoring smaller towns and communities that link them. Under the original plans, which Labour is so determined to stick to, places on the existing line such as Doncaster, Huddersfield, Wakefield and Leicester would have seen little improvement to, or even a worsening of, their services. Our plan means that those great northern places will receive the infrastructure projects they need to link them up with local, regional and national services that run alongside them.

In Government, Labour failed to upgrade our railways. Our infrastructure tumbled down the world rankings. On top of that, the Leader of the Opposition cannot even decide whether he supports HS2. Labour does not have a plan to deliver for the midlands and the north; we do.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for all the efforts I know he has put in during his time in the role to getting the very best package possible. I stood at that same Dispatch Box, promising the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) on very many occasions that Northern Powerhouse Rail would go all the way from Liverpool to Hull. Can the Minister set out how the integrated rail plan delivers the commitment I made within the journey times that she anticipates—and how much sooner it will now be delivered, compared with if we had had to build a second, parallel rail line?

[Andrew Stephenson]

I thank my hon. Friend and predecessor for his comments. As he will know, the Prime Minister was very clear and we were clear in our manifesto that we would commit to Northern Powerhouse Rail, with an initial focus on the section between Manchester and Leeds. The integrated rail plan expands that initial focus to between Liverpool and York. That is the core investment. Alongside it, many of the upgrades already being delivered as part of the rail network enhancement pipeline will continue—for example, upgrades to the Hope Valley line, improving journey times to Sheffield—but we will continue to consider other investments in our rail infrastructure alongside that, to deliver the transformational benefits that we all want to see to communities across the north of England.

Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

It is very important that local authorities consider the impacts of e-scooters on people with disabilities and allow them to access the trials as well. E-scooters have the potential to offer additional means of transport, and we allowed seated e-scooters within the scope of the trials to enable people with certain mobility issues to use them. Our guidance told local authorities to encourage groups representing the interests of disabled people in their areas to advise people with accessibility issues on how they can best use the schemes.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

What steps the Government plan to take to increase the number of rail passengers.

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Grant Shapps)]

We are working with the rail industry to develop a number of recovery initiatives focused on restoring passenger confidence in rail travel.

[Paul Maynard [V]]

Given the importance of improving train passenger numbers once the nation has fully reopened, marketing rail travel will be crucial if only to keep the Treasury happy. What support will the Secretary of State give to community rail partnerships up and down the country, which do so much to enhance the quality of local services, not just in planting out flowerbeds and making stations more attractive but in attracting the leisure passengers that we will need to travel on all our railway lines in ever greater numbers?

[Grant Shapps]

As a distinguished former Rail Minister, my hon. Friend will be pleased to hear that community rail is very much at the heart of the recent White Paper on rail reform. He can expect to see our commitment to rail community partnerships grow in the years to come, which will, I hope, fulfil the ambitions he set out during his time as Rail Minister.

Britain’s Railways

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

The right hon. Gentleman will not have to wait very long for the answer, which I mentioned before, about the integrated rail plan, which includes things like what will happen on 2b east to Leeds and much more on the east coast main line, as we were just discussing.

I want to pick the right hon. Gentleman up on one point. I was in the middle of nodding and agreeing with him, certainly about the timetable debacle and what that demonstrated, but it is not the case that TfN’s core funding, as he describes it, has been cut. It has the money in the bank; it has not spent it. The actual spending is in the billions of pounds, while we seem to have got stuck talking about a £3.5 million administrative fund that is already in the bank.

My point is this: we are committed to levelling up the north—all constituencies, including the right hon. Gentleman’s own—and it will not be very long before we are saying more about that through the integrated rail plan. I entirely agree with him that it is many years overdue, but it is great to have a Government who are getting on with it now.

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con) [V]]

I very much welcome this greatly long-awaited plan. We have all waited for it with such great anticipation, and finally it is here. Can the Secretary of State set out how the plan will embed the role of the existing rail ombudsman as the champion of the passenger interest in the new system? Will he ensure that all ombudsman decisions are binding on rail companies that obtain concessions, and that their participation in the ombudsman system is a condition of obtaining such a concession?

[Grant Shapps]

I want to pay tribute to my hon. Friend because, as a former Rail Minister, there are few people in this House who will know more about this subject than him. During this White Paper’s time, he has made a significant input to what we have today, so it is in no small part his triumph as well. We have Great British Railways thanks to him.

To pick up my hon. Friend’s point about the rail ombudsman, there is clearly talk in the White Paper, which I think he will appreciate—and even recall—about strengthening the role of the passenger champion. I know he pushed for that in his time in the job, and I think he will be pleased with what he reads today.

Future of the Coach Industry

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris). I agree with everything he said—that avoids some degree of repetition.

I want to talk about the impact on the sector in my own constituency. Every July, coach drivers from across the country travel to Blackpool for the coach driver of the year awards, parking their luxury vehicles on the comedy carpet outside the tower. This year, they could not do that. Instead they came as part of a blockade along the M55 for the Honk for Hope campaign.

This is not about one single bus company in my constituency—although Members are right to support companies in their areas. It is about the existential threat to the private sector economy in my constituency. If people travel the Blackpool coast from south to north, they pass hotel after hotel after hotel, each of which depends on coach visitors coming to the resort. Those hotels have seen their business collapse: there were 80% fewer bookings even before the most recent lockdown, and they are now at crisis levels. I know of one coach company that brings 120,000 people a year to Blackpool, putting £30 million into the local economy. That is replicated up and down the coast. I have had hotel after hotel after hotel coming to me and saying, “We don’t know how we are possibly going to survive.”

This is not just a summer-only phenomenon; it is a year-round part of our local economy. We have the tinsel and turkey season right now, but it simply is not happening, because the hotels are closed. Even if the hotels were open, the coaches could not come, because they cannot make a profit, as a result of the social distancing rules that are part and parcel of what has to happen at the moment. We have just missed the illuminations season, which is three weeks solid—particularly in the half-term—of coaches coming in, driving through the lights and, yet again, putting money into not just local hotels but the small cafés, the restaurants, the entertainment venues and the piers. Every single part of our private sector economy in Blackpool is affected not just by the loss of visitors, but by the loss of the coach visitors, who underpin it and have done for decades. As the hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) pointed out, they are part of what Blackpool is.

I therefore urge my hon. Friend the Minister to listen to this sector carefully. There has been a glut of coaches coming on to the market that are second-hand; many existing companies are struggling to make the finance payments. I know that she is the Decarbonisation Minister, so she ought to be enthusiastic about ensuring that we have more and more Euro 6 coaches throughout the network. Here is a chance to “build back better”, to support the finance payments for these firms and to allow companies to use Government subsidy to improve their fleets as part of the decarbonisation strategy. Then it will not just be this sector that survives—Blackpool as a coastal resort might have a chance as well.

Aviation Sector

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

Three minutes—gosh! I am glad the high-speed rail Minister, the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), is on the Front Bench to inspire me to get a move on.

I welcome the new Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts), to the ejector seat role of aviation Minister. He is the fifth in two years; I was No. 3. Such is the turnover that who knows how long he will last. Will he still be there to bring us in to land? I do not know, and that is part of the problem. The sector does not have the continuity in the Department that it needs for long-term decision making. He has fantastic officials, but he certainly has not got enough of them. In the past year, they have had to deal with the collapse of Thomas Cook, the slow, prolonged agony and death of Flybe and now covid-19. They are absolutely frazzled, I have no doubt, which means they cannot do the longer-term work, on issues such as slot allocation, that I think are so important for the Department to grapple with.

I agree with everything everyone has said so far—there is no point repeating it—but on testing, let me make a plea to learn from Italy, which now has obligatory pre-departure testing. There is no environment more conducive to the transmission of the virus than that on board an aircraft. We have a chance to test people before they board, and we should oblige all UK-registered airlines to do just that. Passengers would check in half an hour early, as they do in Italy at the moment, and if they test positive, they would not be allowed to board. That would stop the importation of the virus into the UK. To me, it stands to reason.

May I assist my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) by making a few pleas on behalf of regional airports, in case he does not get the chance to do so? The Government need to move faster on regional airports. They were having an existential crisis already when Flybe collapsed, and it is currently a case of apocalypse now. There was a regional airport review, it had conclusions and there was a 10-point plan. I know because I wrote it, and left it in my in-tray, so I know what it is going to say. The Department knows what it wants to do on public service obligation flights, and that can easily be changed. They are all domestic routes and there is no quarantine angle at all: we can make the changes now.

The Minister may have heard—in fact, I doubt he has heard yet—that Southend airport has, just this week, installed its new £400,000 security scanner. It is one of those that allows passengers not to have to remove liquids from their baggage, and it is part of our overhaul of transport security. They are immensely good news across all airports, but they cost an incredible amount of money—£400,000. In many smaller airports, they require a complete redesign of the terminal layout. Just go and ask the chief executive of Leeds Bradford. Can the Government do more to consider better use of capital allowances to facilitate that sort of investment?

My mantra as Minister was that we were the aviation nation and had to remain so to be ambitious on behalf of the UK sector, but we risk becoming a flightless nation, stuck on the ground and unable to go anywhere. There was a flightless bird called the dodo, which is now extinct. Do not let UK plc’s aviation sector become extinct, please.