Colne to Skipton Railway Link

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Chris Heaton-Harris

Tuesday 29th October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I remind the hon. Lady that the MP at the time, who also campaigned, was from a different party, but that is not the point.

I share the interest of the hon. Member for Hyndburn in ensuring that the corridor between east Lancashire and Yorkshire, in which the former rail line is located, has the transport infrastructure that it needs to flourish and grow. I agree that the potential role of a reopened Skipton-Colne line needs to be considered carefully. It is the case, as he kind of made clear, that the Government are investing in transport in east Lancashire and the north more widely. As he knows, the Government are committed to creating a northern powerhouse to rebalance our economy.

Investing in and fuelling the northern economy provides a great opportunity for the north to be at the forefront of the UK’s economic success for decades to come. I am a midlands MP. I welcome investment in the north because it drives investment in the midlands, too. A national benefit would flow from that. I want to gently correct, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough did, the incorrect IPPR study of investment in the regions. As he correctly pointed out, the investment is £236 for the midlands, £236 for the south and £248 for the north. However, it does not matter because the investment continues to grow, with projects coming forth that really will drive economic growth. Our continuing commitment to transforming rail connectivity across the north is evidenced both by the Prime Minister’s recent announcement on Northern Powerhouse Rail and the continued development of and investment in the trans-Pennine route upgrade programme.

As the Prime Minister reminded us when he visited Rotherham a few weeks ago, the north gave the world the railway. He said:

“And yet two centuries later, in this birthplace of the railways, we can do so much better.”

When he was in Yorkshire the previous week he reaffirmed his commitment to Northern Powerhouse Rail and slightly challenged people by saying that he eagerly awaited the emergence of the plans. He also noted that there has been significant Government investment, with 2,000 additional services now operating every week, £500 million on new trains and £100 million on refurbishment of the rest of the fleet, including wi-fi and power sockets as well as the electrification of the railways in the north-west. A huge amount has gone in.

Before I turn to the Colne-Skipton line, I want to highlight the significant transport investment already under way in Lancashire and across the north to support the northern powerhouse programme. Through the growth deal process, the Government have provided the Lancashire local enterprise partnership with £8 million to support the Hyndburn Burnley/Pendle growth corridor investment, designed to maximise the benefits provided by the M65 in that corridor. Our third growth deal with the Lancashire LEP provides further funding for the M65 corridor—junctions 4 to 6—which will bring further benefit to east Lancashire and the constituents of the hon. Member for Hyndburn. It was my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle who pushed for a study of the work. He is a very busy Member of Parliament.

I am sure the hon. Member for Hyndburn is aware of the proposals for the Colne to Foulridge—or A56 villages—bypass. When consulting on its east Lancashire highways and transport master plan in the autumn of 2013, Lancashire County Council set out six possible options for the scheme. It identified two that would potentially impact on the reinstatement of the railway at a future date. I understand that Lancashire County Council has not actively developed the options any further, pending the outcome of a centrally funded Highways England study that is under way.

More widely in east Lancashire we have, through the LEP, funded improvements to the Blackburn to Bolton rail corridor, and have enabled a more frequent service to operate between Blackburn and Manchester Victoria. That is not the first improvement that we have delivered on the rail network between east Lancashire and Greater Manchester. Thanks to our regional growth fund, under the coalition we reinstated the Todmorden curve, which the hon. Member for Burnley mentioned in her intervention. As part of the Great North Rail project, we have invested in improvements across the region. That is bringing major improvements to the northern rail network, one of the largest rail networks in the country, creating better journeys for passengers, supporting trade and creating, as the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) would like, a stronger economy.

Through the Northern and TransPennine Express franchises and investment in modern trains, we are delivering a host of better, more comfortable, more frequent, faster and more direct journeys. All the Pacer trains, which were possibly once loved but have absolutely outstayed their welcome, will be replaced by a mix of brand-new trains and trains refurbished and upgraded to an as-new standard. Investment in the northern rail network includes improvements to the Calder Valley line between Manchester, Rochdale and Bradford and Leeds—the other key current rail link in the central trans-Pennine corridor—and includes line speed improvements and improved signalling, resulting in increased resilience, more capacity and improved journey times. That is good progress, but we need to go further.

For the Hyndburn constituency, our investment has meant more frequent, hourly Sunday services to Colne from May 2018 and additional funding for the East Lancashire community rail partnership. As part of Northern’s £500 million investment, passengers in the constituency of the hon. Member for Hyndburn will benefit from new trains on the York to Blackpool service via Accrington later this year.

Finally, the Department announced in March 2019 that Highways England would work with Transport for the North on a study looking at options for improving road links between the M65 and North and West Yorkshire. The output of that study will inform consideration of the case for future investment. Those are all important building blocks of the northern powerhouse.

The line from Colne to Skipton was closed in 1970. The Skipton East Lancashire Rail Action Partnership, which is possibly one of the best action groups I have come across in my short time as Rail Minister, and certainly one of the most effective—I think I had a letter from the group two days after I was announced as Minister—was established in spring 2001 to protect the former railway track bed from development so that it could, in due course, be reinstated. As I have detailed, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough said, former Rail Ministers have met the partnership many times, and I join them in paying tribute to its work over the past 18 years to raise the profile of the case for reinstating the 12-mile link between east Lancashire and Yorkshire.

The hon. Member for Hyndburn will be glad to hear that the Skipton-Colne scheme is clearly referenced as a scheme in the “determine” phase of the rail enhancements pipeline published earlier this month. As my officials outlined at last week’s meeting, hosted in Westminster by the hon. Gentleman, the focus of that phase is on establishing the case for progressing the scheme. That means identifying the improved outcomes sought for passengers, freight and the wider economy, and considering a wide range of potential interventions that could deliver those benefits.

The Government assess the case for progressing schemes through a five-case business case that takes fully into account the wider strategic and social case for investment, in addition to economic, financial, commercial and managerial aspects. We remain committed to enhancing rail connectivity across the north. The ongoing work on Skipton-Colne makes a very important contribution to that, particularly on the important issue of the provision of capacity and capability for trans-Pennine freight.

The first stage of feasibility work carried out last year confirmed the engineering feasibility of reinstating a rail link between Colne and Skipton to modern railway standards. It also confirmed the strategic case for a rail link between east Lancashire, which has local authority districts that the hon. Gentleman himself described as the most economically deprived in England, and the Leeds city region, as well as for improved rail connectivity for freight between Mersey and east coast ports and inland terminals.

The hon. Gentleman will recall that during a visit to Colne earlier this year, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell, the former Secretary of State for Transport, announced that he had asked for further feasibility work to be carried out, in order to challenge the cost of the scheme and to establish whether there would be sufficient freight demand, before making a decision on whether a reinstatement scheme should progress to the next stage of the rail enhancements pipeline.

I thank the hon. Member for Keighley for highlighting the towns fund, which will hopefully help towns and communities across his constituency and the north in general. He raised a couple of questions about the feasibility study. I am happy to share the December 2018 strategic outline business case with the partnership, so that it can understand the sorts of issues that we rightly have to tackle as a Government to ensure that the criteria that we have set are fulfilled, and that we can deliver projects that offer value for money and deliver the required economic outputs. Perhaps that can be the hon. Gentleman’s Christmas present. It is not quite the Christmas present that he asked for, but it is part of the way to it.

There are lots of important considerations, because there are challenges for the project. I am sure that the project can answer those challenges, but it is important to highlight them so that they are open and public, and so that people can work together to overcome them, as I believe has been the case up until this point. The first consideration was the initial finding that the economic case for reinstatement was quite poor without provision for, and extensive use of, the route for intermodal trans-Pennine container freight traffic attracted from road. We need to ensure that that can be delivered.

Before the feasibility study, there was insufficient evidence that the route would attract a sufficient volume of intermodal container traffic. There is evidence that other trans-Pennine routes, with necessary enhancement of capacity and gauge, could offer shorter journey times, and thus more efficient utilisation of rail assets—both staff and rolling stock. I am aware of the extensive work being done, and that has already been completed, by SELRAP, right hon. and hon. Members, and local businesses, as demonstrated by some of today’s speeches, to estimate what level of local freight could be expected. That work is very helpful indeed.

We must always address concerns about the high estimated capital cost of the scheme—questioned by the hon. Member for Hyndburn—which is relevant to both the economic case and the general affordability of the scheme. The first stage of the further work carried out by my Department’s technical advisers is nearing completion. It has been carried out in close collaboration with Transport for the North, Network Rail and the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, with very helpful in-depth discussions with a number of freight customers. That work, which is continuing, suggests, first, that a high proportion of potential trans-Pennine intermodal container traffic could be carried on a low-floor wagon that requires a loading gauge that is smaller than the W12 gauge provided on a number of other trunk routes, and only marginally larger than the minimum current clearance on trans-Pennine routes.

Secondly, routing freight via Skipton-Colne is not only slower than other potential routes but engages a capacity bottleneck—as was mentioned in passing—on the eastern side of the Pennines, crossing the eastern approach to Leeds station. That is absolutely not insurmountable, but it does need to be addressed as we move forward.

Thirdly, we have confirmation that future demand for the key flows in question—Liverpool-Drax biomass and intermodal containers—is really sensitive to the end-to-end journey times that can be achieved, due to the impact on resource utilisation, so we need to work with those companies to ensure that there is a business case that works for us all.

Network Rail’s order of magnitude cost estimates are not inappropriately high, given the current state of the project’s development. However, further discussions are in progress with Transport Scotland, as the hon. Member for Hyndburn highlighted, regarding the Borders railway, as it appears that its out-turn costs were, per mile, much lower than Network Rail’s early estimates for the Skipton-Colne link. We are therefore trying to learn from what has gone on elsewhere, because we want to drive value for money.

[Rachael Maskell]

I am really interested in what the Minister has to say. There seems to be an overengineering of a number of rail projects at their inception. Is the Department reviewing the way that infrastructure projects are approached, so that they are appropriately engineered?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

The whole point of the pipeline is to try to do exactly that, and to learn from previous projects, when things are delivered late and run over cost and when things are delivered within budget. Network Rail is going out of its way to learn from those projects, so yes, I can give the hon. Lady that assurance.

We need to investigate a number of issues further before any conclusions are drawn, hence the need for the current process. Those issues essentially boil down to the two questions that I outlined: what are the likely costs, including gauge clearance, of creating viable timetable paths in the short and medium term for additional freight, and what levels of freight traffic is the route likely to attract? We are pressing on with that work, including through a Network Rail feasibility study on trans-Pennine gauging, which was announced last month, so that we will have a complete picture in a few months. My officials will continue to update the campaign’s project development team as the work progresses. We will continue to do all we can to answer the questions that I have raised and recent work has raised, which will hopefully mean that we can work together to move this interesting and popular scheme forward.

To conclude, I congratulate the hon. Member for Hyndburn and SELRAP on the continuing commitment to this issue that they have shown, as well as the other right hon. and hon. Members with an interest in this matter—both those who could be present today and those who could not. I repeat that the Government are keen to reach an early conclusion on what role a reinstated line could play in improving passenger and freight connections across the Pennines. Given the current phase that this scheme finds itself in, my focus, and the Government’s, is on establishing the case for progressing it.

Railways (Safety, Access, Management and Interoperability) (Miscellaneous Amendments and Transitional Provision) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Chris Heaton-Harris

Monday 21st October 2019 General Committees

[Rachael Maskell]

Can the Minister therefore confirm that should the European Union advance its safety standards, the UK would at least keep parity with those standards—or, as he has just related, go beyond those standards?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Yes, I think I can; in fact, we will not be diverging to reduce safety standards from where they are now. We might choose to diverge to increase our safety standards, but I give the hon. Lady the commitment that she asks for about not reducing safety standards through diverging—absolutely, 100%.

[Rachael Maskell]

May I split hairs with the Minister on this issue? He has clearly stated that we will not regress from where we are now, but if the European Union were to advance its safety standards, would we keep parity with it at that juncture?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I would like to think so, but I honestly cannot answer, because I have no idea what the European Union might do in the future. I would like to think that we would be in advance of European Union standards. Certainly, there is no rush to diverge in any way from current European Union safety standards, and the only push that I can see from this Parliament and domestically is for better standards. I would assume, therefore, that if the European Union tried to improve its safety regulations and regime, we would be ahead of that curve already and the EU would be following us.

There were a number of questions relating to the Williams review of the Office of Rail and Road, its resources and whether it needs additional resources. There will be no additional cost to the ORR or train operators from Great Britain’s safety regime after Brexit, so, realistically, the ORR should have sufficient resources already. The Williams review opens up opportunities for how these things could be both resourced and policed in the future. We will doubtless have quite some debate across the Floor of the House on that, but that is for another time.

On devolution, I am as ambitious as the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun is to have devolution writ thick through the Williams review. That, again, is not a debate for these particular regulations, but it is one that I look forward to having with him in the future.

Question put and agreed to.

Draft Heavy Commercial Vehicles in Kent (No. 1) Order 2019

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Chris Heaton-Harris

Tuesday 8th October 2019 General Committees

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

My hon. Friend makes a fair point; I will get feedback from officials on the point of law. We are doing everything, but we are completely open; if he or other Kent MPs, or others from the Kent Resilience Forum, believe that there are other things that we can do to make the process simpler and more helpful and to keep things fluid within the county, we are completely up for looking at those suggestions, but we do believe that the contingency measures will be enough to deal with the levels of lorries, on which I have some numbers for my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil in a moment.

Highways England has recruited staff for the checks and the DVSA will be deploying 130 officers, 60 of whom will come from outside Kent—there will be a lot of people surged into the Kent area for this process. I would very much like to think that that is welcomed by Kent.

[Rachael Maskell]

I thank the Minister for the clarity on the number of additional staff who will be deployed to Kent. Are those people being transferred from other functions and elsewhere in the UK or are they new, additional staff?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

It is a bit of both. Some are new staff being recruited and some are being transferred from other functions across the United Kingdom.

I hope I have answered most of the questions; I will come back to my hon. Friend the Member for Dover on those I have not. We have a forum later today with Kent MPs and I will have the answers to any questions I have not answered.

My hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil asked me what we are doing to make lorries compliant. I hope I answered that in my comments on the comms campaign. We hope to be using the pop-up sites to tell drivers that they are border-ready. Currently, the message is about making sure that they understand what they need to do. Where the sites are popular and being used properly, and when we get to 1 November, we hope to move on to messages around, “Yes, actually that is a border-ready document; you should move down to Kent and you shouldn’t have too much of an issue to maintain flow.”

I want to give hon. Members a rough idea of the numbers of vehicles that could be in the Brock process in Kent. The slip road at Eurotunnel has capacity for 450 vehicles. The holding area at the Port of Dover has capacity for roughly 1,100 vehicles. The capacity of Brock M20 will be up to 2,000. Manston airfield will hold around 5,800. The Dover traffic access protocol has capacity of about 300, and if we needed it, the Brock M26 would hold 1,700 or so vehicles.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I understand my hon. Friend’s point. To answer his earlier point, and hopefully this point at the same time, he is quite right to say that designated traffic officers can work on local roads, but they are mainly meant to be relieving problems on the strategic road network. However, we are considering designating Kent County Council officers to support Brock in this circumstance—it is not Dover Council, which I think is where his question came from, but Kent County Council officers. I hope that is of some assistance to him.

I want to finish on a couple of additional points that the hon. Member for York Central raised. She made a point on the timing and asked why the plan was timed to end at the end of December 2020. It is actually nothing to do with the transition period; it is when the planning permission allowing us to mount the operation at Manston finishes. It is about planning; it is not about any transition period should we get a deal. Why is it so important that it is done in Kent? Well, 80% of the UK’s freight goes through the Kent ports—a big percentage of our trade goes through them.

[Rachael Maskell]

If there is serious congestion at Folkestone and Dover ports, haulage companies will look to other locations through which to cross the channel or the North sea. Are discussions under way about contingencies in those areas, should they become the key route that traffic flows through in the future?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Yes. That is a legitimate question about what would happen should Folkestone and Dover get very busy. My personal belief is that if I was running a business—I used to import wholesale fruit and veg for a living, and I have used the short straits crossing a huge amount in the past for my business—and was worried about there being a problem, I would divert my route. That is why the Government have already announced that an extra £9 million is being made available to local areas and major ports, so that they are ready for us to leave without a deal. Some £5 million of that will be given to local councils that either have or are near major air, land or sea ports, to ensure that they can continue to operate effectively when we leave the EU. We have also done the traffic modelling and shared it with the local resilience forums in each of those individual areas, and we are working with them to ensure that they are completely ready for when we leave the European Union later this month. It is a completely legitimate and fair question, and I appreciate the hon. Lady’s asking it, so that I could clarify that point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell asked me a vaguely political question, but there was a sensible question within it: are hauliers taking this seriously? It is not that the political question was not sensible; I just do not want to be told off by you, Mr Hanson, tempted though I may be to leap in. I can honestly say that hauliers are taking this seriously. I have been in lots and lots of meetings with both business representatives and organisations of the freight and haulage industry, and indeed with big and small individual companies, and they all understand what impact this might have if it were to go wrong. They all understand that if they and everybody else get the paperwork right, there would not be the problem we are discussing and we would not need the contingency plan—Brock—because flow would continue. We need to continue—we will do this as a Government and, I hope, as individual Members —to say to anybody we meet from a haulage company, “Are you Brexit-ready?” The Government should have written to them a number times through different Departments, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and so on. They should have seen the adverts that have been in the papers and on motorway gantries. There are pop-up sites up and down the country, and we are using the trade press. They have all sorts of opportunities to notice them. It is their living.

I used to work with the haulage industry, importing fruit and veg, and I know that, although hauliers put things off to the last minute because they do not want to take on board the extra expense, when they know that it is about their livelihood and those of the people who work for them—they might be a small operator with one or two rigs—they take notice. They do not want to be held up. There are not massive margins in the haulage industry, so delay costs could cost them business and therefore profit, or their living. I believe that they are absolutely taking this very seriously.

Heavy Commercial Vehicles in Kent (No. 2) Order 2019

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Chris Heaton-Harris

Tuesday 8th October 2019 General Committees

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I somehow guessed, Ms Ryan, that you would pull us back to the subject. It is a wise thing to do. I do not want to get too excited about that issue, because I really want to answer the points that the hon. Member for York Central made and stress how important it is to everybody in Kent that we get this exactly right. My hon. Friend the Member for Dover makes some very sensible, straightforward political points, and we can have a battle about them another time. I just want to make sure this item is scrutinised correctly.

The hon. Member for York Central asked me a number of questions—nine, I think—and I shall try to answer them all. What happens to lorries travelling down the route or trying to get back on to the route when the two-hour window applies? Well, I am always told that the first rule of policing is common sense. Common sense will apply, and we would like to think that police officers and those enforcing will use it in that time period.

What sort of paperwork would be required to demonstrate that people are driving on local routes? The production of a delivery notice for an address in the local area with the appropriate goods on board will absolutely demonstrate that. That is a relatively straight- forward, “as things are now” answer.

I think the hon. Lady’s third question was: what happens to empty lorries? Some restrictions apply, and they will have to join the Brock queues. We know that 30% of containers on trucks heading back to France are empty, but those trucks will have to join the queue like anyone else, because it is very difficult to distinguish them from any other lorry.

[Rachael Maskell]

Often a lorry is a cab without a trailer. Will the same restrictions apply despite there being no load on board?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I will double-check, but I think the answer is yes. In Kent, that is a very rare occurrence, because the type of movements across the channel are roll-on roll-off movements, and so they take the container with them. My officials are scrawling away. I will lengthen my other replies, and hopefully I can get the definitive answer within the course of the debate, but I believe that what I have said is correct.

The hon. Lady asked what paperwork would be required to satisfy the specified person if an HGV driver was trying to say that they were going down a local route. As I said in my previous answer, they should have a delivery slip—that is not the correct word—or a delivery manifest that demonstrates that the load on their lorry, or part of it, is going to a local address. There is no real discretion; they should have something that demonstrates that what they say is the case.

The hon. Lady asked about local permits being issued by Kent County Council. I have been in meetings where I have been told that they have been very well publicised locally, so haulage companies in Kent absolutely know where to get them. After this Committee, I am going to a meeting with the gentleman who is in charge of these issues for Kent County Council, and I will ask him that exact question. If the answer is not as I have said, I will come back to the hon. Lady.

On welfare, strangely enough, I am with the hon. Lady. As I alluded to in the earlier debate, I used to import wholesale fruit and veg—hauliers were the lifeblood of that business. Without them, I would not have been able to do half the things I was able to do. The job has never been as valued as it should be. We have been working with the industry to determine what might be required for drivers’ health. She made the point about mental health; there is a whole industry focus on the mental health of drivers, because there is a recruitment and retention problem in the industry. It is really important that these things are addressed properly and professionally.

We do not want drivers to get stuck in Brock and, because of something else that is going on, to stay in Brock, when they can move on and get on with their lives. I mentioned earlier that we looked at all the different welfare things that we should and could provide, from printers to toilets to food and water. We do not want to make a community centre out of Manston airport, but we want it to be a functioning workplace where people are treated with the appropriate respect.

[Rachael Maskell]

I am grateful for the clarity that the Minister has given on many of my concerns. If lorries are parked along the motorway carriageway, could he say how frequent the spacing out of toilets will be?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Very frequent. I believe we know the designated spacing and the answer is coming to me. The toilets will be every kilometre. Going back to the point about the vehicle without the container, restrictions will apply to HGVs over 7.5 tonnes.

On the hon. Lady’s seventh question, this is a contingency plan for something that we do not want to happen. The reason we have a massive communications campaign up and down the country as we speak is to ensure that the drivers and traders who use haulage companies are ready. If they are ready, as I hope and believe they will be, there will be no issues with flow and Brock will not need to be stood up. There has been a huge amount of investment on the French side, at the ports of Calais, Coquelles and Boulogne, to ensure flow continues over there as long as we have drivers in a place where the paperwork is ready. Hopefully, this is a contingency that will not need to be stood up.

The hon. Lady asked about road traffic issues—what happens if there is a crash or unexpected emergency roadworks? It is very helpful that the Kent Resilience Forum leads on all that, which is a combination of local councils, the police and highways authorities—a whole host of different agencies and people. They are working together now and their lead police officer, Peter Ayling, is in charge of co-ordinating that. Nothing should happen that they are not prepared for, but they have extensive plans for everything including severe weather and other events that may be concurrent with problems with flow at the port. [Interruption.] I have just been corrected on the spacing of portable toilets—they are at one-mile intervals, not one-kilometre intervals. I will always be more imperial than metric.

Finally, the hon. Lady asked about costs. There is a political point to make here: if the hon. Lady and her political party had voted for the deal, there would not be the extra costs of planning for a no-deal Brexit. However, a responsible Government have to do exactly that. In 2018-19, the cost was £59.9 million, and in 2019-20 it will be about £40 million, although there are still some costs to come as and when Brock gets stood up. I hope that has answered all the hon. Lady’s questions. If I have missed any, I shall write to her, if that is okay. I hope I have answered everybody else’s points.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the Heavy Commercial Vehicles in Kent (No. 2) Order 2019.