1) The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the South West Regional Select Committee's inquiry into transport in the South West.

2) The RMT organises across the transport industry in the region with members employed a series of sectors including rail, bus, road transport and maritime. Our support for a fully integrated, democratically accountable, publicly owned transport network is well documented.

Summary

· Public Transport plays a key role in the regional economy, supports employment opportunities, combats social exclusion and delivers a sustainable transport future

· The de-regulated and privatised bus and rail industries are currently not meeting those challenges

· A raft of rail re-openings in the South West will encourage modal shift from car to train

· There is a case for the creation of Integrated Transport Authorities as set out in the Local Transport Act 2008

Regional Transport Strategy

3) Transport has a key role to play in the regional economy not least by directly and in-directly supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs, encouraging both regional integration and integration between the South West and the rest of the country and contributing to the challenging statutory target to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. With 17% of households in the South West having no access to a car[1], public transport also plays a key role in combating social exclusion.

4) Regrettably, public transport, which has huge environmental advantages over the private car, as currently provided in a de-regulated, privatised and fragmented fashion in the South West is proving to be not up to the challenge.

5) In the bus sector, timetables across the region are often woefully inadequate particularly in rural areas. All too often, this results in socially excluded households being denied access to travel, leisure and work opportunities throughout the region. RMT's survey of our Bus members, the vast majority of whom work in the South West, also found that staff morale suffers when services are seen to be poor and fares too expensive.

6) Furthermore, bus passengers in Plymouth now face the privatisation of CityBus. Privatisation of services will lead to a loss of jobs, reductions in routes and a reduction in service provision to the community. RMT has participated fully on the campaign against the sell-off which has seen 15,000 people signing a petition against the privatisation plan.

7) Rather than promoting privatisation and de-regulation, processes that have seen passenger numbers fall dramatically outside of Greater London since the 1980s, local authorities should be using powers contained in the Local Transport Act 2008 that make it easier to regulate bus services through the introduction of 'Quality Contracts'. Although some way short of a return to RMT's position of a publicly owned bus network, Quality Contracts do mark a step in the right direction. Over the past eighteen months RMT has worked closely with DfT officials to ensure that staff transferred to any new Quality Contract routes have their terms, conditions and pension arrangements fully protected.

8) Across the region rail services are expensive and often overcrowded. Indeed, the committee will be aware that 2008 saw a passenger fares 'strike' in the Bristol area in response to the new First Great Western (FGW) timetable that saw reduced services and a lack of appropriate rolling stock.

9) In January 2008 the then Secretary of State for Transport Ruth Kelly, informed Parliament that FGW was in breach of its franchise agreement due to excessive levels of cancelled services and had in fact misreported the actual scale of cancellations. From April 2008, the operator was required to implement a Remedial Plan and introduce a package of improvements worth £29million.

10) Train stations can often be unwelcoming, inaccessible environments, particularly after dark and/or during the winter months. The July 2005 National Audit Office report Maintaining and improving Britain's railway stations indicates that "Research by Crime Concern for the Department in 1996 and 2002 found that measures to improve personal safety would result in 11% more journeys by public transport, including 15% more by train and Underground". The research demonstrated that a staff presence, CCTV and good lighting were the three main factors which passengers found reassuring.

11) In July 2002 the Scottish Executive published Women and Transport: Moving Forward which sets out guidance and a checklist aimed at ensuring the policy makers and providers recognise the effect of their decisions in relation to womens' travel plans. The guidance clearly identified that the issue of personal security acts as a significant constraint on women's travel choices.

12) The report makes clear that CCTV should be supported by appropriate staffing levels and should not be seen as a solution in itself. It explains that surveillance measures are not sufficient to address women's safety issues and that staff should be provided on vehicles and facilities wherever possible.

13) RMT is therefore seriously concerned that in the face of the above evidence South West Trains has, in the past year, radically reduced ticket office opening times and plans to cut hundreds of front-line, operational jobs.

14) The other main operator in the South West, Arriva Cross Country, removed all buffet cars from their trains from September 2008 following a refurbishing programme and currently only provide catering trolleys on train services north of Plymouth and only until 8.00pm. From Monday 13 July 2009 Arriva Cross Country withdrew from a contract to provide on-train cleaning services on their routes, deciding instead to provide only train cleaning staff at termination stations such as Plymouth and Edinburgh. During the summer large numbers of holiday-makers from the North of England and the Midlands use Cross Country services to the South West. To remove buffet shops and cleaners from these trains constitutes a significant deterioration in service quality, which makes them less attractive alternatives to the private car. The result is loss of modal shift, increased road congestion and harmful carbon emissions. Refurbishment of trains should be an opportunity to improve on-board services and safety, but Arriva Cross Country is using it to strip essential catering facilities from long-distance cross-country trains. For our members it adds up to inferior, exposed and less safe working conditions, and for passengers it is a straightforward attack on their services.

15) In terms of improvements to the rail network in the South West, RMT welcomes Government proposals to electrify the Great Western Mainline and we would take this opportunity to re-iterate our call to re-double the Swindon-Kemble route in order to deal with the serious bottle neck on the line. In the Bristol area RMT supports the re-opening of the existing freight only Portishead-Bristol and Henbury Loop to passenger traffic. The Henbury Loop runs close to the huge Cribbs Causeway shopping centre and could provide a sustainable alternative form of transport for shoppers should passenger traffic be re-instated on the line and a new station developed.

16) Additionally on rail re-openings, RMT has worked closely with the Campaign for Better Transport and the Growing Railway Campaign and would endorse the following re-openings in the South West.

· Okehampton - Tavistock - Bere Alston

· Stratford - Cheltenham

· Bristol - Oxford

· Axminster - Lyme Regis

· Exmouth - Budleigh Salterton - Sidmouth

· Yeovil - Taunton

· Chard Junction - Chard Town - Taunton

· Exeter - Bude

· A railway line linking Yeovil Junction station to the Westbury-Weymouth line

· Newton Abbot - Moretonhampstead

· Frome - Radstock

· Somerset and Dorset Railway, from Bath to Bournemouth

· Banbury - Cheltenham

Aviation and economic regeneration

17) Transport has a key role to play in supporting economic regeneration and promoting tourism; this is particularly the case in the South West. There is growing evidence indicating that money spent on expanding regional airports does not in fact encourage tourists to visit Britain but rather encourages British tourists to take their holidays abroad.

18) The March 2009 Aviation Environment Federation report Airport jobs: false hopes, cruel hoax, indicates there is a UK tourism deficit of £19billion a year and that the aviation tourism deficit is equivalent to a loss of roughly domestic 900,000 jobs. Given the preponderance of jobs in the leisure and tourism sectors in the region, the South West suffers these losses disproportionately higher than many other regions of the country.

19) RMT is therefore disappointed that the Regional Development Agency has spent around £19million supporting aviation expansion at regional airports including Bristol, Bournemouth, Exeter and Plymouth.

Maritime industry

20) The South West region contains some key ports with vital connections to the continent and important ferry routes. RMT believe that the South West Regional Committee should be seeking to promote waterborne transport as an environmentally friendly mode of transport that can facilitate reduced carbon emissions if freight is switched from other modes. Important south western ports such as Southampton have traditionally provided an important source of employment for the local community through the port infrastructure and the seaborne routes.

21) Unfortunately the UK will very soon be facing a crewing crisis due to the inadequate numbers of UK seafarers being trained, in particular seafaring ratings. The last figure recorded in the UK for 2006 was 50 trainee ratings and we strongly believe that numbers are still falling. The leading crewing agency Clyde Marine has advised RMT of the need to train more seafaring deck and engine ratings.

22) Ferry companies need to be encouraged to train youngsters wishing to go to sea. For example if Condor ferries, which operates out of Poole, provided training for young deck and engine ratings from the local area, they could assist in providing valuable skills which could facilitate a worthwhile career linked to the infrastructure of the south west economy.

Local Transport Act 2008 - Integrated Transport Authorities

23) Over many years six English Passenger Transport Executives (PTE) and Passenger Transport Authorities - now Integrated Transport Authorities (ITA) - have played an effective role in supporting and developing integrated transport in their respective areas of responsibility. Although not perfect as a model, ITAs introduce a measure of democratic participation and control into transport planning and provision and stand in sharp contrast to the plethora of unelected and unaccountable regional bodies and agencies charged with developing transport and other regional strategies.

24) The RMT therefore welcomed powers in the Local Transport Act 2008 which makes provision for the creation of new Integrated Transport Authorities where two or more local authorities propose such a course of action. Our Union's resolution to the 2009 South West Region Trades Union Conference reiterated "support for the encouragement of debate within the region around the principle of establishing Passenger Transport Authorities, or similar organisations, along the lines of those already in existence in the North and West Midlands". The resolution was unanimously carried and we hope that your inquiry plays an important part in taking that particular discussion forward.

25) The RMT would welcome the opportunity to provide oral evidence in support of our written evidence.

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[1] Transport Statistics Great Britain : 2008 Edition