Old Oak Common Station

Richard Foord Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. The south-west is a region with enormous untapped economic potential. We already have a brilliant clean energy industry, which is growing. We have a fantastic defence industry, with lots of small and medium-sized enterprises. We have a thriving agricultural sector and a flourishing food sector. We have a tourism industry that welcomes more than 20 million visitors per year. Our economy depends very heavily, with all these things, on reliable transport links.

We in Devon are bucking the trend nationally. Since 2019, the proportion of rail journeys taken across the country has fallen by 6%, but in Devon, it has increased by 9%. Time and again, however, we have seen the west country miss out on rail investment, which has been concentrated in other parts of the country—in the midlands, the north of England and, of course, London. The south-west is left grappling with an underfunded and unreliable rail network.

The construction of Old Oak Common will exacerbate some of those challenges. Over the next decade, passengers travelling on mainline inter-city services serving the south-west will face severe disruption. Planned works will reduce the number of available seats on trains that are already crowded and have slow journey times. We will see a fall in the number of direct services to London Paddington. Last month, the Government pointed to a £30-million mitigation package. That is woefully inadequate. Compare it with the £6.5-billion cost of Old Oak Common —by contrast, £30 million is a pittance. Worryingly, that £30 million has already been committed to operational adjustments such as depot changes and electrification in London, with little or no regard for the south-west.

The Tories’ catastrophic management—or rather, mismanagement—of the rail system was exemplified by the two-year industrial dispute that cost taxpayers an eye-watering £25 million per strike day, and led to reforms that have saddled the public with hundreds of millions of pounds in additional cost. Nowhere is the previous Government’s legacy of transport failure more apparent than in relation to High Speed 2, where flip-flopping over the last 15 or 20 years has led to ballooning costs, neglected communities and misery for passengers.

I want to point out how that has affected people in some west-country communities. It might be supposed that it is only HS2 communities—people in the midlands and the north—who have been affected by some of the cost overruns and the indecision, but that is not so. When we saw the cancellation of HS2 by the previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), there was then some big announcement about Network North, and we were promised that HS2 money was therefore going to be ploughed into stations and the redevelopment of stations across the country.

In the constituency I represent, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton came to visit. He hired a community room in a farm shop—a sort of farm shop conference centre. He and other Conservative activists held up British Rail placards with the word “Cullompton” underneath, as if to encourage people that somehow there was money from HS2 that could be invested in our local rail transport. That was absolutely not the case, as has since been revealed. Now we can see that those were all empty promises.

Old Oak Common is one more step in this misadventure, with an additional 20 minutes that it adds to a journey from Paddington to the south-west. That could be enough to influence holidaymakers to choose other destinations overseas, which would be a tragedy for the south-west economy. I really hope that the Government look kindly on proper mitigation.

[Andrew George]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent case, as did our hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson). Of course, his constituency of Honiton and Sidmouth is three and a half hours away from Penzance, so a 20-minute delay for people at Penzance is not necessarily the issue. It is the disruption, the uncertainty and all the other factors on the route that make the current service completely inadequate. That is really why we want to see investment in improvement, to bring the service up.

[Richard Foord]

I recognise the particular plight of my hon. Friend’s constituents, who are as far south-west as one can go in England. My time is up, but I plead with the Minister to think again about the £30-million mitigation fund and whether it really offsets the costs that south-west residents will bear.

[Clive Efford (in the Chair)]

I call Ann Davies.