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Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): Does my hon. Friend agree that he, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) and I represent highly rural constituencies and that, without a satisfactory railway system, people will not stop making journeys, but will simply make them on the roads, which are becoming ever more congested? That is environmentally unsustainable.
Sir Michael Spicer: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I would add to his comments only my last point. Some people do not want to, or cannot, use a car, and for various reasons, some do not want to drive to work. They, especially those in rural areas, face the prospect of being even more stranded. I look forward to the Minister's response.
7.50 pm
Mr. Peter Luff (Mid-Worcestershire) (Con): I have approximately two minutes before the Minister might be expected to reply. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Sir Michael Spicer) on a fine speech on a subject that is important to all our constituents in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. I agree with everything that he said about the Cotswold line. I want to comment briefly on issues that affect his constituency, mine and Birmingham.
I hope that the Minister might persuade Network Rail to give higher priority to three different infrastructure investments, each of them modest, which make an enormous difference to the genuine suffering of my constituents who use the line. The first investment is in remodelling track between Worcester Foregate Street and Worcester Shrub Hill station. That would greatly enhance the flexibility of the train operators, especially Central trains. The second is the introduction of an additional signalling section between Worcester and Droitwich, which would greatly increase capacity on the line. The third is increasing the length of Bromsgrove station to enable it to take four-car trains. One of the major problems for services between Malvern, Worcester, Droitwich and Birmingham is the Health and Safety Executive rule for four-car trains. They cannot stop at Bromsgrove so they cannot run on the line. One fast train is non-stop at Bromsgrove.
Lengthening Bromsgrove station, putting in an extra section and remodelling the junction between Foregate Street and Shrub Hill would transform capacity and make a big difference to reliability. It would not cost much, either.
7.52 pm
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Dr. Kim Howells): I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Sir Michael Spicer) on securing the debate and providing an opportunity for the House to discuss the future of rail services in Worcestershire.
Before I respond to the points that the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) made, it might be helpful if I provided information about the performance of the train operators who predominantly serve Worcestershire. I should like the hon. Member for West Worcestershire to know that there will be no return to a nationalised rail industry. He is doing what he is supposed to do as an Opposition Member—opposing the Government. However, I was sorry that he did not admit that we are spending a lot of money on the railways. That is happening rather too late because, for 30 years, very little money was spent on them.
The hon. Gentleman was right to say that privatisation has levered out money that was not previously available for the railways. That is welcome. A symptom of that, which he described, is the 50 per cent. increase in patronage on the Cotswold line. Somebody is doing something right, and we should be readier to pay tribute to people who operate the railways, from those who welcome and look after passengers to the Strategic Rail Authority, Network Rail and the Office of the Rail Regulator.
The system is not easy but complicated, and I am glad that the hon. Gentleman raised the matter because it gives me an opportunity to say that the rail review that we are currently conducting does not seek greater centralisation. I have a great deal of sympathy with his last point, when he said that the privatisation that happened nine years ago was not the right sort of privatisation and that perhaps there should have been a greater range of models for running railways in different parts of the country. I have no doubt that they could have been run better, and that any model that is top heavy or very prescriptive in the way in which it seeks to serve very different markets in different areas—rural markets and commuter markets, for example—needs to be challenged. We need ideas about how best to run the railways, and that is why we have instituted the review.
I get the message from the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire. I have read the press release that he put out on 3 February; it is a very detailed assessment of what is required. I take his point about the platform at Bromsgrove. Many platforms around the country need modification; there is no question about that. We could greatly increase the capacity of our railways if we were able to make those modifications.
I was lucky enough to be in Japan over the past week. I had heard that it had the best railway system in the world, and I wanted to have a look at it. Japan has a population twice the size of ours. We have been celebrating the fact that British railways carried a larger number of people last year than in any year since 1961—1 billion people. In Japan last year, the railways carried 22 billion people, yet the network is not much larger than ours. They have created a signalling system and a system of control and route utilisation that are infinitely better than anything we have. We have a great deal to learn from them.
I have absolutely no doubt that Worcestershire as a whole would benefit greatly if we could adapt some of that technology, expertise and know-how. Certainly, something as basic as getting platforms the right length so that they can take longer trains is an important issue. I have spoken to Richard Bowker, the chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority, who knows the railways of Worcestershire very well, and he is very keen that we should get on with the work. There is a problem, however, and it relates to the subject of this debate. I would say to the hon. Member for West Worcestershire that I would certainly like to dual a lot more of the single-track lines in the country, but that can happen only at a cost. Dualling is under way at the moment down in Cornwall, and I think that a seven-mile stretch is costing about £14 million. The track was ripped up in the 1980s—quite late, really—and it is now going to be re-dualled. That is a lot of money, yet that is one of the least costly projects that I have seen.
The SRA can manage a project like that, working with Network Rail, for about £14 million for seven miles. The hon. Gentleman listed a number of stretches that need dualling, and some are at least as long as that. That would involve a lot of money. I am sure that he would clear that with his right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor, because it would be money worth spending. I cannot, however, give him a promise here and now that we can somehow make that money available from central Government. He is quite right to say that this is a complicated process.
One of the objectives of the rail review that we have implemented is to ensure that we get more bangs for our buck, so to speak, when we spend money on the railways. This year, we shall spend the best part of £4 billion, which is two to three times as much as was being spent on the railways five or six years ago. That is a lot of money, but a lot of things need doing on the railways. The hon. Gentleman has told us that he cares passionately about his constituents being able to have access to jobs and other markets, and I am sure that he could wish for nothing more important than that, except perhaps a better health service or education service. However, he knows as well as I do that railway systems are very expensive to run. If we can manage better what we already have, that will be a good start. I am not convinced that we do it well enough at the moment, and we must be much more responsive and imaginative in the way in which we engage with the customers that he is talking about.
I mentioned the huge increase in patronage on the Cotswold line. Somebody must be doing something right there. I am sure that it is not the case that people are simply choosing not to use their cars, because clearly road congestion is rising at the same time. The fact is that people are travelling more and they are looking for opportunities to use public transport where they can.
Sir Michael Spicer: The Minister is making a thoughtful and interesting contribution, and I am grateful to him for it. I once heard him make what to me was an extremely interesting remark. He was on the "Today" programme on Radio 4 to discuss the question of prioritising expenditure, which is what, to some extent, we are talking about. The Minister courageously made a point, which it was difficult for him to make, about gold-plating health and safety expenditure by
going over the top and unnecessarily far. Would he care to develop that? I say that in the best possible spirit: it was an extremely courageous thing for a transport Minister to say because it raised the question of prioritising. He is right that the money has to be raised, but there is a circular process. If the money is to be raised, it will be raised partly because the operating company is making a profit and it has to be allowed to work the system properly. There is an upward spiral.
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