Paulette Hamilton
Main Page: Paulette Hamilton (Labour - Birmingham Erdington)Department Debates - View all Paulette Hamilton's debates with the Home Office
West Midlands: Transport
Paulette Hamilton Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Mrs Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) for securing this important debate. My constituency is three miles from the city centre of Birmingham, or about a 10-minute train journey. Trains are vital to our communities, but with the threats of closing ticket offices and the difficulties that people face in booking online, some of my constituents tell me that they feel locked out of purchasing tickets. One constituent told me:
“We have fine officers on trains rather than ticket officers. What this results in is a situation where people who unable to buy a ticket at their station—be that due to faults in ticket machines or offices being unstaffed—are being fined rather than being offered the chance to buy a ticket on the train itself. It is clear that a great utility for Birmingham is changing its practices and signalling a disregard for basic human decency.”
That is not a unique story. I am sure that colleagues across the room have heard similar things from their constituents.
If my constituents want to travel to the other side of the constituency, they can expect to wait for two or three buses, sometimes with long delays at bus stops. One of my constituents had to wait an hour and a half for a bus on a match day, and she says that she often has to wait an hour on a normal day. It is not too much to ask that people in Erdington, Kingstanding and Castle Vale and across the UK should be able to travel to work, school or college on a bus and expect to be there on time. However, that is far from the reality. Since Labour was last in government, there has been a 47% decrease in weekly bus services across the west midlands, and a 24% decrease in my constituency.
Public transport is an important investment in local growth for individuals and businesses, but we are not funding it well enough. If it were not for public transport, my constituents could not access their jobs. Nor have we seen the investment we need in active travel. So many people cannot afford to get around my constituency by car.
The west midlands has some of the worst air quality in the country. Some of the most populated areas exceed the UK legal limit for toxic nitrogen dioxide, and 80% of that is caused by road transport. Air pollution contributes to more than 43,000 deaths in the UK every year, and more than 2,000 in the west midlands. It is, of course, worse for our children, who are breathing in toxic air. That is why I am glad that our new West Midlands Mayor has pledged to bring buses back under public ownership, and that Labour has pledged to deliver the biggest overhaul to our railways in a generation.