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9.2 pm
Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock): I listened carefully to what the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr. Day) said, and I agree with him in one respect. It should be said in the Chamber that, like him, I was serving on a Select Committee this afternoon, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich(Mrs. Dunwoody). Time and again, the people who run this House--the Leader of the House and perhaps others--arrange transport debates or Opposition Supply days when hon. Members who want to participate and who demonstrably have an interest in participating are in Committee, and hon. Members who perhaps do not have a bona fide excuse for not participating do not attend. Parliament is serving the fare-paying public badly when such an important debate is so poorly attended.
I hope that the party managers will in future get their act together so that members of the Transport Select Committee can attend such transport debates and hear the
arguments advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Ms Short) and by the Secretary of State. We were denied that opportunity today because of the way in which the people who manage the House have acted.
Having got that off my chest, I want to say that a lot of rubbish was spoken by some hon. Members, who diverted this important debate on rail privatisation into avenues relating to trade union sponsorship and so on. Some Conservative Members receive thousands of pounds from trade unions--quite legitimately--for acting as consultants, but that is not deemed to be inappropriate. That is a matter of fact--one such Member is in the Chamber at present.
There is some agreement among the political parties about the parlous state of our railways. We agree that the railways are clapped out, that staff are demotivated, that we have a shortage of staff, that we have high fares and that the fare-paying public are sick and tired of our deteriorating rail transport system. The public want remedies, and that is where the parties differ. The fare-paying public believe that the parlous state of the railways is a result of the repeated starvation of resources by successive Governments, but particularly by the present Government who have been in power for a long time. They know that our railways are clapped out because of the failure of the Conservative Government to provide proper funding. That is the real problem.
The Government are now trying to extricate themselves from their embarrassment and kick into touch the problem by flogging off this important infrastructure asset in such a way that the damage will not occur in the time in office of the current occupants of the Treasury Bench. The public want investment in our railways, and they want a modernisation of our railways. They understand that the fragmented scheme that the Government are proposing is a prescription for disaster, and will bring us to the brink of a second Beeching. If it goes ahead, the result will be higher fares, a diminished service and the closure of intermediate stations--particularly as the real estate is flogged off by the new owners of Railtrack. There will be a different map of our railway network a decade from now because of the actions of the Government. There is an opportunity tonight for Conservative Members--those who are in the Chamber--to stop the Government going down this foolish path. I hope that, even at this stage, they will join us in the Lobby and put the freeze on this crackpot course.
The hon. Member for Cheadle said that he thought the proposed method of privatisation was foolish, as did the late Robert Adley. The scheme was not designed that way, however. The previous Secretary of State for Transport said that the Government were not going to privatise Railtrack for a long time. But the Government are running out of resources, they are running out of a legislative programme, and there have been changes on the Treasury Bench. The Government should have disposed of Railtrack in the way proposed by both the late Robert Adley and the hon. Member for Cheadle--if they had to privatise, they should have sold off the track and the trains on a regional basis. But that plan was abandoned by earlier Tory Secretaries of State, and the Government are now compounding their errors by selling off this important infrastructure because it is valuable real estate.
My constituents have suffered from the franchising process already. They have seen the halting of the London-Tilbury-Southend line franchise--the misery line--at the 11th minute of the 11th hour, and we do not now know what is going to happen. One thing revealed by the aborted LTS franchise was that the passenger service requirement was not worth the paper it was written on. When Enterprise Rail was creating its shadow franchise in the build-up to the sell-off, we were told that there would be four trains an hour at peak hours. At first glance, one would think that that broadly matches the present situation. But if one cross-examines and probes that statement, one finds that it means two trains one way and two trains the other way--there is no guarantee that the existing inadequate service will be maintained following rail privatisation. We have in a sense looked into the abyss, and we know that what happened to the LTS line is likely to happen elsewhere.
The hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn), who is not in his place, spoke a lot of humbug about trade unions. He also raised the question of safety. He alleged that Opposition Members were scaremongering. On my London-Tilbury-Southend line I already have a number of important privatised junctions to various industries along the river frontage. Lines go off at junctions with signal boxes to an Esso plant, car freight depots and Vandenburgh and Jurgens. I am concerned because we are already suffering from the fragmentation of control and the training and employment of staff, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) has referred in interventions.
On 10 April an incident occurred on a private track off the LTS line in my constituency. A freight train was going in or out of a private yard and there was an incident on the crossing. The private train, going into a private yard, was left sticking out on the main line and the fare-paying public on the LTS line were left stuck, not in stations, but on trains for two and a half hours because the privatised signalman, or his crossing, was not operating properly. There was absolute chaos and a potentially enormous hazard was created. That scenario will be compounded as track and operators are privatised. We will find that the frustration of people who pay fares will increase because their trains will not run. Various organisations will blame each other and argue about who should remedy the situation. I believe that dangers will be created as a result of the fragmentation of control.
I am about to conclude, but I am grateful to see that some more Tory Members have come into the Chamber. On the last occasion when I spoke, I referred to all the stations on the south-west lines. I shall not go through the litany again. In a few years' time when their constituents are complaining, Tory Members of Parliament here tonight, if they are still Members of Parliament, will put the violin music on in the background and say how dreadful it is that their stations have closed, there are no trains at weekends, fares have gone up, and so much has changed on the railway network. Some branch lines will have closed. Tory Members will put on a phoney act of weeping and gnashing of teeth saying that it was not them. We shall remind them that it was they who went into the Division Lobby prepared to sell off this public asset to the disadvantage of their constituents. If and when it happens, they will be to blame.
Mr. Brian Wilson (Cunninghame, North):
We have heard some valuable speeches from Labour Members. I particularly recommend that Conservative Members, if they are capable of listening and learning, listen with respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, East (Mr. Heppell), who spoke about safety. It takes someone who has worked on the railways, as he has, to understand the complexities and the folly of what is being done and to set aside on the basis of that reality the trite reassurances that Tories offer to themselves. They are playing with fire in this privatisation.
Just as important, as I have said throughout this process, and just as wrong as the privatisation, is the process of fragmentation on the railways. As my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay) said, the Government can take no comfort from anything that the Health and Safety Executive has said at any stage in that process. It has said specifically that an inherently less safe, more dangerous railway is being created. It has made recommendations to counter the fragmentation process. If the Government are prepared to put in place an inherently less safe railway network, what kind of responsibility to society does that show? Steps of enormous complexity have had to be taken to guard against what the Government are doing.
Let us get rid of one of the international canards and be absolutely clear that no Government or country has embarked on anything remotely resembling the process of rail fragmentation in which the Government are now engaged. I would suggest that no other country has done that not for ideological reasons but for safety reasons; other countries have realised and accepted that a fragmented railway system is inherently less safe.
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