Cost of Public Transport

Simon Burns Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood]

I shall deal with that very question later on in my speech, so the hon. Gentleman should listen attentively.

Why did the Transport Secretary not raise the alarm in the last Parliament when the estimated cost of electrifying the midland main line rose from £250 million to £540 million, and then to £1.3 billion? Why did he not do so when the cost estimates for great western electrification rose from £548 million to £930 million, and then to £1.7 billion? Of course, the estimate has now risen further still, to £2.8 billion. Why did he not act when the Transport Committee warned in January 2015:

“Key rail enhancement projects...have been announced by Ministers without Network Rail having a clear estimate of what the projects will cost, leading to uncertainty about whether the projects will be delivered on time, or at all”?

Will the Transport Secretary confirm that he commissioned a report on the state of the electrification programme, which was given to him in September 2014? This report has never been published, and a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy has been personally refused by a Minister in his Department. What did that report say, and what has he got to hide?

The truth is that the Department was clearly warned by Network Rail about the impending northern power cut. The company’s board discussed last March

“the decisions required jointly with the DFT”

regarding

“enhancement deferrals from June”.

Network Rail’s chief executive has confirmed to me:

“In mid-March 2015, Network Rail informed DfT that decisions may need to be made in the coming months about the deferral of certain schemes.”

If the Secretary of State really was not aware of what his own Department and Network Rail were doing, there is only one possible explanation: he made it clear that he did not want to know. He failed to take responsibility, and passengers are now paying the price.

We were told that 850 miles of track would be electrified before 2019, but now the Department is refusing to say how many miles of track will be electrified in this Parliament. Is it half the original target? Is it a quarter? Will the Transport Secretary confirm that by 2019 this Government would do well to realise the plans for electrification set out by a Labour Secretary of State, the noble Lord Adonis, a decade earlier?

Let me return to the cost of tickets.

[Sir Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)]

rose—

[Lilian Greenwood]

I am not going to give way at the moment, because I want to make some progress. The Government claim they will not increase regulated fares above inflation, and we will hold them to that promise, but may I remind the Transport Secretary of his comments from two years ago, when he said that Labour’s fares freeze

“would cost £1.8 billion over the lifetime of the next parliament and be paid for by more borrowing and higher taxes.”

Given that the black hole in Network Rail's finances will be plugged by £1.8 billion-worth of asset sales and £700 million of additional borrowing, has not this Government’s ostrich-like approach to the railways resulted in what the Transport Secretary’s own party might call more spending, more borrowing, and more debt?

We need investment in our rail network, both in HS2 and in the existing railways. I am proud of the fact that we saw record investment between 1997 and 2010. Our Government invested more in the railways, in real terms, than any previous Government, addressing the chronic maintenance backlog, replacing thousands of unsafe, slam-door Mark 1 coaches and ending the appalling safety crisis created by the disaster that was Railtrack. I am concerned that the Government’s programme has come to resemble not the much heralded “biggest investment since the Victorian era” that we have heard so much about, but the ill-prepared 1950s modernisation plan that did so much damage to support for the railways.

As we come to make the case for additional investment, we need Ministers to own up to the challenges that the programme continues to face, but again and again, the message is the same: they did not know; they were not responsible; and they were not there. We could ask what exactly Ministers were doing instead of keeping improvements on track, because they were not keeping an eye on the franchising programme, which collapsed in 2012 costing taxpayers more than £50 million, or on the allocation of trains in the north, as the Secretary of State approved the transfer of new rolling stock from TransPennine to the south, triggering a capacity crisis that cost taxpayers another £20 million to resolve. It seems that their focus was solely on privatising East Coast, a successful public sector rail operator, which delivered record passenger satisfaction and punctuality scores—

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it was to listen to the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon)? It was an excellent maiden speech. As everyone in the Chamber knows, it is usually a nightmare to make your first speech in this Chamber. The way in which the hon. Gentleman delivered his speech, without showing a single nerve, justifies the reputation that outsiders from the south like me heard about in the run-up to the by-election: that he was a highly effective leader of his local council in Oldham. He is not a loss to Oldham and he is certainly a gain to the House of Commons. We look forward to his future contributions to our debates.

I read the motion very carefully and I listened to the shadow Secretary of State with great interest and growing amazement. I noticed that she was able to make her speech while keeping a straight face. It was quite incredible. Here is a motion which, if we look at the parts relating to the railways, is basically, in nice cuddly words, suggesting that we renationalise them. Many of my hon. Friends, and certainly the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton, are too young to remember the days of British Rail, but the way that history has been rewritten to suggest that everything was wonderful under that monolithic organisation is extraordinary. It was late, expensive, the sandwiches curled up at the ends, and it did not provide a fit-for-purpose rail system for this country.

I am not going to rehearse, owing to the shortness of time, what has happened since rail privatisation. What I will say is that because of the private sector and the Government, there has been massive investment in our rail network. Because I am more generous than the Labour Front-Bench spokesmen, I accept that the previous Labour Government began the process of reinvesting in our railways to make them fit for purpose. I would ask, however, that they be equally generous in accepting that we are spending billions and billions of pounds, from a variety of sources, to invest in building on that improvement, to make sure that we have a proper rail service. In control period 5, £38 billion is being spent.

More has to be done, of course, but we are investing in the future and in passengers to ensure that we have a proper railway. Anyone who suggests going back to a nationalised rail service is living in cloud cuckoo land and is driven by dogma, not reality.