Rail 2020

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Iain Stewart]

I am too young to have been able to enjoy the east coast main line in those years, so I cannot comment, but from what I remember of the old British Rail Scottish region, the catering offer was not—

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

rose—

[Iain Stewart]

Edinburgh is about to intervene.

[Sheila Gilmore]

Has the hon. Gentleman sampled the catering offer and customer comfort on ScotRail, because I rather suspect it is not much better?

[Iain Stewart]

I have been on a number of trains in Scotland and had a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I do not know which services the hon. Lady has been on, but the last time I took a ScotRail train it was rather good.

If the Minister will forgive me, I want to touch on two local issues. First, I mentioned earlier the welcome investment that Virgin and London Midland are making in their rolling stock, which when all is delivered will achieve a considerable increase in capacity for my constituents. Until we get that, we have a problem with overcrowding, particularly during the evening peak. I have written to him about that before and so am just giving a gentle nudge to see whether we can reach a temporary arrangement between London Midland and Virgin to allow some London Midland passengers to use Virgin trains in the evening peak in order to spread demand.

Secondly—I made this point this last week—when we look at the second phase of high-speed rail and where the east-west line will intersect the proposed high-speed line in Buckinghamshire, perhaps it would be sensible to look at an intermediate station to allow people in Milton Keynes and the rest of Buckinghamshire to access the line.

In conclusion, the railways are in a good place. The problems and challenges we face are the product of success and increased patronage. The investment that is being made is welcome. I heartily endorse the different investments the Government are making and look forward to our achieving another golden age for the railway network.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

In recent months, I have been spending a lot of time working on issues relating to the east coast main line and the proposal to re-privatise it. The Backbench Business Committee was good enough to grant a debate on that some two weeks ago, which gave many of us an opportunity to explain why we had severe concerns about what was happening. In a lot of these debates it is interesting to see how we reprise a lot of our own prejudices—we are probably all a bit guilty of that—and we heard repeated the old mantra about British Rail’s soggy sandwiches and drinks that were like coffee or tea. However, some of us can also recall some pretty good things about British Rail. As a student, I was able to send my luggage in advance, door to door. None of the privatised rail companies has, at least as yet, repeated that. When my children were going to university, it was difficult to send their luggage. No doubt a lot of people now drive their children there and back, but we did not do that. There are good and bad things here. If we, on both sides of this argument, constantly raise those issues without having a proper debate, we will not progress things much further.

One advantage of the east coast line having been operated by Directly Operated Railways in the past few years is that we have been given something of a comparator. The Minister is fond of saying, “There is nothing really to compare. Every area and every franchise is different, so it is not a fair comparison.” Nevertheless, this arrangement has given us something that is perhaps as close as we are ever going to get to an ability to try out a comparison. It is a pity that the Government do not seem to want to allow it to continue so that we can see what is happening over a longer period.

Obviously, today’s debate is about looking more widely at railway issues and where they are going to be in the next few years. The things that have exercised the Government and the Transport Committee are the McNulty report, the cost of Britain’s railways and McNulty’s stark conclusion that our railways cost 40% more to run than comparable networks in Europe, many of which are state-run. If we had still had a nationalised railway at the time of McNulty and it had been found to be 40% more expensive, there would have been a huge outcry from many people about how dreadful it was and how we must do something about it. In some ways, one could start to construct the argument that it is a sign of the failure of the entire process of franchising and privatisation over nearly 20 years that we are in this position. We were promised that the system would be innovative and cheaper but that just does not seem to have happened. We should be having some serious discussions about why.

The Transport Committee has considered the problem and tried to analyse some of the reasons behind it. We have heard a number of suggestions about how we could achieve the efficiencies identified by McNulty. He considered staffing, closing ticket offices and cutting the number of train guards, but as the Transport Committee rightly said, safety issues must be considered, including people feeling safe when they travel. We do not want to compromise safety and we must ask what savings can be realised in such circumstances, particularly as McNulty was looking for substantial savings of £3.5 billion.

McNulty also suggested closer working between Network Rail and individual train operating companies—what is now called alliancing in the language of transport. A key driver of increased cost since privatisation has been the fragmentation of the industry to try to create competition when it is inherently difficult to do so with the split between track and stations and the operation of trains. The difficulty with alliancing is that it will not—or probably cannot—be rolled out on routes with multiple operators. Network Rail therefore said that from that point of view it does not expect to save much money, so, on that basis, we must ask how it would actually work.

McNulty also mentioned raising income from retail and we discussed that today. There have been changes in places such as the new King’s Cross station and the new St Pancras station. Sometimes, one walks into a station nowadays and wonders whether one is in a station or a shopping centre. It can even be quite difficult to find out where the platforms are, and people get quite disoriented. Whether such an approach is feasible anywhere other than in the big mainline stations must be considered with some degree of caution. Much of people’s travelling life is spent in relatively small stations in small places and people want to get there, get on their train and go, rather than have a shopping experience. One reason it works for the airlines is that people are required to arrive at airports very early and have a lot of time on their hands. In my view, one of the advantages of rail travel is that passengers are not required to spend a lot of time waiting. That is not to say that the idea is not a good one, to some extent, but the notion that we can achieve huge income and therefore efficiencies through such an approach is doubtful.

The Transport Committee states that if the efficiencies are not achieved, we must go back and consider the whole way in which the industry is structured to see whether that is the best way to make the railways work for us. If the McNulty proposals that the Government are working through do not achieve those savings, we will still have a serious problem ahead.

It is good that we are here. Our predecessors 40 years ago would have been surprised to find that we are in the Chamber discussing the railways with such enthusiasm, as they thought they were becoming a rather niche interest. However, there is a question about whether we are in this position because of privatisation, as some speakers have suggested, or whether we have seen a change all over Europe in how people travel. The initial attractions of car transport have diminished, particularly in a crowded island such as Britain. It must be said that much of the investment that has gone in since privatisation and that is still going in is from the public sector. It is not coming from the private operators, regardless of what was promised, so we as taxpayers are subsidising the railways. Perhaps that is the right thing to do, but whether it is the right thing to do through privatisation, so that we are, in effect, subsidising the profits made—where they are made—is a completely different question. As my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) said, we must not confuse correlation with causation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Burns]

I must make progress, because it is almost time for me to finish.

The Rail Delivery Group is showing how collaborative working across the rail industry can secure improvements in asset programme and supply chain management. We are working through our franchise programme to facilitate regional partnership working arrangements and alliances between train operators and Network Rail, as has been mentioned by a number of hon. Members.

[Sheila Gilmore]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Burns]

No, because I am running out of time.

Those arrangements could involve joint working to improve performance and planning for engineering works or to reducing delays and disruption for passengers. Integrated control centres can deliver smoother and more efficient network operations.

The Rail Delivery Group brings together Network Rail, freight operators and passenger train operators. It provides leadership for the industry, and offers a coherent and focused response to the investment and operational challenges laid down by the Government. Network Rail is enhancing its accountability with a new transparency scheme to publish more information and data that are of interest to the public.