Oswestry to Gobowen Railway Line

Valerie Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Valerie Vaz (in the Chair)]

I will call Helen Morgan to move the motion and then the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Oswestry to Gobowen railway line.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Vaz. This is an important subject for my constituents in the lovely town of Oswestry and the nearby village of Gobowen. Oswestry has a population of approximately 17,000 people. It is the second largest town in Shropshire and is of huge importance to the border region, but economic potential there is being stunted by poor public transport, which plagues the whole of Shropshire.

People who live in Oswestry are forced to rely on a bus or car to get to Gobowen railway station just up the road to access connections to larger economic centres, such as Shrewsbury, Liverpool or Manchester. What about someone who does not have a car and works in Chester? They will need to leave home by 7 am to get to the office for 9 o’clock—a journey that takes about 45 minutes in a car. Someone travelling further afield and returning late would need to get a taxi back from the station because the buses do not run outside regular hours, and that is if they can track down a taxi, which is another problem for another debate.

Oswestry was once a proud railway town. The railway station was on the main line of the Cambrian railway and, at one stage, it housed the headquarters of the Cambrian Railways Company. Unfortunately, it was a victim of the Beeching cuts, and there has been no connection to the main line from Oswestry since 1966. That is why the news that the restoring your railway fund would be used to reopen the line between Gobowen and Oswestry was so well received locally; and why the news that the Government wanted to scrap the funding, without even examining the new business case, has been such a huge disappointment. From healthcare and high streets to the environment and the economy, I cannot overstate what a transformational impact reopening the line would have on our area.

Poor public transport removes opportunity. It hinders young people, limiting their options for further and higher education and restricting their access to culture and leisure. In short, barriers to mobility are barriers to social mobility. During a recent visit to the jobcentre in Oswestry, the brilliant staff there told me that the No. 1 barrier to people accessing work is poor public transport. Meanwhile, I have spoken to businesses in Oswestry that have reported real difficulties in recruiting. They need to be able to attract people to work from a much wider area than Oswestry and not just those who have access to a private car. That means we are in the ridiculous situation where employers cannot recruit and jobseekers cannot find jobs to match their skills because of the same problem of poor public transport.

Let us take the outstanding Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt orthopaedic hospital near Gobowen: it has such a fine reputation that it has no trouble attracting high-quality staff, but the problem is that it cannot get people to and from their shifts early and late because there is no public transport, so if they do not have a car, the job will not work for them. Reopening the line would include a halt at the hospital. That would help to swell staff numbers and ease access for patients, many of whom are elderly, do not have access to a car and have to rely on the good will of friends to get to appointments on time. The hospital is a national resource: people come from across the country to access the excellent care there, including from the veterans’ centre, and railway access for them would be a huge bonus.

It is not just me who thinks that this is a great project. Feedback from the Department for Transport on the strategic outline business case acknowledged the importance of all of this:

“Oswestry is the second largest employment area in Shropshire, and unemployment in Oswestry is higher than the average in Shropshire. Productivity—the ability to match jobs with labour across North Shropshire—is a particularly pertinent issue. The growth in vacancies has been significant in Oswestry and Gobowen in recent years, which is exacerbated by the low population density and ageing populations of these areas.”