Transport Infrastructure (Essex)

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), who is a fantastic champion not only for transport, but for business, in Essex.

In Harlow, we face three major challenges: reputation, skills and infrastructure. We are dealing with the first two. We now have the highest business growth in the UK, as Experian has shown. An enterprise zone is opening next year, a new university technical college is opening in 2014, and 600 more people are in work in the town, compared with January, but transport infrastructure is holding us back in three ways. First, as my hon. Friend the Member for Witham and my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst) highlighted so well, we are not getting enough investment in trains in the east of England. Secondly, Harlow lacks proper motorway entrances. Thirdly, a sense of unfairness has built up over decades, due to only a fifth of fuel duty receipts being spent on our roads. I shall consider those points in turn.

I welcome what the Government have done to limit train fare rises. Many people in Harlow are on below-average earnings and commute into London, and could not afford some of the bigger rises that were initially mentioned. Of course, expensive rail fares have not happened overnight. Simon Carter, a Harlow resident who is also a councillor, has the ticket stubs to prove that a season ticket from Harlow to London went up by some 40% over the past 13 to 15 years, but Harlow commuters still suffer from the worst overcrowding in the country.

I recognise and welcome what the Government have done to invest in new rolling stock and to negotiate with Abellio to run a short franchise when National Express dropped out. I appreciate that Abellio has hired 100 extra security staff on the west coast main line, protected all Harlow services from cuts and smartened up our train stations, but Essex is a major engine of the English economy and our train fares are still too high, compared with the inward investment in the network. That is why I, along with my hon. and right hon. Friends, urge the Minister to consider the East Anglian rail prospectus, with targeted schemes, such as a third line in the Lea valley, and line improvements along the Stansted Express route, so that trains can get up to speeds of 100 mph. Improvements in infrastructure in the Roydon and Sawbridgeworth stations would be welcome.

[Sir Alan Haselhurst]

On my hon. Friend’s point about increased rail capacity through the Lea valley, we do not want to be sold short on just a third rail. For that job to be done properly, we need four rails, ideally, as far as Broxbourne. That would separate the more localised traffic from the traffic to more distant destinations, such as his constituency and mine.

[Robert Halfon]

Of course, my right hon. Friend is correct. He is an incredible champion for commuters across Essex.

Crossrail is estimated to have raised property prices along its line of route by about £5.5 billion, meaning that one third of the scheme’s cost has already been recouped by local home owners. This is the value that major transport projects can unlock.

I urge the Minister to expand the Oyster and other smart card systems to include Harlow commuters, because most people who commute to London from there use the London underground or London buses.

The Minister is aware, from a previous debate, that I have long campaigned for an additional junction on the M11. A new junction is critical if Harlow is to continue to grow and attract new businesses. Harlow town alone has a population of some 81,000 or 82,000, in addition to that of the villages in my constituency, but we have only one entrance to the town, which is crazy for a huge employment hub close to London. The industry is located at the opposite end of the town, meaning that lorries must trundle back and forth, almost through the town centre. Almost every day, our town faces gridlock because we do not have the extra junction.

I welcome work done by the local council on a £500,000 study into building a new M11 junction 7a, which will report in November—in a few weeks. I urge the Minister to consider that report. The case for a new M11 junction is simple: it would cost only around £15 million, would create jobs and growth, cut congestion and the cost of traffic, and would generally make Harlow a much better place to live. Our local enterprise partnership has secured a small amount of funding for road improvements, and I welcome some things that the Government have announced, but this is a sticking plaster. We will not solve our transport problems in Harlow until we get the extra junction.

I want to talk briefly about how our infrastructure is funded. My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) has brilliantly highlighted how, unfortunately, money raised for the railways by commuters through fares is not spent in the east of England; most of it goes to other parts of the country. We must move to a situation where money raised in the region by commuters paying high rail fares is spent in the region. The same thing has happened with fuel duty. Through the 1920s, the road fund was repeatedly raided to prop up the Treasury, and from 1937 it was treated as a general tax. By 1966, just one third of the revenue was spent on roads, and by 2008 the figure was just one fifth. The proportion of fuel duty being spent on roads has shrunk hugely, but at the same time that duty has risen. Motorists regard that as unfair because they do not see any benefit from the huge sums in fuel duty tax that they pay. The same is true of train ticket price rises. How can we justify those without proper investment in our local road and rail networks?

The cost of living is the No. 1 issue in my constituency. People want cheaper travel and they want every penny that the Government take from them to be recycled back into the community. I urge the Minister to refocus the Department on extra infrastructure investment in the east of England, in our trains, motorways and road networks—a cause that is close to our hearts. We need more radical transparency, so that people can see whether fare increases are genuinely being ploughed back into their area.

I am glad that the Government have fulfilled their election pledge and stopped a second runway at Stansted airport. The answer to infrastructure spending is not to spend millions on an extra runway, but to spend that money, if it is ever available, on our roads, rail and other transport infrastructure. Stansted is running at only 50% of full capacity, so there is no economic case for a second runway. Some say that people in Harlow would benefit, but Stansted has some 10,000 employees, of whom only a few hundred come from Harlow. I am yet to be convinced that Harlow people would benefit if there were an extra runway.

The Government should look seriously at the case for a new airport, but my constituents ask me time and again for a new M11 junction and extra train capacity to London.

--- Later in debate ---

[Norman Baker]

I will not, if the hon. Lady does not mind, because points were raised by hon. Members that I want to cover.

My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester also raised the issue of cycleway provision, which was right. He will know, I hope, that the current Government has produced a brand-new sum of money, £600 million—the local sustainable transport fund—which, by encouraging match funding, has now produced more than £1 billion of funding for schemes on the ground, which are now being delivered. I have that rare pleasure as a Transport Minister of both approving the funding and still being there to open the schemes when they finally arrive. Many of those schemes involve cycleway provision. We are now seeing a commitment to cycling—a commitment right across England—that we did not see before. That is very good news. The number of people cycling is going up in this country.

My hon. Friend also mentioned light rail systems. I can assure him that we are doing a great deal to promote light rail. I refer him to the Department’s document “Green Light for Light Rail” and the fact that we have granted extensions to light rail systems in Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham, as well as authorising a tram-train project between Sheffield and Rotherham. The current Government is very supportive of light rail.

Of course, these sorts of scheme, whether they involve light rail, bus or cycle provision or, indeed, local roads, will be handled in future to a large degree by local people through the devolution proposals that the Department is bringing forward and through the creation of local transport boards, which are accountable through local authorities. Therefore, to a large degree, these sorts of discussion in the future, I hope, will be held in Essex, rather than necessarily in this House.

[Robert Halfon]

Will my hon. Friend agree to meet me, the local council and the enterprise partnership, as well as the other Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond), once the study by Essex council on the extra junction on the M11 has been completed, so that we can make the case to the Department?

[Norman Baker]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s tenacity on that matter. He has raised it before, when I responded to a debate that he introduced. I am very happy to make my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) aware of his continued interest in the matter. I am sure that the Under-Secretary will be looking at the report on junction 7a, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow referred earlier, but I will pass on his request for a meeting and ensure that my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon replies to that accordingly.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow also raised the issue of smartcard delivery and how that can be rolled out. The Department is very keen on that and I lead on it for the Department. We believe that the availability of smartcard technology can transform public transport by making it far more attractive and easier to use, as has been proven to be the case in London. We are now seeing pilot schemes across the country.

For example, in the Southern train area, we will shortly be seeing three-day season tickets being piloted with smartcard technology. We are very committed to that. The local transport White Paper, which I launched last year, “Creating growth, cutting carbon: making sustainable local transport happen”, has an objective of the majority of public transport journeys being undertaken with smartcard technology by the end of 2014, and we are on target for that.

I hope that I have dealt with most points. If there are any outstanding points, one of my ministerial colleagues or I will write to hon. Members about them.