No-Deal Brexit: Cross-channel Freight

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Our policy has been consistent from the start: we want to leave the European Union with a deal. We will continue to work to do so but will make appropriate plans for all eventualities.

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

We all knew that a no-deal exit might happen, but none of us could have said that it would definitely happen. So I do not know which is worse: whether the Secretary of State has overseen contracts that did not have the flexibility and caveats built into them to allow for that eventuality, or whether he refuses to admit that that was a mistake. Whatever it is, this combination of incompetence and arrogance is costing the taxpayer a lot of money. What assurances do we have that as we approach the October deadline and he begins over the summer to look at this process again, he will learn from the mistakes and not waste even more money?

[Chris Grayling]

That is precisely why these contracts had early cancellation provisions that enabled us to close the contracts down at a cost that was much lower than the full cost of the contracts.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ms Ghani]

I am a little confused by the hon. Gentleman’s statement, because the Government are yet to put out our response. We are working with the charities sector, including with the Community Transport Association and community transport operators. There is an EU regulation that we are trying to make this fit into, but we are committed to ensuring that our community transport operators continue to operate. That is why we have the £3 million fund and the £11.5 million building connections fund.

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

4. What steps he is taking to reduce potential disruption to travel at UK ports in the event of the UK leaving the EU without a deal.

[Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)]

9. What steps he is taking to reduce potential disruption to travel at UK ports in the event of the UK leaving the EU without a deal.

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Chris Grayling)]

The Department has been working for some time to ensure that traffic can continue to flow through UK ports as frictionlessly as possible in all scenarios when we leave the European Union. This has included engaging closely with others across Government, and with ports and their representative bodies. As regards ferry capacity, I refer the House to the two statements I made earlier this week.

[Tommy Sheppard]

The Government will forgive the House some scepticism about their efficacy and intention in this regard. Surely the Seaborne fiasco shows that only one of two things can be happening: either there is abject incompetence in the preparations for no deal; or the Secretary of State and his Department are not really taking them seriously. Which is it?

Oral Answers to Questions

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Mc Nally (Falkirk) (SNP)]

1. What assessment he has made of the effect of the UK leaving the EU on the rail industry.

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

3. What assessment he has made of the effect of the UK leaving the EU on the rail industry.

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Chris Grayling)]

The Government’s rail sector report was published in December and included an analysis of the rail industry. We keep our analysis under constant review. Our future relationship with the EU on rail will be a matter for the negotiations. Both the UK and the EU have greatly benefited from investment in each other’s rail markets. We want that to continue as the UK leaves the EU.

[Chris Grayling]

I am not sure quite what that has to do with our future relationship with the EU, but I want the rate of increase of rail fares to come down. The biggest barrier to that is the Labour party’s and the trade unions’ insistence that the RPI measure has to be at the heart of every pay increase in the rail industry. The industry collectively needs to move to RPI, but the training manuals for the unions that back the Labour party insist that it is unacceptable to negotiate on anything except an RPI increase.

[Tommy Sheppard]

The Government often cite EU regulations on state aid as a constraint on their agency. Can we therefore look forward, after Brexit, to innovative new approaches to the public ownership of the railways, or will the Secretary of State continue to sell rail services to the state-owned companies of other EU countries?

[Chris Grayling]

We have a diverse rail market, with investment from the UK and international investment. I hope very much that after Brexit we will not become a country that does not welcome international investment. We are an outward-facing global nation, and I hope that will continue.

Transport Secretary: East Coast Franchise

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

I always travel by train when I can, and with respect to colleagues from the north-east of England, I am going to lay claim in this debate to be Virgin Trains East Coast’s best customer. I have made 32 return journeys from Edinburgh to London in the past 12 months. That is the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe in a Virgin train and it gives me quite an insight into the service.

I pay tribute to the staff of that service who have served me over these years—the people who drive the trains, who check the tickets, who serve the drinks, who provide the information—and also the many hundreds of staff who work in the depots, cleaning and engineering these magnificent machines. I think it is a shame, the way in which they have been treated, and that they are constantly being told that their boss and their uniform is changing, rather than being valued for the service that they provide.

We have heard a lot about ideology in this debate. The Government seem convinced that their opponents are motivated only by ideological dogma. Anyone reviewing the text of this debate surely can only conclude that the reverse is the truth—that in fact, it is the Government who are so blinkered by ideological dogma in favour of privatisation that they refuse even to consider the possibility of a contemporary public sector alternative. That seems to me very regrettable, because there are many positive reasons why the public sector alternative should be considered. I just want to name two.

The first reason is that it would allow integration of the management of the service and remove the ridiculous separation between the train and the track that is responsible for many of the problems that we are facing in the operation. What better way to ensure that the track serves the demands of the train service than to place it under the management of the same people who manage the train service? The idea of separating a vehicle from what it is travelling on might make sense with a road network, where there are lots of different avenues to travel, but the train only has one track on which to get from A to B, and the management of those things ought to be integrated. That could happen, in a public sector organisation.

[Alan Brown]

Clearly, I agree with the points that my hon. Friend is making. Does this not further reinforce the argument that, in Scotland, Network Rail should be devolved to Scotland, to allow the Scottish Government to have that integration he is talking about?

[Tommy Sheppard]

Indeed, and I will come to that later.

The second big positive of having a public sector operator is that it will allow for much greater investment—we would not have to have investment that was contingent on franchise payments and on levels of use; we could just take a serious decision, as a grown-up country, and say, “We need to rapidly and significantly invest more in our rail network if we are to bring it up to scratch and achieve the type of global service that our competitors can achieve.”

I represent Edinburgh East, including the world-famous Waverley station. I admit there have been some improvements over the past few years—we have seen the market share of the rail journey from Edinburgh to London rise to a peak of 37%—but that still leaves nearly two thirds of the people who make the journey from Edinburgh to London taking the plane. Surely that is a ridiculous situation, and we must take urgent action.

The industry will tell us that, when we get the journey time down to four hours, that is a tipping point and that will take market share to around 40% but, to get the train as the majority means of transport between Scotland and London, we will have to reduce the journey time to three hours, and that can only happen with massive investment in a high-speed network and it can only happen with a new fleet of trains. So I want the Minister to confirm that these changes that are taking place will not in any way affect the delivery in December of the roll-out of the new Azuma fleet on the east coast line and that he will engage seriously and purposefully with the Scottish Government in discussing the investment required for HST in the future.

The Scottish Government, because of devolution, have some responsibility for the rail network in Scotland, yet as with so many other things it is working in a straitjacket that is set by this place. We have repeatedly said, over a long period, that the franchise for rail services in Scotland should be run by a public sector operator. We tried, in a debate on the last Scotland Bill, to get the whole regime transferred to Holyrood, but could not find support from any other parties in this Chamber. There is now a golden opportunity, however, for the Department for Transport to take seriously the Scottish Government’s request. Now we have the ability to put a public sector operator into the tender process, there is an opportunity in Scotland—if they will not do it here—to use this to experiment to see how a contemporary public sector operation takes place. The Thatcher Government began the attacks on British Rail when, as a service, it was still reeling from the attacks of Beeching and the massive line closures. We do not know what a public sector operator would be like now if privatisation had not happened. Maybe—just maybe—we might have had trains as good as people have in France and Germany.

This is a motion of censure, and I find it surprising that the Secretary of State has absented himself from the debate. This is not a normal motion on a matter of policy; it is a motion that questions the capability and commitment of an individual. At the very least, he ought to have the decency and respect to be in attendance in this Chamber to hear the case against him.

Community Transport

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Davies. On behalf of the third party, I associate myself and my colleagues with the Transport Committee presentation and the speech of its Chair, the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), in support of the general thrust of our discussion today.

We cannot overstate the gratitude that we should express to the many hundreds of organisations throughout the country that provide a community transport service and, in particular, to the many thousands of volunteers who are involved in the boards of the charities, running the services and, often, sitting at the wheel to provide the service itself. Such people are the dedicated community heroes whom we should be lauding, saluting and encouraging. I suggest that the role of Government is to nurture, enable and give support to people who want to provide that service in their community, so I regret that we seem to have got ourselves into a situation in which this Department for Transport consultation exercise leaves many of those people devalued and in many ways frightened about the future of the service in which they are engaged.

In my own city of Edinburgh, we have a very good community transport service. There are five main providers operating in a public sector partnership with the local authority. In my constituency, the South Edinburgh Amenities Group and Lothian Community Transport Services provide an excellent service, which is not just a matter of transporting people from A to B. The whole nature of the service, and the rationale behind it, is that it provides a vital social and caring service to those people in our community who need it. We cannot overstate the importance of the service in preventing and overcoming the social isolation that many people would otherwise feel. The service is vital not just in providing material and physical help to people, but in allowing them to live their lives more fully and better than would otherwise be the case.

Community transport is a service provided at an individual level, and it gets to the places that normal transport does not or cannot reach. Quite often, that involves getting people not only to the door but through the door, with physical assistance for people to get into vehicles—something that normal operators simply could not provide.

I am very disturbed about the process that is under way. There is some confused thinking going on, particularly in the attempt to redefine, after all these years, the notion of the word “commercial”. To suggest that simply by virtue of the fact that money is paid to a service—irrespective of who is paying it and who is receiving it—an operation is rendered commercial seems to me to turn on its head what most normal, right-thinking people believe to be a commercial operation. A commercial operation, for most people, is one in which an operator engages in supplying a service in order to make a profit. That is the normal meaning of “commercial”. Organisations that do that explicitly not for profit should not be regarded as commercial, and they should be exempted from the requirements of sections 19 and 22 on that basis alone.

Even more bizarre is the suggestion that it will be for a private operator to decide whether we apply the exemption—only when a private operator says that it might be interested in running the service will the community transport operator be obliged to go into the new licensing regime. I find that bizarre. We could have a situation in which, on the one hand, a community transport operator is regarded as commercial simply because it receives payment from the local authority or someone else for providing the service and, on the other hand, it could be exempted and be non-commercial on the grounds of there being no private sector interest. At one and the same time, the operator could be both commercial and non-commercial. That is a policy of which Schrodinger would be proud, but it ought to have no part in the planning of public transport.

We must also understand the effect. If the proposal goes ahead, many community transport operators will be faced with higher costs as they try to fit in with a licensing regime that they did not have previously. More importantly, a lot of the volunteers who run such organisations will simply say, “This isn’t why we got into this. We didn’t go into it to be a commercial operator or to operate on this basis”, and they will simply give up. We will see a collapse in community transport organisation providers, and that will leave a gap in the service, driving up the cost to the local authority or anyone else who needs to provide the service.

[Stephen Pound]

Many volunteer drivers would be extremely put off by having to undergo all the onerous training to get the additional certification. Many people will simply walk away if they are required to get all that additional certification. Does the hon. Gentleman agree?

[Tommy Sheppard]

I could not agree more. That is another reason for that effect of the policy—if we oblige community transport operators to jump through the new hoops and the red tape, many people will simply say, “Well, that’s not what I want to do. I want to serve my community. I don’t want to do this.” The Department ought to be responsive to that.

I have a couple of final observations. First, I cannot be the only person to find it bizarre that the suggested rationale for why this is happening now is a sudden desire by some officials in the Department to comply better with the regulations of the European Union. We are, after all, only 47 weeks away from being led out of the European Union by this Government, whereby they hope to free themselves from the shackles imposed on them by just such European Union regulations and many others. Why the sudden outbreak of Europhilia, at the 11th hour of our membership of the European Union? It does not add up. It is probably a smokescreen for some other agenda going on in the Department.

Secondly—I know I am the only Scottish MP present—as I researched for the debate and read around the issue, I have to confess that I realised that the situation in my city is bizarre. The roads along which the community minibus travels are regulated and paid for by the Scottish Government; the people inside the bus are being taken to health and social care facilities that are regulated and legislated for by the Scottish Government; and yet the Scottish Government have no oversight of whether the operator should have a licence to drive the bus. That seems to me to be something of an inadequacy in the devolution settlement. I hope that next time we review the competencies of the devolved Administrations we consider some more joined-up thinking in that regard, so that the settlement is at least internally consistent, and all aspects of public policy can be integrated.

I have attended many of these Westminster Hall debates and usually they are much more collegiate than exchanges in the main Chamber. However, I do not think I have yet seen one in which there is this degree of unanimity in the views expressed by Members right across the House. The Minister is an admirable fellow, and I know that his fingerprints are not on this particular consultation. He now has a golden opportunity to rein in his Department, to say “Stop!” to whoever is driving this policy, and to recognise in public policy and Government action the importance and uniqueness of community transport providers the length and breadth of this country.