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Mr. Jessel: Has not my hon. Friend left out the word "comprehensive"?
Mr. Hawkins: Indeed. It is a word beloved of so many Labour politicians, and it has always spelt disaster in education, as it would in rail if the Labour party ever had control over that area.
The crucial point about the anecdote that the shadow Transport Minister told in his opening speech was that, despite confusion over the telephone, the people concerned reached their destination on time. Moreover, they had two hours extra at Stansted airport. If the best that Opposition Front Benchers can do is tell a story of people who get to their destination on time and have two hours extra to enjoy the excellent facilities that the private sector has provided at Stansted airport, it shows the bankruptcy of their arguments.
I return to the crucial issue of the benefits that rail privatisation has produced. For many years before I came to the House, I campaigned for improvements to passenger services on the railways and worked with passenger consultative committees, transport users
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I want to mention some of the specific benefits that the taxpayer would never have had if the railways had remained under state control. Opposition Members do not understand how railways can be run commercially for the benefit of passengers, because so few of them have had any direct business experience; they all still believe that state control, which has failed throughout the world and has led to the death of socialism in eastern Europe and many other places, is in some way a redeeming feature of their policy, and that profit is a dirty word.
Opposition Members do not understand that, to provide benefits for consumers in a capitalist system, there have to be people who are prepared to take the commercial risk and one has to ensure that benefits and improvements to services can be funded by investment. That is what profit is all about; it produces risk takers who will provide the risk capital to produce benefits for passengers. That is what the new privatised system is all about.
Railtrack is going ahead with core modernisation programmes on the west coast main line, amounting to £1.3 billion. If Opposition Members seriously think that they could have got that kind of money from a Labour Chancellor, if we were ever unfortunate enough to have one, they can dream on: it would never have happened, because only the private sector can produce £1.3 billion of badly needed investment.
Railtrack has already awarded two parallel contracts for the signalling and control system to Transig, a consortium of ABB Transportation and Westinghouse Signals, and to a consortium of GEC Alsthom and Siemens. The main contract letting will begin late this year or early next year, and the work will start next year. There is no way that any Labour Chancellor could have promised that under a nationalised system; it would never have happened.
The infrastructure investment agreement between the franchising director and Railtrack for the upgrading of passenger facilities on the west coast main line, with tilting trains and dramatically reduced journey times, was signed on 7 October. Opraf is aiming to award the 15-year franchise for InterCity West Coast in March next year, and the benefits of the upgrade will flow to passengers over the next few years. Railtrack is discussing options for the freight usage of the west coast main line with the Department of Transport, and work on the freight upgrade plan is expected to be continued shortly.
It is essential, as those of us know who sometimes use the west coast main line and sometimes use the roads, to get more heavy freight off the M6 and on to the railways. That is already starting to happen from the Trafford Park terminal, as my hon. Friend the Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) pointed out, and it will increase as the infrastructure improvements come through. That will be of great benefit to those involved in long-haul freight, maximising the usefulness of the channel tunnel, and to
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There will be great benefits for British industry, especially in parts of the north-west, from using the channel tunnel. Long-haul freight going, for example, from Italy to the north-west and vice versa, can be made much more economic. It was always inevitable once the channel tunnel opened that economies of scale for long-haul rail freight would be improved dramatically, and much more heavy freight is now going by rail.
The channel tunnel is yet another example of a project that could never have existed except under a Conservative Government and with the help of the private sector. Opposition parties would never have got it built; the risk capital would never have been raised. The solution for rail freight in this country is the existence of the channel tunnel, and the upgrade that the private sector is producing for major trunk routes that run to the tunnel, such as the west coast main line, is vital.
The rail freight business is nearly completely privatised. Rail Express, Freightliner and Trainload Freight have all been sold and British Rail intends to sell Railfreight Distribution around the turn of the year. There is no doubt that Freightliner and the other companies have recorded notable successes in attracting new freight to the railways. Both Freightliner and EWS have plans for new investment that demonstrate their belief in rail's future.
My hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest drew attention in his splendid speech to the problems that many companies had in trying to place freight contracts with British Rail. As he rightly said, freight could be delivered by British Rail only if the customer agreed to a specific day and a specific time when the train would turn up.
We had proof positive of that in evidence given a few years ago to the Select Committee on Transport by Castle Cement in Lancashire, which said that it did not want to have to despoil rural Lancashire with fleets of heavy lorries, but was forced to do so, because whenever it tried to use the railways, the driver would turn up at the wrong time and the business of delivering cement to the other end of the country for a construction site was time sensitive. The driver would turn up sometimes several hours late and would then say, "I'm sorry, I've now got to take the engine all the way back to the depot because it needs some more diesel fuel." That was the pattern of freight on the old nationalised railways; that customer had been forced for the survival of its own business and the delivery of its services to invest in heavy lorries in which it did not want to invest.
The privatised freight business can be sensitive to customers' needs; they need not be dependent on when the driver turns up and there is a guarantee that the service level that they want will be provided. The scale of Railfreight's acute losses made the write-off of tunnel freight investment inevitable; it would have happened under any Government, regardless of our proceeding with privatisation.
Railtrack expects to spend no less than £8 billion over the next five years to maintain and improve the network. Even that huge sum does not include enhancement projects such as Thameslink 2000. Privatised Railtrack
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Railtrack's current commitment to a safe and efficient railway will be continued because it can raise money on the private sector capital market. The key aim of privatisation is to improve the quality of service on the railways. As my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest rightly said, it is customers who matter, not a rail system that appeared for so many years, until privatisation, to be run for the convenience of the employees rather than passengers.
Before I came to the House, I worked for many years with many dedicated rail employees who cared about customers, but the biggest concern expressed to transport users consultative committees year after year was about the poor quality of front-end contact with passengers, the lack of information, and the fact that people on the station platforms did not seem to care. When people travel on privatised services such as Gatwick Express, Great Western or Midland MainLine, which I discussed with my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) only the other day, they notice how vastly improved the services are. My home town is on the latter line. I know that the improved service is of dramatic benefit to the people who use it. It is not only quicker and more efficient; the attitude of customers to the provision of service to passengers is much improved.
On the Midland MainLine, there are plans to run22 extra services each weekday between London and Leicester. That is only one example; similar examples are to be found all over the new privatised railway. Some, such as the London-Tilbury-Southend line, which as my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest said is now run by Prism Rail, have improved security at stations. I commuted on that line for a while. There were rarely station staff in the evening to protect passengers travelling late at night and there were several serious incidents. Each of those reduced the number of passengers. Now that we have the extra staff to ensure security, I am sure that passengers travelling on the line will feel much safer. It is an improved service and more people will be prepared to use it, especially, as my hon. Friend said, ladies who have to travel late at night from the City back to their homes in Essex.
Many companies are investing in improved rolling stock. National Express Group plans to introduce a new fleet of rolling stock for the Gatwick Express service by 1989. NEG is also refurbishing the existing high-speed fleet on the midland main line and will introduce additional rolling stock to provide the extra services that I mentioned. On south-eastern services, Connex will undertake rolling stock investment worth about£400 million to replace all the slam-door stock within the 15-year life of the franchise, starting with the oldest stock shortly.
There is a rolling programme of further investment and improvement that no Chancellor of the Exchequer would have been able to afford from taxpayers' funds. Only by raising private sector money in the capital markets can such investment be provided. On Network SouthCentral, new off-peak and Sunday services for south London by the London and South Coast railway are planned. There is support from the franchising director of £85 million
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Safety on the railways is not only about preventing bad accidents when trains collide or are derailed, important though that is, but about safety for passengers who use trains, stations and car parks. Network SouthCentral will have a centrally co-ordinated passenger information system, with public address and display systems at stations.
On the south-eastern service, Connex is planning to invest a further £25 million in one section, with station improvements including enhancements to passenger security, ticketing systems and car parking. It will improve punctuality standards for the Kent link and services on the Kent coast.
I have used Thames Trains recently to travel to conferences. Victory Holdings plans to increase the frequency of the Oxford to Paddington service to make it half-hourly, and to introduce additional services between Thatcham, Theale, Newbury and Paddington from 1998. Services between Reading and Gatwick are being improved. There will be additional off-peak fast services to Maidenhead and improvements in Reading to London journey times.
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