<Railway Services: South-West>

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Martin Wrigley) on securing this important debate. We all know the importance of strong and effective railway services in the south-west.

I will give a bit of background on my constituency. As I mentioned in my maiden speech in the House—and continue to mention at every opportunity—improving the transport links in my constituency of Tiverton and Minehead is one of my top priorities. We are served by only one major train station: Tiverton Parkway, which sits on the Great Western Railway and CrossCountry lines, as well as the charming and historic West Somerset Railway—a heritage line that runs up through the shoulder of my constituency and along the coast, terminating at Minehead.

Those services provide the totality of rail connections in my constituency, but there is still no way to get from Tiverton to Minehead. Minehead desperately needs linking to the main line at Taunton, as I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) would agree, but there are much wider issues at play for rail travel in Tiverton and Minehead.

The latest available data from July to September ’24 lays bare the inadequacy of railway services across the south-west. The punctuality of CrossCountry trains is pitiful—more often tardy than not, just 46.4% of the time did the service run as scheduled. That is shocking, as the figure is over 20 percentage points below the national average for punctuality on the rail network over the same period. Meanwhile, the Great Western Railway service is understood to have operated in accordance with the timetable 60.2% of the time—still over 7 percentage points lower than the national figure. That is better, but hardly an advert for timeliness.

Not knowing whether a scheduled service will appear on time is far from the only issue for my constituents. Even when the service is scheduled, and appears to be all-functioning, there is always the risk of cancellation. Both of the major carriers for Tiverton and Minehead had cancellation rates above the national average from July to September ’24, and in both cases, the majority of those trains were cancelled as a result of not Network Rail, but the operator itself. That is not what the people of Tiverton and Minehead expect when they buy their tickets, and they deserve better.

As is also the case across the length and breadth of the country, passengers in the south-west are forced to grapple with exorbitant train fares. Even with the Government’s rail fare discounts, which are in place for the next few months, the price of standard regulated tickets in England will go up by 4.6% on 2 March, climbing higher than the retail prices index inflation and hitting passengers hard.

The Liberal Democrats have previously called on the Government to do the decent thing and freeze rail fares immediately to help families struggling under the cost of living crisis, instead of hiking ticket prices. We will continue to fight for a fair deal for commuters and families who will be left forking out more and more for the privilege of using Britain’s rail systems. I am not sure how many people in the south-west would call it a “privilege”.

Just 1% of my constituents use rail as their means of travelling to work, according to data from the House of Commons Library. That is well below the national average, but not at all surprising, given the sorry picture for rail travellers in my constituency that I have painted. Members might assume that the proportion of my constituents travelling to work by bus would be higher, but I am afraid to report that that percentage sits at just 2%. I am also an avid campaigner for improving the bus routes in Tiverton and Minehead, but we are talking about railways today.

The state of railway services in not just Tiverton and Minehead, but the whole south-west, adds strain on the road network, because the lack of transport connectivity and the unreliable, overcrowded and overcharged public transport links leave people with no other choice but to travel by car. The environmental implications of that reality cannot be ignored.

Before closing, I must briefly draw attention to the looming Old Oak Common HS2 project and the inevitable disruption to travel that it will cause. Pressing ahead with the project will condemn the south-west to inter-city services that are among the slowest anywhere in the country and greatly reduce the number of direct trains to London. To accommodate the new role of Old Oak Common, trains originating in the south-west will be diverted from the traditional London Paddington route to London Euston, which will add an hour, on average, to train journeys.

The current provision of rail services is already well below a level that could be deemed satisfactory, so the new interchange at Old Oak Common comes at great expense to the west country and our friends in south Wales. Immediately freezing fares and introducing discounts for passengers in the south-west seem reasonable and fair first steps towards correcting that glaring disservice to the people of Tiverton and Minehead, and beyond. Beyond the short term, we ought to simplify the fragmented ticketing system to provide passengers with more affordable fares if we are serious about making public transport public.

The Government have an opportunity to look seriously at the issues of the south-west and its rail network, and I sincerely hope that they do so. For far too long, transport links have been overlooked and under-resourced. I appreciate that the pressures on the public purse are heavy at the moment, but so are the pressures on ordinary people in Tiverton and Minehead, and across the south-west. I urge the Government to look closely at what they can do to better support the rail, bus and road network so that the people of the south-west do not have to settle for the sort of service that is, far too often, currently on offer.