Weather Events (South West England)

Debate between Sheryll Murray and Gary Streeter

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hood. It is great that the Minister responding to this debate knows a great deal about the south-west of England, representing as he does North Cornwall, which is also feeling the impact of the issues that we are grappling with.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) on securing this debate, and he made a characteristically passionate speech. However, I say gently to him that his analysis appears to be that everything was great before 2010 and disastrous since 2010. That is not the real world. Other than that, I appreciate the passion and power with which he put forward his argument. He is right to say that we have to do more, both on flood risk management and on upgrading and making our infrastructure more resilient.

The greatest challenge that we in the south-west face is peripherality. People think that, when they get to Bristol, they have arrived in the south-west, but they have not; they are in the south midlands or the west country, not in the south-west. Plymouth is 110 miles from Bristol. I often thought, as I got off the train in days gone by—it seems a long time ago that I got off the train at Plymouth—that I felt sorry for people going on to Penzance in Cornwall, which is another hour and a half on the train. We are a long way from anywhere. Of course, peripherality keeps us beautiful and it is one of the great things that keeps our region from being overwhelmed.

[Sheryll Murray]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the railway has become more important since Plymouth lost its airport? It is the main link to the south-west and Cornwall now.

[Mr Streeter]

I agree—it is the main link, although the M5 and A38 are pretty good in terms of bringing all the many hundreds of thousands of visitors who will come to us at Easter. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris), who represents Dawlish so ably, that the south-west is certainly open for business.

If our big problem is peripherality, the solution to that is connectivity. This is where our rail link is so important. Yes, superfast broadband is important, as is the M5-A38 link, but as we have just heard, we do not have an airport at Plymouth any longer—there are airports at Newquay and Exeter, but not in Plymouth, which is the engine room of our sub-region—therefore our rail link is extremely important.

I remember a trip to India in 1990s with some Indian business people, just after the monsoon had struck, as it does every year in India. A frustrated Indian businessman said to me, “This is what is holding us back. Every year our physical infrastructure is overwhelmed by the weather and often is swept away and we have to start all over again.” We do not want to be in that position in the far south-west. We must have in place robust infrastructure that underpins our connectivity.

Let me mention the impact on Devon. There was, of course, flooding, which my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot talked about. By the way, just after the Dawlish breach, iconic pictures, now on the BBC’s “Spotlight” archive, show my hon. Friend raging against the elements, overlooking this breach, almost trying to turn back the storm and doing her utmost for her constituents in fighting for urgent action, which, of course, has followed. Those pictures will live with me for a long time. King Lear has nothing on my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot.

Of course, we have had flooding before, but the battering our coastline took was a new thing this year. In 2012, we had a lot more flooding inland, but it was the coastal attack that was so spectacular this time. There is a worthy scheme to compensate some businesses that have felt the impact of these storms and help has been announced for people in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, but no help has been announced for the people of Torbay or Plymouth. This may be an oversight. Perhaps a civil servant thinks that Devon includes Plymouth and Torbay, which, of course, geographically, it does; but legally it does not. Will my hon. Friend the Minister please look into that to ensure that those businesses on the seafront in Plymouth that were swept away by the storms are compensated in the same way as those along the Cornish or Devon coastline? My hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) would make the same point for his constituency if he were here.

[Mr Streeter]

I beg my hon. Friend’s pardon. Of course, that is right. He will no doubt make that point in his speech, which we anticipate.

Although we are talking about weather, the main focus of our attention today is rail resilience. Network Rail has responded quickly and I pay tribute to it. On the very day of the Dawlish breach, it attended a meeting with the Secretary of State for Transport, here at Westminster, and it was obvious that it was going to grip the situation. It gave a six-week timetable, which has slightly slipped because of further storms, and is getting on with it. I understand that it has 100 people working 24/7 to fill up this wonderful hole, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot described it. Congratulations to Network Rail on such a rapid response. The Secretary of State has also responded quickly, and it was good to see the Prime Minister coming down and taking personal control.

I, too, thank First Great Western. It gets hammered and gets a lot of criticism, but it has responded. Perhaps it took a couple of days, but it has now responded well. The service that it is putting on for many of my constituents is excellent.

[Sheryll Murray]

My hon. Friend might like to know that some constituents visited me yesterday and they were full of praise for First Great Western and asked me to mention it. Does he agree that this is now the trend, rather than people complaining about First Great Western?

[Mr Streeter]

I agree. It provides an increasingly impressive service to the far south-west. There is another debate to be had—it is not a matter for this Minister—about the future of the franchise and how, with only two and a half years to run, the company lacks the ability to invest in upgrading its rolling stock, and so on. That needs to be tackled, but that is for another day.

The real challenge will be not getting the Dawlish breach restored and the trains running again before Easter—I am confident that will happen—but, as my hon. Friend said, the report to the Government on alternative or additional routes that I understand will be made by July. That is when the fun will begin, because there will be myriad views on the right approach. Let me say, first, that I agree that the existing route has to be reinforced and kept open. We should consider alternative routes from Newton Abbot to Exeter that would be faster and straighter, because that would make the link from the far south-west to London much quicker and more acceptable, to business people in particular. That needs to be fully explored. However, I agree that the existing line must be kept open. All we may really need is an additional line to be used in extremis, but which can be used for freight and local traffic. Then if there should be another breach in years to come, traffic can be switched to that alternate route. It would be wise to wait until we see the report, but it will be important for those of us in the west country to try to reach a consensus on the right way forward. I am afraid that at the moment there are probably as many views as there are Members of Parliament in Devon and Cornwall, which is not helpful. We need to try to reach a consensus.

That issue is eclipsed by the far greater issue of funding. I agree with many of my constituents who ask me, “How on earth can you support HS2?” There is already tremendously impressive infrastructure from London to Birmingham and further north, while in the west country we have a Victorian line that is unfortunately looking more and more vulnerable. I have come to the conclusion that it is very difficult to answer that question, except by saying—as I have already said to Ministers—that it will be impossible for me to support the Government on the Second Reading of the hybrid High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill unless there is a firm commitment on the table for a fully funded package for an agreed alternative route. That has to be new money. There is a lot of money in the five-year budget, but a lot of things have to be done with it; it has to be new money. We are probably talking about hundreds of millions of pounds.