Increasing Choice for Rail Passengers

Stephen Hammond Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered increasing choice for rail passengers.

It is a pleasure to have you in charge of our proceedings, Mrs Moon. It seems that almost no one is terribly happy with how our railways are performing at the moment. Not passengers, who have to suffer delayed or cancelled trains when timetables go into meltdown, as they have done repeatedly recently, causing misery for millions. Not the unions, who have been in an on-off dispute on a variety of routes for months. Not the staff, who have to cope with angry passengers every day. Not the rail firms, who have repeatedly handed back expensive franchises to the Government because they cannot make them work, and not rail Ministers, who face continuous incoming flak, from urgent questions in Parliament to critical headlines and irate passengers who lose thousands of man-and-woman hours battling to get to and from work every day.

That is odd, because until recently Britain’s railways were quite a success story; something to be proud of. Since denationalisation, passenger rail journeys have more than doubled, and we have one of the safest railways for passengers of any major network in the EU. What has gone wrong? Why is everybody on all sides unhappy with where we are today? I argue it is because franchising has run its course. It might have worked in the past, but not any more—at least, not well enough. It has become a brittle, inflexible, fiendishly complicated, expensive old thing that causes misery and frustration for millions and which nobody loves.

The root of the problem is that franchises put train firms, rather than passengers, first, because passengers do not have any real choices when things go wrong. Why should we be at the mercy of a single train company when the timetable melts down? If a train is delayed or cancelled, we ought to be able to switch to a different firm’s service that is still running instead; franchising takes away that choice. If we do not like the service the franchise-holding firm provides—tough. Our only choices are to get in the car, which could mean traffic jams and is not very green, get on a bus, which is usually slow, or just lump it and get back on the train.

It is weird, really. We would not put up with being banned from changing to a different brand of coffee, cornflakes or broadband. We expect to be able to choose between a dizzying array of different car insurers or energy firms. But trains? No.

[Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)]

Although I agree with my hon. Friend that franchising has severe problems and has run its course, does he agree that one of the central problems is Network Rail and its inability efficiently to allocate track access, and the money it gets for investment and upgrading, to the franchises, as it would do if there was more open access on the system?