Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether she has taken recent steps to improve the resilience of railways to landslips.

Network Rail, as the infrastructure manager of Britain’s railways, has the main responsibility for maintaining the integrity and safety of the rail network from landslips. To this end, Network Rail has allocated £2.8 billion during Control Period 7 (2024-2029) to be invested on activities and technology to improve system wide resilience to extreme weather and climate change, including landslips.  These activities include both preventative and reactive measures, including reinforcing embankments, enhancing drainage systems, stabilising slopes, and using remote sensing and real-time monitoring to predict and monitor slope movements to enable early intervention.  Network Rail has recently invested £33m to prevent landslips on the Browney Curvey near Durham, £25m on the Severn Estuary line and £3.5m on the Edinburgh to Glasgow line.  Network Rail has also developed a range of measures to enable it to anticipate and mitigate disruption to the rail network caused by extreme weather, which are contained in its Weather Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation Plan.  These build on the recommendations of the Mair-Slingo reports, which were commissioned following the Stonehaven derailment in August 2020.