Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Swallow Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander]

I will happily ask the Rail Minister to meet the right hon. Gentleman to ensure that progress can be made at Wickford.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

I know that my right hon. Friend will be delighted by the news that Go-op will be operating a new mandate for return services between Swindon and Taunton. Does she agree that this demonstrates the Government’s commitment to improving connectivity across the country? Can we hope for such improvements to connectivity in my little corner of the world in Berkshire?

[Heidi Alexander]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend has raised this proposal, which demonstrates the pragmatic approach we take to open access operators. Go-op will be the first co-operatively owned train service running anywhere in the UK. If there are any investors out there thinking about investing in that service, I encourage them to look closely at it.

Airport Expansion

Peter Swallow Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mike Kane]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question, but I do not think I will take any lectures from Liberal Democrat Members about sitting on the fence. Theirs is the politics of licking their finger, putting it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing, and then putting it in a leaflet. There is no development consent order for Heathrow yet. I am sure the hon. Lady will have her opportunity to raise her concerns at a later date in this place.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

I could not agree more with the Minister when he points out that any airport expansion has to be part of the overall picture of upgrading Britain’s broken transport networks. Bracknell sits on the Reading to Waterloo train line, which passes through Feltham, just south of Heathrow. Journey times on the line have not improved since the ’70s, and there is no direct connection to Heathrow. Will the Minister assure me that any plans to upgrade airports will be part of the overall picture of an integrated plan?

[Mike Kane]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. I am not usually quite so divisive at the Dispatch Box, but we inherited such a broken system it is almost untrue, such are the things we are finding out about the sclerotic nature of the previous Government. The Roads Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), is investing £1.6 million in fixing potholes, while the Minister responsible for buses, my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield and Rothwell (Simon Lightwood), has invested £1 billion in buses. We are moving fast. We are fixing things and we are delivering.

Road Safety

Peter Swallow Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andy MacNae]

Absolutely. I will touch on this later, but I feel that devolution and local government reorganisation create a huge opportunity to ensure new levels of co-operation between authorities, and we should have no hard borders when it comes to road safety.

Again, the conclusion we reach is that we need action to prevent deaths and injuries, yet when communities raise their concerns and real-world experience with the county council and the police, they are told that the KSI—killed or seriously injured—data does not meet the threshold for speed cameras and other meaningful interventions.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, too often, an accident waiting to happen has been forced to become an accident that has happened before action is taken, and that when communities know that a road they live on and live with every day is unsafe, we should listen to those communities much more and act before the accident happens?

[Andy MacNae]

I agree entirely. Again, it is devastating for communities to raise those issues repeatedly, stridently and sometimes desperately, yet feel that they are not being heard. The message they get back is, in effect, “We have to wait for someone to get killed before we do anything”, which is surely is not the message our communities should be hearing.

As well as Burnley Road in Rossendale, I could tell stories about Todmorden Road, Burnley Road East through Whitewell Bottom, Market Street in Whitworth, Bury Road in Edenfield, Newchurch Road in Waterfoot, Bolton Road, Sunnyhurst Lane, Hollins Grove and Pole Lane in Darwen. In each case, residents see close calls day by day, but are told that the statistics do not merit action, and even when they do, they are simply told there is no money. This approach is nonsensical and out of line with even the county council’s own adopted vision zero strategy and is decades behind those employed internationally. Ultimately it costs lives and money. Beyond this, unsafe roads have far-reaching impacts affecting an area’s sense of place and identity. They take lives, devastate families and shake up communities. Roads felt to be unsafe have a significant impact on the day-to-day lives of people living near them. Residents feel less able to get around, uncomfortable on their own doorstep and cut off from each other.

Rail Performance

Peter Swallow Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Louise Haigh]

One of the purposes of this reform was to save the taxpayer money, and bringing operators into public ownership as their contracts expire means there will be no compensation. We will also be saving the money currently leaking out of the system through dividends and management fees. It would not be fiscally prudent in the current environment to spend billions of pounds on nationalising the rolling stock, so we will continue the current arrangement whereby private finance is leveraged into rolling stock companies.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

My constituents are reliant on a train line between Reading and Waterloo that has seen no improvements to frequency or journey times since the 1970s, so they will warmly welcome the steps the Secretary of State has outlined today to launch a consultation setting out plans for unification across the railway. Does she agree that a modern railway system is an essential step in getting our economy growing?

[Louise Haigh]

I absolutely agree. For too long, passengers have not been able to rely on the railways, and it has driven people off them. We see in the latest Transport Focus data that people are gradually starting to feel more confident in using the railways, but we have a long way to go to turn the tide on the last 14 years of failure.

Driving Test Availability

Peter Swallow Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the availability of driving tests.

It is an honour to serve under you as Chair, Sir Roger.

Driving test delays are a source of misery, anger and lost opportunity across my constituency and the country. Today a new learner will have to wait on average four and a half months for a driving test, which is more than double the wait nine years ago and nearly 50% higher than four years ago. New learners in my constituency must wait on average over five months for their test. Those are some of the worst waiting times in the country, and they have more than tripled since records began in 2015. That is five months during which my constituents’ travel, and therefore their ambitions, are severely restricted. Hon. Members will remember vividly the great feeling of liberation when getting behind the wheel for the first time after passing our driving tests. Today, that rite of passage, instead of a moment of great excitement, is a source of punishing expense, confusion and misery for too many of my constituents.

Take, for example, my constituent Molly, who is having to pay to do her theory again because, like the majority of drivers, she failed her first practical, and now must wait another five months to take a test. I confess that I too did not pass my driving test the first time—a fact that my partner, who did pass first time, always likes to remind me whenever I offer backseat commentary on his handling of Bracknell’s many roundabouts—but what was for me a source of slight irritation is to Molly a significant logistical hurdle with real-world costs. Having struggled to book her test the first time, she now needs to go through the whole long process again. She faces paying continued expenses to keep up lessons, using public transport to get around and possibly retaking her theory simply because it has reached its two-year limit.

Common also are stories like that of Therese, who, unable to find a test for her son for six months, booked him a test in Wales, which involved a costly round trip and an overnight stay, all just to get a test sorted in a reasonable timeframe. Other constituents have contacted me who have gone as far afield as the Isle of Wight and Aberdeen to get tests. Aberdeen is 500 miles from my constituency. When even simple systems like the provision of driving exams break down, inequalities deepen and opportunities dry up. Young people in my area are now seeing their career aspirations and their education take a hit as they look at a half-year delay before they can gain the independence of driving.

There has been national and regional coverage of this story for years, since the 2020 spike in driving test demand, yet the previous Conservative Government failed to get a grip of the crisis. On the one hand, they talked a big game, asking examiners to work ever-longer hours in an ever-exhausting push for short-term solutions—then on the other, they blamed examiners for striking over pay and conditions. What did that fiddling around at the edges get us? Today, waiting lists are more than double where they were in August 2020 and young learners are exposed to more vicious test touting than at any time since.

It is true that the DVSA responded to the immediate spike in 2020 by adding 1,000 more test slots and, over the year 2022-23, cancelling the accounts of more than 600 fake businesses abusing its service to block-book test slots just to sell them on, yet driving test centres in the year to March 2024 also cancelled more than 68,000 tests due to illness and industrial action. Driving instructors in my constituency tell me that that is often last minute and, due to the delays, pushes students back months. An increasing number of students are turning to the black market to get hold of tests, exposing themselves to fraud, abuse and spiralling hidden costs as test touters continue to exploit multiple flaws in the booking system to fuel their exploitative business models.

[David Williams (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend talked about driving instructors, and there is also a significant backlog in the driving tests required to qualify as a driving instructor. Does he agree that it is important that we look to address that backlog as well?

[Peter Swallow]

Absolutely. I have also spoken to businesses in my constituency that have highlighted the huge difficulties with getting tests for driving larger minivans and lorries. This debate is about not just bog- standard driving tests to get on the road, although that is a significant issue, but the whole system-wide problem.

Examiner illness is not something that the Conservative party can be blamed for, but whether it was striking doctors, nurses, train drivers or driving test examiners, the Conservative legacy is one of pushing workers to the brink then denying responsibility when industrial action is the inevitable result. I heard from my constituent Chris, a driving instructor, who explained how the local community of instructors are at their wits’ end over the issue, and feel powerless to stop students turning to the black market to book tests.

Driving examiners in Bracknell are getting up before 6 am on a Monday morning, when local centres release a week’s worth of tests, and by 6.02 am every single slot is gone. Those tests are six months away, yet greedy and unscrupulous test touters are using bots and fake business accounts to block-book those sessions and sell them on at ludicrous premiums. My constituents are scraping together hundreds of pounds to pay double or triple the test price only to have their details cloned, and these black market operators then use them to squeeze others out of the market. Meanwhile, some learners are, more innocently, paying big fees to apps and websites that simply trawl the DVSA database and spot cancelled tests for drivers to book at the last minute, which has fuelled understandable concerns. The drivers are showing up to tests underprepared, winging it in the hope that they just about pass, rather than waiting five months to take a test when they are properly ready.

I urge the Minister to set out what steps can be taken to end this financial abuse. The practice of test touting is against DVSA policy, but what more can we do to end it all together? Has the Minister considered whether the practice of reselling driving tests for profit can be made illegal—in line with our plans to tackle ticket touting—or can the system be fixed so that only legitimate driving instructors are able to transfer tests between their students?

Learner drivers pushed into taking their tests early by a broken system are more likely to fail, and therefore more likely to need to book another test, thereby further fuelling pressure on test centres and pushing up demand. What more can we do to ensure that more learners pass first time, unlike me? Will the Minister also ask the DVSA to investigate opening a test centre in my constituency? It sits in a desert of driving test provision between the M3 and M4. The nearest test centres to Bracknell are Reading and Farnborough. How can it be practical that a town of more than 120,000 people is not served by its own test centre?

If I may, I will touch on the connected subject of car insurance. For many young people, the financial pressure of becoming a new driver does not abate when they have finally managed to book and then pass their test. Next comes a hefty bill for car insurance. It is perfectly reasonable for younger and otherwise less experienced drivers to be charged more for car insurance, as statistically they are more likely to have an accident, but too many of my constituents are paying far more than is reasonable. Car insurance premiums have shot up by 21% since June 2022. This is not just an issue for young people in my constituency; I have also been contacted by older drivers, with many years’ experience on the road, who are being priced out of the market all together. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to welcome the action taken by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport today to launch a new taskforce to address that pressing matter.

The struggles faced by my constituents and by learner drivers across the country represent a brake on our national productivity and an unbearable frustration to our young people who, in understandable desperation, are exposing themselves to fraud and financial abuse at the hands of bad actors cynically exploiting this situation.

[Adam Jogee (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, which is a nice thing to be able to say from the Back Benches here. He raises an important point and as he touches on insurance, I wonder whether I can bring in the issue of inadequate public transport, particularly in Madeley and in Betley in Newcastle-under-Lyme. I increasingly receive letters and emails from people who see their ability to secure a test after they have failed the first one now being pushed further and further away. The relevant period is rather like the five months that my hon. Friend refers to, but there is a double whammy because of the lack of any viable, meaningful, and affordable public transport, particularly in Madeley and Betley. Without that, and with the pressures of available driving tests being pushed further and further away, many of my constituents, like those in Bracknell, are left at breaking point.

[Peter Swallow]

That is a fantastic point, and perhaps another day I could opine on our train links, which have not improved since the 1970s. That, I fear, is a debate for another day, but my hon. Friend’s point is an excellent one. Not only young people are affected, but many young people look to passing their driving test to give them a real sense of liberation and freedom. That is particularly true in communities where public transport, after 14 years of Conservative Government, is not where it should be. It therefore must absolutely be the priority of this Government to improve transport connectivity for all communities and, in particular, rural and semi-rural communities. It is clear that this Government must be—and are—on the side of the driver. For that reason, I urge the Minister to make real headway on this really important issue.

This situation cannot continue. After years of chaos under the Conservatives, this Government have inherited a broken test system and must now fix another Tory mess. All the while, my constituents face unacceptable waits and undue stress. Passing the driving test should be a moment of great joy and freedom but, for too many, the journey to passing has become a one-way trip to frustration and misery.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Swallow]

I start by thanking the Minister for the incredibly constructive way in which she has approached this debate and responded to the wide-ranging and serious issues raised by Members. It is heartening to hear her reiteration that this is a priority for the new Labour Government. That is demonstrated by the Secretary of State’s meeting with the CEO of the DVSA at such an early stage. I am grateful that Ministers have asked the DVSA to look at what more can be done to tackle test touts, and I welcome further updates in due course on this. Test touts are taking advantage, and we must crack down on them.

I also thank the Minister for updating us on the situation of employing more driving examiners, which will be very welcome indeed for my constituents. However, I would tempt her once again to examine opening a new test centre in Bracknell; even better than having more driving examiners would be having another place to put them. That would be really wonderful.

I thank hon. Members across the House for taking part in this debate. We heard about constituents affected across the country, from Strangford to Hastings and Rye, Reading Central, Portsmouth North, Kettering, Telford, Sittingbourne and Sheppey, Carlisle and Ilford South. That demonstrates the breadth of this issue.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the availability of driving tests.

Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Swallow Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Simon Lightwood]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. I will refer this matter to the Minister with responsibility for rail, and will write to the hon. Gentleman with further information.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

E-scooters offer an excellent opportunity for promoting active travel, but many of my constituents are concerned about the speed at which people travel on them. Will the Minister confirm that the Government’s road safety strategy will look at e-scooters, so that we can make sure that they are a safe part of our active travel system?

[Simon Lightwood]

We believe that micro-mobility has a vital role to play in an integrated transport system. We are looking very carefully at the e-scooter trial areas across the country, and will look at what further steps we can take to push forward this agenda.