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12 Feb 2009 : Column 510WH—continued
4.41pm
Mark Hunter (Cheadle) (LD): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Nicholas. I thank the Chairman of the Transport Committee and the members of the Committee for all their work on what is generally recognised as an excellent report. Many members of the Committee have contributed to this useful debate. I welcome the Committee’s recommendations and I hope that the Government will take them on board as soon as possible.
Much as I acknowledge and welcome the Government’s announcement today on investment in new trains, I intend none the less in the few minutes available to me to restrict my comments to the findings of the Select Committee and the Government response, although the context is slightly different from what we perhaps anticipated.
One of the report’s key criticisms of the White Paper is that it does not deliver what was previously promised. It is not a strategy for the next 30 years. The high-level
output statement covers only 2009 to 2014, and I agree with the Committee’s recommendation for the Government
“to be bolder in its vision and to set out a proper long-term strategy”.
As we heard, the rail network is almost full to capacity and passenger numbers are rising all the time. Surely the Minister would agree that what the Committee described as “just-in-time investments” is not enough.
I certainly agree with the Committee’s concerns that the Government are not doing enough to integrate rail policy with other policy areas. Local and national transport networks have a profound effect on local economies, communities and the environment, and we believe that consideration of the broader socio-economic benefits and the full cost of carbon should be fully integrated into the policy-making process.
I was genuinely taken aback to read in the Government’s response that, while they are considering the environmental performance of the existing railway, they will not develop proposals for increasing the contribution that railways can make towards improving the environment until the next high-level output statement. If Britain is to play any real role in tackling climate change, let alone the lead role that we all aspire to, we need to be more ambitious and look at how rail can help move us towards a carbon-free society. I therefore would be interested to know whether the Minister has considered bringing forward the next HLOS so that the UK can be more proactive on the issue.
On a more positive note, I am pleased that the Government have moved towards considering the high-speed rail option, albeit the move is seen by many as only an environmental sweetener for the plans for the third runway at Heathrow. Frankly, many of us would still say that they are not moving fast enough or with nearly enough conviction. The case for high-speed rail is clear and urgent. Some of us have been saying for a long time that it is necessary to cut journey times to Scotland and the north, to improve capacity and to encourage a modal shift from air travel in the UK.
I also welcome the Committee’s recommendations on capacity. With a 40 per cent. increase in passenger miles travelled by rail since 1996, this is absolutely a key issue. We need more capacity on almost all of our lines, and the Government ought to be taking drastic action to increase capacity and reduce overcrowding. I acknowledge that a step in the right direction has been taken today, but, while I welcomed the announcement, I hesitate to celebrate prematurely, as the Government have ordered only one third of the long-promised 1,300 train carriages that were announced some time ago. New carriages on some lines are a good start, but more needs to be done.
Electrification, which we fully support, is key to increasing services and lowering emissions, and I am pleased that the Government are planning to electrify the Great Western and Midland Mainline services. They mentioned in their response that a review of electrification would be completed by 2008. Perhaps the Minister might confirm whether it is complete, when it will be published, and whether it will make a commitment to electrifying the entire mainline network.
I would like to expand still further on many of these points, but, in fairness to other colleagues who have yet to speak, I shall restrict my remarks to those.
4.45 pm
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con): It is always a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Nicholas. Like other hon. Members, I wish to extend my congratulations to the Chairman of the Select Committee and to her predecessor, the late Gwyneth Dunwoody, on the part that they played in chairing the Select Committee during examination of the White Paper and in producing the report.
I am sure I cannot be the only person who has been wondering why we are here today. The White Paper, “Delivering a sustainable railway”, was announced in July 2007, the Select Committee report was published in July 2008, and the Government response was published in October 2008. It has taken a long time to get here.
We had the statement today by the Secretary of State for Transport. I suspect it was made so that the Minister can talk a little more about it this afternoon and avoid some of the issues that have been raised. It was noticeable again this morning that the Secretary of State failed to answer any of the difficult and detailed questions about the number of extra carriages. We will come to them later, but let us now turn to the White Paper itself.
As many other hon. Members have noted, it is unfortunate, to say the least, for the Government that, less than two years after its publication, the so-called 30-year strategy is basically out of date and has fallen apart. It is no wonder that the Select Committee concluded that the Government should seek to develop a genuine 30-year strategy. At the time the document was produced, it was rightly lambasted by several industry experts as over-hyped and visionless. Several people said that within the high-level output statement itself there were many good things, but, like so much from this Government, the good is recycled and the new is bad.
The HLOS and the 30-year statement talked about three things: Birmingham New street and Reading—in reality, a re-announcement; £100 million for all new station improvements outside London; and, again, the much-vaunted 1,300 carriages. In fact, in that document we went from 1,300 new to 1,300 extra carriages, and we should not forget that previous Secretaries of State announced them as well.So when the Select Committee concluded that
“the level of ambition in the White Paper is too modest...we urge the Government to be bolder”,
“disappointing that the White Paper dodged the decision”,
“hesitation...will mean years of avoidable misery”,
“the White Paper dismisses electrification too easily”,
it clearly agrees with the view of many in the railway industry that, in reality, the document was nothing more than an expensive waste of paper and ink.
Now, two years on, in the short period since the publication of the document, the White Paper’s dismissal of high-speed rail and electrification has been deemed obsolete by the new Minister of State and a Government U-turn. The new Minister has reversed the catastrophic opposition to high-speed rail. It is a shame that, so far, those plans are uncosted and we do not know where they are going to start or where they will go to. One hopes that they will not have the fantasy train to accompany Heathrow’s fantasy plane.
The analysis in the White Paper of the procurement system has been blown out of the water by the Competition Commission; its refusal to reform Network Rail demonstrates that the Government are not concerned with the serious criticisms of the governance issues relating to Network Rail; and its fares policy has been criticised by a number of hon. Members this afternoon. So it is not surprising that the words of the Select Committee—
Mr. Martlew: Can the hon. Gentleman take this opportunity to give us the Opposition’s fares policy?
Stephen Hammond: I shall come to that later. I am sure that you will be waiting earnestly and excitedly to hear it.
Sir Nicholas Winterton (in the Chair): I am not waiting: the hon. Member for Carlisle is waiting. The word “you” is not appropriate.
Stephen Hammond: I am disappointed that even Sir Nicholas is not waiting. But I take it that the hon. Gentleman may be waiting.
The Select Committee report was rightly critical of the engineering overrun of new year 2008, describing “serious deficiencies” in respect of control. Of course, the debate in the House and comments in the report said that engineering overruns were quite unacceptable. That is true. It was brought out during the debate in the House that a number of those delays were absolutely avoidable and predictable, because Network Rail was warned as far in advance as 12 December 2007 that there were going to be problems, but they carried on despite the problems that would lead to the overrun.
To be fair, that was 2007-08 and Network Rail has certainly made some improvements since then, and the Government cannot be blamed for the operational problems of Network Rail. However, it is right that the Government can be blamed because they set up Network Rail, which, structurally, is not accountable to passengers and is not given strong enough incentives to respond to what passengers actually want. All too often, Network Rail believes that its customer is the Government or the Office of Rail Regulation.
Ms Angela C. Smith: Does the hon. Gentleman not consider Network Rail to be a vast improvement on its predecessor, Railtrack?
Stephen Hammond: At the moment we are discussing the governance issues of Network Rail, so let us continue to do so.
What should be obvious to Network Rail is that its real customers are the passengers and the train operators and freight companies it serves and it should not believe that its real customer is the Department for Transport. But neither the passengers nor the freight companies have an effective means of holding Network Rail to account, due to the way that the company was set up. The only body to which the company management is required to account consists of the members, which it appoints. That is hardly a model of corporate governance. Indeed, the Select Committee’s report concluded:
“If Network Rail’s members cannot, or will not ...they are not a body worth having.”
I agree. I welcome the Select Committee’s critique of Network Rail. I urge Committee members to read the rail review document issued by my party yesterday. We have listened to that criticism carefully; we intend to reform the governance of Network Rail.
The Network Rail company needs a supervisory body. To comply with European legislation the members of that board will be from outside the rail industry and will comprise passenger representatives and independent members with a strong background in business and dealing with corporate governance issues. The remainder of the members will represent passenger, freight and open access operators and supply. The supervisory board will have an independent chairman. The management board should and will be accountable to the supervisory board for performance. So stakeholders in the industry would have a greater power over Network Rail’s priorities, meaning that we should see an improvement in performance, with a focus on service quality, value for money and passenger concerns, and an improvement in respect of tackling overcrowding and producing better co-ordination and integration with track and train.
The Committee is right. The governance structure is not adequate and it needs to change. The Committee also correctly highlighted the problem of communication, particularly, as we have already mentioned, in respect of the events of early January 2008. Having listened to the Committee’s criticism of Network Rail, it seems appropriate that changes should be made.
The Conservative party believes that the ORR should look at the licences. We would work with it to amend the licences issued by the regulator so that they place a much stronger obligation on Network Rail to keep the passenger and freight operators informed of issues affecting the efficient running of the services, such as the progress of engineering works and the likelihood of overruns. The key problem with the 2008 overruns, in terms of the way that Network Rail interfaced with the passenger, was that very short notice was given to the operators to change their service. For example, at Liverpool Street, where there was chaos, National Express was given less than three hours’ notice that that station would not re-open after the new year break. We will strengthen and extend the duties imposed on Network Rail to co-operate with the train and freight operators and place a clear and explicit duty on it to co-operate with the train operators on passenger satisfaction, capacity improvements, overcrowding, growing passenger numbers and planning major upgrade projects.
It is right that Network Rail’s monopoly on capacity enhancement needs to be challenged, for only in that way can we ensure that the public purse is getting value for money.
The Select Committee correctly highlighted a number of issues to do with the way that Network Rail contracts out its engineering works and the associated problems with value for money. Making small-scale enhancement projects available to and contestable by other operators, including the train operators, local authorities and community rail projects, would improve efficiency and help provide an important benchmark for Network Rail’s performance.
It was absolutely right that the White Paper highlighted safety as a key concern. Safety must always be the key priority—it must be a top priority—but nothing in the plans that would allow small-scale capacity projects to be contestable would affect the safety of the network. It is true that tragedies on the rail network are not the exclusive preserve of either the private or the public sector.
I credit the Government with getting one thing right in its 30-year strategy: correctly identifying that the capacity shortage on the network should be the top priority. However, again, the Select Committee was quite damning:
“We are concerned that the Government is failing to take the concerns of the industry seriously...We recommend that the”
“revise its method for predicting developments in rail patronage...The Government’s approach to increasing capacity...is over-cautious.”
Hon. Members have given all sorts of examples of that from their constituencies. One example that directly affects my constituency is the inability of the Government to bring back into operation the five Eurostar platforms at Waterloo. They were told about those in November 2004 and, still, five years later not one of those is back in use. The Committee might say “over-cautious”, but that certainly is not the word used by commuters.
I should like to touch on three other areas where progress could be made in terms of capacity. I agree with a number of hon. Members who have mentioned the need to protect disused lines. The Select Committee correctly highlighted the question of disused rail lines. I have written to the previous two Secretaries of State about this matter to ask them to agree to a moratorium on the usage of disused lines so that they could be re-opened, but I have had no response to either of my letters. I think that in paragraph 23 of the Select Committee’s conclusions, which says that the responses from the Government are “less than convincing”, the Committee is being rather kind to the ministerial team. We need to ensure that there is a moratorium on disused lines so that they could be used for rail openings, if that becomes appropriate.
When the Select Committee report was published it was correct to conclude that, at that stage, the Government had absolutely no interest in high-speed rail. Indeed, the then Secretary of State described high-speed rail as being risky and expensive and said that it would not help passenger demand. How things have changed. Although we may not agree exactly on the route, there now appears to be a cross-party consensus building on the need for high-speed rail. That would not only have huge impacts in terms of economic benefits for the north of England, but would rebuild capacity for both freight and passengers on the west coast main line.
It is clear also that one should welcome today’s statement from the Government about new carriages. Paragraph 25 of the Select Committee’s conclusions welcomes the new carriages—wouldn’t we all?—but has the statement today taken us any further forward? The Secretary of State failed to confirm exactly when any of those new carriages would come into operation. As I understand it, the 2013 phase will be only a testing phase. There will be no benefit from any of the new carriages until beyond 2015. Will the Minister say exactly when he expects the rolling stock announced today to come on board?
Finally, as the ORR and others noted in their evidence to the Select Committee, it is not the place of Government to develop detailed strategies.
Mr. Martlew: I am a bit worried because the hon. Gentleman has said “finally”. He did promise that he would tell us about the Conservative fare strategy.
Sir Nicholas Winterton (in the Chair): Order. I have to say to the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) that I am rather pleased that the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) has not gone down that track, because the subject of the debate is the Select Committee report, not the Opposition’s transport policy.
Stephen Hammond: I hear your strictures, Sir Nicholas, but I hope that you will allow me just a little latitude in a few moments’ time.
Mr. Martlew: He was only trying to help.
Stephen Hammond: I know he was. A number of the problems that we can see today have been attributed to the fact that timetables, franchise specifications and all the rolling stock plans are being written in Marsham street, not by those in the industry, who know what is going on and what the passengers need from transport when travelling. The facts speak for themselves. The Competition Commission has issued its draft findings on the rolling stock industry. There is a scathing report coming through on the way in which the Government have mismanaged the procurement processes. Franchises are so tightly specified that there is no room for any innovation. As long as the interests of the taxpayer are being safeguarded, rail professionals should be taking operational decisions and the Government should be left with strategic decisions.
The hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) made a point about fares policy, but I have listened to your strictures, Sir Nicholas. Of course, we will inherit from the Government whom he supports control period 4; that is where we shall have to start from if we get into power.
I would be interested to hear from the Minister exactly what the Government’s intentions are, given the comments by the Select Committee in paragraph 34 of its conclusions. It showed foresight in saying that
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