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12 Feb 2009 : Column 497WH—continued
Thirdly, we need to invest in a bold plan to develop infrastructure and support the spatial economic development of the whole country. I will press for quick decisions on that because, as the Minister will be aware, such things take decades to plan, develop and complete.
The north and Scotland in particular cannot wait any longer for positive decisions on the future of our railways.
In terms of the ambition in the White Paper, the Government have announced since its publication the potential for High Speed 2, with investment in a new west coast line. Clearly, that is to be welcomed. I join the Chairman of the Transport Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman), in pressing the Minister for clarity and direction on those plans and some idea of when a decision will be taken.
I press the case for adding a new trans-Pennine link to the first phase of High Speed 2. One already exists, and everybody here who knows me will know my views on building on existing rail routes to reopen the trans-Pennine link. We could do it easily. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) made the case for reopening old railway lines. It is relatively cheap and much less damaging environmentally than building new lines. The old Woodhead rail line from Sheffield to Manchester could easily fulfil the criteria. It must be remembered that it was not Beeching who closed the Woodhead rail route; it was the Tory Government in 1981.
Another issue is electrification. There are some tempting suggestions on the table to electrify the midland main line. I am quite open about the fact that Sheffield would be the main beneficiary. It is England’s fourth largest city and only 165 miles from London, yet it still takes more than two and a quarter hours to get from Sheffield to London. Sheffield is still a major manufacturing centre and is important to the economy. The electrification of the midland main line and all that that would bring—not just for Sheffield but for Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and all the towns further on in the east midlands, such as Northampton, Kettering and so on—would be important for all of us. I know that First Great Western is pressing for electrification on its other lines too. I would like to see them all electrified, but I will of course press the case for the midland main line in particular. It would help to reduce the regional disparities to which my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley referred.
Another point about the trans-Pennine link is that the Woodhead rail route is used at the moment by the National Grid Company. The two old Victorian tunnels, as I have said in previous debates, are used by National Grid to supply power to the north-west. It proposes to move its cables from the Victorian tunnels to the 1953 tunnel. If it does, there is a risk that we will lose the use of that line for ever for railways.
I am pleased that the Select Committee report makes it clear that we should not allow such current uses—excuse the pun—for old railway lines, as it shuts off for ever the possibility of reusing that old capacity. Will the Minister reiterate the commitment made by the previous Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton), to ensure that the tunnels on the Woodhead rail route are properly maintained until a decision can be made on whether to reopen it? It is incredibly important for those of us who live in the north—not just in Sheffield but in Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle as well—because we would all benefit from a trans-Pennine link.
My second point concerns the tendency to be reactive when it comes to investment in the railways. We need to learn to be proactive in creating infrastructure to help
to drive sustainable economic growth. We as a Government have talked a lot recently about rebalancing the economy by moving away from the reliance on financial services that has brought us such disaster, expanding our manufacturing base for the future and exploiting the growth of new green technologies to ensure that we are more sustainably prosperous in future. However, we also need to consider rebalancing the economy in terms of a shift from the south-east and London to elsewhere.
It is critical to remember that the north has a population of 14.5 million, which is equivalent to a medium-sized European country such as Sweden. I have made this point in previous debates. The north has a large internal market with an economy worth more than £200 billion. It is a major economic player. The Northern Way, a group of regional development agencies, has pointed out that potential demand to move containers from the ports of the north and across the Pennines exceeds what the railway network can accommodate.
It has been said that Immingham alone carries 20 per cent. of the in and out freight traffic of the United Kingdom. When that is combined with Hull and Grimsby, anybody can recognise the importance of the Humber estuary to the country’s economy and the economy of the north. From that perspective, the £30 billion gap in the economic capacity of the north compared with that of the south-east and London is fairly incredible. We need to do something about it.
Yet there has been a significant differential between investment in transport infrastructure in the north and in the south-east, as my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley said. The Crossrail investment in projects is estimated at £175 million, in stark contrast with investment in northern rail projects such as the Manchester hub. At the moment, as he said, it amounts to Department for Transport officer time only. We are nowhere near to resolving the Manchester hub problem. I support what was said about that resolution being important to every single city and town in the north, not just Manchester. I reiterate the importance of resolving that problem immediately, or as soon as possible. It is also true that the age profile and relatively poor condition of rolling stock in the northern rail franchise has not attracted the same level of investment as in the south-east. Northern Rail has received no new carriages since 2004. Clearly, something needs to be done.
Professor David Begg, a respected academic in the transport field, has said on behalf of Northern Way that the north always underperforms when it comes to fighting and lobbying for the level of investment necessary. I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North, who represents a London seat, but High Speed 1 and Crossrail are both London-based, south-east-based and connected with France. When it comes to High Speed 2 and a Crossrail for the north—the trans-Pennine link for which I am fighting—Professor Begg would say that we in the north need to fight hard for it. That is what we are doing today. We need a level playing field in terms of investment in infrastructure for the south and north.
This is not just about closing the £30 billion gap between the north and south; it is also about ensuring that we connect the economy of the north more successfully. The agglomeration benefits of bringing the businesses of the north closer together and allowing them to benefit from more accessible, concrete transport connections
cannot be overestimated. However, we can do that only if we have a coherent transport system that enables businesses to flourish beyond what tends to be their current limit of expansion, which is their city-region boundary. We have eight city-regions in the north, or we would have if they were given formal status. Businesses need to reach out beyond their city-region bases and to connect more widely. The rail transport network is an essential part of that process.
We need to develop a bold plan for railway infrastructure. As I said earlier, we also need to remember the importance of dealing with pinch points, electrification and High Speed 2. We need to connect Heathrow and the south-east to the midlands and the north. However, over and above all those considerations, we need to connect the north itself. We also need to think about high-speed rail capacity for the east coast main line.
The point has been made that, if we are to close the £30 billion gap between the north and the south, we need to think about a high-speed rail network that runs up and down the east and west of the country and that is also connected in the north. That is the vision of the Northern Way group and the vision that is right for the country. The immediate benefits of realising that vision would be worth £10 billion to the northern economy and there would also be benefits for the south-east. At the end of the day, London is still a major financial centre and to connect it to the north more successfully would create benefits for all.
Clearly the Government have a leading role to play in investing in our economic future. We talk about rebalancing the economy, about investing in skills and increasingly nowadays about investing in manufacturing, to ensure, as I said earlier, that we can exploit the low-carbon technologies that are developing and the opportunities that may arise with the development of a new generation of nuclear power plants. However controversial those plants may be, at the end of the day it is said that the UK could provide up to 80 per cent. of the components needed for them. We need to exploit digital technologies. However, if we are to do all those things, why on earth are we not investing in the transport infrastructure that would make it so much more likely that we can succeed in developing skills, manufacturing and our economic future?
The Government need to be bold. They were bold when they intervened to save the banks and when they stimulated the economy with their fiscal plans and their commitment to bringing forward public spending. However, what we are talking about today would be the big, bold investment that people in this country are longing for; it is the announcement that they want to hear. They want something to be positive about—an ambition to build the best integrated transport system in Europe. As far as I am concerned, nothing else will do.
Above anything else, including enhanced economic prosperity, I hope that such a system would achieve the modal shift from road to rail for which everybody in this country is now increasingly pressing. If we want to cut our carbon emissions while at the same time securing economic prosperity, we must make that modal shift from road to rail. It is no good building bypasses on the Woodhead in the Pennines as a way of simply encouraging more and more freight to go across mountain passes and on the M62. If we want to see the Humber estuary develop into one of the most successful port areas in the
country, importing and exporting freight, we must ensure that we have the rail capacity to enable us to exploit that increased movement of freight in and out of the country. It is absolutely critical that we do that. Otherwise, the system will not work; increasingly, the roads will clog up and we will never succeed in doing anything other than deterring economic investment, rather than increasing it. Socially, economically and environmentally, therefore, we must secure that modal shift from road to rail.
Let us give the people of this country the ambitious plans that we really need and the hope and the confidence that this Government can deliver strategically the support that the economy and our transport infrastructure need. It is not just about freight, but about getting people to work in the morning and getting them home at night.
I will finish by moving to a very local level. In Sheffield, there is only 15 per cent. capacity left on our roads. We need a better rail network. The journey between Sheffield and Manchester, and that between Sheffield and Leeds, are absolutely horrendous. As I said yesterday in the Select Committee, it takes an hour and a half to travel 40 miles from Sheffield to Manchester on the train—an hour and a half. In the 21st century, that is not good enough.
The Victorians knew how to solve that problem. They built the Woodhead railway. In 1981, the Tory Government closed it. Let us just hope that this Labour Government take us back to the Victorians and achieve what they achieved more than 100 years ago; I have faith in this Government’s ability to do that.
4.5 pm
Mr. David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op): It is a delight to take part in this debate. Two colleagues also wish to take part, so I shall keep my remarks as brief as possible.
It is also a delight to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Ms Smith), who raised a plaintive cry for help from the Government. I do not come to seek help from the Government. I was able to talk to my hon. Friend the Minister yesterday—I shall refer to a particular case that we discussed. I think that the Government have already come to our aid, but I want to put on the record briefly how I think that that Government help can be delivered, to ensure that those of us from Gloucestershire go away from this debate on railway strategy somewhat happier than we were a few weeks ago.
I would just like to pay due regard to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) and the excellent report that her Select Committee produced. It has given us every opportunity to say whatever we like about railways. Also, coming as it does hot on the heels of the Office of the Rail Regulator’s rail strategy increased investment report, there is plenty of opportunity to say what we like and what we hope may happen in due course.
In passing, I draw my hon. Friend the Minister’s attention to early-day motion 794, which is in my name and the names of a number of my hon. Friends. It refers to what my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) was talking about earlier—some of the rail cuts in which Network Rail is indulging.
Those of us who want to see the recession over as quickly as possible feel that that it is an adverse move on the part of Network Rail to be considering some reduction in expenditure, particularly in key areas such as maintenance and signalling. So I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will have some good news about that, to put Network Rail back on the straight and narrow so that we do not give the wrong signals—no pun intended—and to ensure that we invest in this area and so that investment is not just of the longer-term variety but of the immediate variety too.
My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) is not here, but if he were I am sure that he would have spent quite a lot of time talking about rail freight. As far as I am concerned, he is Parliament’s greatest advocate of the need to invest in rail freight. He would want me to say that, although this debate is not principally about that issue, promoting the shift of freight from road to rail is something that this Government have really tried to do. However, anything that we could do to encourage that process should be happening at this important time, not least promoting the idea of a central freight line. I know that my hon. Friend has done lots of work on promoting that idea, and the Government, through Lord Adonis, the Minister with responsibility for railways, are increasingly taking it seriously. So, anything that my hon. Friend the Minister can do to steel Lord Adonis, to ensure that that central freight line is ever more likely to happen, would be a jolly good thing.
My hon. Friend the Minister knows about this already and I am sure that he has all the facts about it in front of him, but the particular issue that I want to refer to is the redoubling of the line from Swindon to Kemble, which is on the Cheltenham to Paddington line. The line from Swindon to Kemble is a relatively short piece of line that is single-track. There was some madness about the time of the Beeching cuts, I think. We had a cut and lost one of our lines. That line was supposed to go all the way through to Gloucester, if not Cheltenham, which would have left us somewhat bereft.
Thankfully, some wise person managed to stop that, so only the worst bit of track bed had to be dealt with by slewing two lines into one. We think that we are making progress on getting that reinstated. I attended a meeting on this issue three weeks ago, as did the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown), in whose constituency the line lies—of course, it also impacts on my constituency—and the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), so there is genuinely cross-party feeling on this. My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. Dhanda) has also been a keen advocate for that work to be done. It will open up all sorts of opportunities, not least regarding multi-modal shift and congestion problems, because when one train is late, it causes further delays on single tracks because no other train can get on to that piece of railway.
On the three provisos, the Government have been true to their word in their press announcement this week. They will find £900,000 for the GRIP 4 rail evaluation—I always wonder where these things come from: GRIP stands for nothing more devious than Government rail investment programme—and they want the South West of England Development Agency, and allied bodies, to find £1.6 million for it. We hope that we have found the initial money to show that the project
stacks up in terms of value for money. We will also have to find the remaining £40 million to ensure that things are done. In the great scheme of things, and given that the investment should be paid back within three or four years, this is almost a no-brainer. We hope that the Chair of the Select Committee will make some noises on our behalf, but we think we are on to a winner. At our meeting, three weeks ago, Lord Adonis said that he thought the region had the money, so I hope that the Minister will have some nice things to say about how negotiations with the region are going.
It has been left to me to persuade First Great Western, if we get the track done at some point from 2010 onwards, to run some trains on it in addition to those it runs already, so that we will get a better service. My ideal would be a half-hourly service, one of which is a through train to London, but, first, let us just fill some of the gaps during the day and make sure that people are able to do what we want them to do—get on a train. I should like it to be a cheaper train than it is at the moment, but at least they would be able to get on a train. I should have liked this to be a pre-emptive move, before work on the north Cotswolds line began, but for some bizarre reason, that is an even worse line than the Swindon-Kemble, Cheltenham-London line, so it was given prominence over this work. None the less, if the team can be taken off the north Cotswolds line when it finishes in 2010 and moved on to this line, that would be good news, and we would accept that.
I hope that the Minister has listened to my pleading, which is the only bit of local lobbying I shall do today. That work is important, because it could be such a good example of the multi-modal issue and how people’s travel patterns can be altered. More to the point, it will pay for itself. It is a little-known fact that Kemble, which is at one end of the line, sells more first-class rail tickets than any station outside the big inter-city stations. We know what the Cotswolds is like, so that should not come as a total surprise. We need to get on with that work.
A number of issues have been covered by my hon. Friends, and the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) has covered much of what I wanted to discuss, so I shall not spend too long on those points. The key issue with the rail strategy is how to get a relationship between what the state invests, what the user has to pay from the pocket for fares, and what the rail companies are currently able to invest from their profits. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North mentioned some of the profits that those companies are making, which some of us think rather obscene. Given the current discussions about what the bankers have taken out of the financial system, it is interesting that the rail companies are not far behind. I should like there to be a movement back to the public sector, but I shall say more about that later.
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