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Mrs. Dunwoody: My hon. Friend has chosen to accuse me of abusing parliamentary procedure, and I have to say that that is the first time in 30 years that anyone has said anything of the sort. I certainly believe that Lord Cullen
must make his recommendations, but I am deeply concerned about the fact that straight after the accident, Railtrack gave certain undertakings about the immediate creation of a railway safety authority. I made that point then and I make it now, and I resent the suggestion that I am doing anything that in any way abuses parliamentary procedure.
Mr. Snape: I stand by what I said, and my hon. Friend can resent what she likes. The future of the railway industry is done no great service by attacks such as those that have just been made, particularly when the Government have set up an inquiry to look into all the causes of the Ladbroke Grove disaster and to make proposals that will, I hope, be debated and accepted as quickly as possible.
Another allegation is that Railtrack is unfit to investigate rail accidents or to have any responsibility for rail safety. If Railtrack does not do that, who will? It is easy to demand independent inquiries, but the technicalities of rail safety are complicated and people investigating rail accidents must have prior knowledge of the industry, track layout and how signalling is designed and installed. Finding someone who is independent and who has the knowledge to take on that responsibility on a day-to-day basis is no easy task.
We ought to get away from the concept that, to us, everything that the previous Government did is automatically bad, and, to the Tory party, everything that the Government are doing is automatically bad. Those who work at any level in the railway industry deserve better from this House.
I cannot understand the present-day Conservative party from the terms of the motion: a Conservative Opposition are denouncing a Labour Government for not spending enough public money on transport. I was always brought up to believe that the wicked Tories were against public expenditure, but somehow they have decided that there is some political mileage to be gained from hammering such spending on transport.
I do not want to bore the House too much with my experiences, but I have seen lots of public money spent on the railway industry since the late 1950s when I began working in it. I have seen lots of public money wasted on it by Conservative Governments. I well remember the aftermath of the 1955 modernisation plan, when millions of pounds of public money was spent on wiring up railway sidings that had not seen a wagon for years. Overhead wires were provided for sidings that had gone rusty before I was born.
I saw the Government of the day--a Conservative Government, I must remind the House--insist as part of that modernisation plan that railway locomotive purchase was spread as far around the country as possible. The result--I speak from memory, but I think that I am right--was 32 different types of diesel locomotives, many of which were in the knacker's yard in a decade because they were not any good. Is the Conservative party these days saying that all public expenditure is necessarily a good thing and that a Labour Government who look carefully at their expenditure priorities are misbehaving? I would have thought that the reverse would be true.
Can we get away from the philosophy that everything was wonderful when the railways were publicly owned and when they were privatised everything was appalling? I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich that the previous Conservative Government's system of privatisation was disastrous because it was introduced in too much of a hurry to get it out of the way before the then impending election.
However, the system has one advantage now that it is beginning to settle down, as my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich said. At last, and for the first time in my life, the railway industry is out from under the dead hand of the Treasury. Before people are allowed to renew franchises, they will have to pledge some long-term investment in the industry--not something that we could ever get out of the Treasury.
Again I refer to some of the disastrous mistakes following the 1955 modernisation plan--but we were lucky. I remember Peter Parker, as the chairman of British Rail, fighting desperately for a three-year investment plan in the industry, yet under franchising we can demand 20-year investment plans. The train operating companies do not just lease trains and run them; we can demand that they make improvements to infrastructure along the route that they have chosen to acquire. We could never do that in BR days.
Indeed, more often than not, the first piece of expenditure to be cut by successive Governments--Tory and Labour alike--was capital investment in our public sector industries in general and our railway industry in particular. I remind the House of the saga of the west coast main line electrification and modernisation. We did the first bit from Crewe to Liverpool and Manchester in 1959 and the second bit from Euston to Crewe in the mid-1960s, but it took another decade to complete the bit from Crewe to Glasgow--I nearly said Edinburgh--where it stopped in those days. That was largely because the Treasury, under successive Governments, could never resist interfering with investment plans.
Mr. Quinn: May I advise my hon. Friend that about 65 per cent. of all the design work with which I was personally involved in 18 years of working in the railway industry remains in some dusty drawer? I do not think that that is a reflection on my abilities as a designer, but it supports his point.
Mr. Snape: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I hope that those of us with practical experience of these matters can occasionally put politics aside and say that we have to start from where we are today if we are determined to have a better railway industry. There is no point harking back to the glory days--either pre-grouping, since nationalisation or beyond.
Of course the Tories got it wrong in the mid-1990s because they were in such a hurry, but other countries that are privatising have learned from our mistakes. Australia, which is a case in point, takes the same view that many of us are coming round to: if the railway industry is left in the public sector, it is always subjected to the vagaries of the economy. I am not saying that the private sector is immune from those vagaries, but at least long-term investment plans are part of the railway hinterland in a way that they never were in the past. We ought to recognise that.
I wish that the Conservative party would grow up and participate in a proper debate. In other parts of the world--particularly other parts of Europe--these matters are not considered worthy of political discussion, and whether Governments are of the left or of the right, a basic transport infrastructure is accepted as necessary and something that has to be paid for in any civilised society. However, the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) yesterday issued a press statement entitled "The new railway--serving the customer". As far as I am aware, no statement was made in the House, but I shall put that to one side.
The hon. Gentleman made some sensible proposals--for example, that franchise terms should be reviewed if the franchisee does not live up to them. Hon. Members on both sides of the House would not argue with that, but occasionally he moved into the realms of fantasy. One paragraph, entitled "Standing is Free", says:
- For too long passengers, particularly on London commuter lines paying full fares, have found themselves having to stand. Train companies now need to grasp the fact that their product includes a seat. Selling a fare without the capacity to provide a seat is like selling a hotel room without a bed.
- In passenger speak, it is a "rip off".
- Therefore we would ask the SRA to introduce a new policy whereby after three years of a new franchise all customers unable to get a seat would be entitled to a refund.
What about the people who choose to get into the front coach of a train arriving at a dead-end terminus? Many do so, all over the country, to get ready for the off. Should we compensate them as well? My hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich referred to the Indian situation, but that would lead to an overcrowding problem as people in one half of the train would stand on the roof, and on each other's heads, to qualify for a refund, while everybody else would demand breakfast because there was lots of space in the carriages.
Someone ought to take the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells aside and teach him the facts of life, particularly if one remembers when the time came--not much more than a decade ago, and under BR and public ownership--to replace the diesel multiple unit fleet. A Conservative Government insisted that that could be done only if three-car DMUs were replaced with two-car DMUs. Now the Conservative party complains about overcrowding. If ever a railway industry was designed to be overcrowded, it was that which the previous Government left us.
I hope that we can bring a little common sense to these debates. I am glad that the hon. Member for North Essex has returned to his seat. I hope that he will give serious and mature consideration to these matters instead of behaving like a red-nosed comedian without the red nose, particularly as he should obtain a new script from time to time. It is impossible to deliver the same jokes to the same audience all the time. I realise that the audience for these debates is not a great one, but those who attend regularly
would appreciate his getting a new scriptwriter so that we could at least hold a sensible and grown-up discussion on the railway industry. People in the industry deserve better than the debates that usually take place in the House and they certainly deserve a lot better than the cliched and hackneyed nonsense that they hear from the hon. Gentleman.
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