It is a great pleasure to start the new year by talking about something that this Parliament helped to create and establish all those years ago. We approved the legislation that enabled private railways such as Brunel’s Great Western to exist and to flourish. However, we have not had much debate recently about what has effectively been a creeping nationalisation since the pandemic. Recent rhetoric has not really recognised the success of the private railways that were created, or indeed the success of the privatisation of those railways more recently, which led to a 107% increase in passenger journeys, a 32% increase in passenger services, and a 145% increase in passenger revenue. At the moment, the situation is that the Department for Transport is really in control of the railway operators, including Great Western, and His Majesty’s Treasury takes the risk, with passenger frustration over the last few months increasing during a long period of train driver strikes.
But let me start at the beginning. All of us here share being part of the Great Western geography; we are linked by our constituencies to Paddington station, that railway cathedral graced by statues of the founding genius, Isambard Kingdom Brunel—what a name—Paddington bear, and a soldier in the trenches, symbolic of the 3,312 employees of Great Western who died in two world wars. We surely all recognise the engineering achievements of the Box tunnel, or even Kemble tunnel, the architecture of Bristol Temple Meads, and the social vision of the Great Western Railway’s village in Swindon, which led to the opening of the main line from Paddington to Bristol in 1841, and the fastest trains, such as the Flying Truro, which reached 100 miles an hour 30 years before the Flying Scotsman—
As I was saying, the network of Great Western Railway today stretches from Pembroke Dock to Falmouth Docks, from Portsmouth to Gatwick and to Hereford. The GWR railway network now runs more than 1,600 services a day, with more than 80 million passenger journeys. That, of course, is significantly down on the pre-covid figure, which was almost 100 million.
I congratulate the hon. Member on securing today’s debate. I recently met the GWR managing director Mark Hopwood and his team because many of my Slough constituents were angered and frustrated by the reduction in the number of fast trains going to and from Slough. Given that Slough is a huge business hub, does the hon. Member agree that it is incumbent on the Government and GWR to ensure, for the benefit of the local, regional and national economy, that we have a large number of fast trains so that commuters can go to and fro? If he cannot comment on that Slough-related topic, does he agree that it is about time the Government built the western rail link to Heathrow, having committed to it more than a decade ago and given that it is the No. 1 infrastructure priority for the whole Thames Valley region?
The hon. Member touches on one of the themes of this debate: the importance of Members of Parliament working very closely with their railway operator, the Department for Transport and Network Rail to try to achieve the services that their constituents most value. I will not comment on the business of commuter traffic from Slough to Paddington—it is not my specialist area. On his second point, constituents all over Gloucestershire and Wiltshire would relish the opportunity provided by opening Great Western Railway services to Heathrow. I am sure the Minister will want to touch on that, and I thank the hon. Member for his intervention.
Of course, there have been constant improvements to the network in recent times, although there have also been some real difficulties—as The Sunday Times focused on at Theale over the weekend—and colleagues will no doubt highlight those successes or failures. Since he cannot be with us, I highlight for my neighbour, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), the improved forecourt, interchange cycle hub and 70 additional car park spaces in his constituency that he and Great Western Railway have worked successfully on together. There is also the fourth platform at Bristol Parkway, the delivery of the MetroWest network, the new Portway park-and-ride station, and the new Ashley Down station coming soon. All of those are helpful in the west country. In all this, the Department has played its part, as have successive Ministers, including this one, who is a great supporter and champion of railways, which is important.
Inevitably, I would like to highlight what has been achieved in Gloucester since 2010. Gloucester railway station is an extraordinary animal. It has the longest platform in the country, but it is on a spur off the main line between Birmingham and Bristol, and therefore there has always been a lot to do. Since 2010, we have managed a significant number of improvements, including a covered walkway between platforms 2 and 1, the new waiting rooms, and a new accessible station footbridge with the lifts and eventually the canopy. That also led to a remodelled station booking office, and we have introduced additional car parking on the south side of the station, which was a major business. It is difficult to transfer an asset from the Ministry of Justice to the city council—that took about three years, but we got there eventually.
I expect to call the Opposition spokesperson at 5.31 pm, the Minister at 5.36 pm and Richard Graham to wind up at 5.46 pm, and that the debate will end at 5.48 pm.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on securing this debate. As it states in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, I am a member of the GWR stakeholder advisory board. I represent the Thames Valley on that board.
I want to pick up the point that my hon. Friend made about the advantages we saw from privatisation of the railways. In my experience of dealing with companies covering services to my constituency—to Maidenhead, to Twyford, and the branch lines to Wargrave, Furze Platt and Cookham—there have been significant improvements when the companies are private and we have been able to work with them to improve railway services. The companies—predominantly GWR, recently—understand the importance of providing for the needs of customers. That is why I echo my hon. Friend’s comment that it is important that the Government examine the current situation, because there is a strange dichotomy between the cost risk taken by the Department for Transport and the revenue risk taken by the Treasury. The two need to be brought together if decent decisions are going to be made about the services that will be provided to customers.
Sadly, despite my overall experience of working with GWR, I have to say that in the last month, the experience of my constituents has not been good. I want to read out the problems that they have experienced. On 7 and 8 December, there was damage to overhead electrical wires, with delays and cancellations between London Paddington and Reading. On 9 December, industrial action resulted in delays and cancellations. On 10 December, damage to the overhead electric wires between Slough and London Paddington caused delays and cancellations. On 11 December, a points failure in the Slough area resulted in delays and cancellations. On 13 December, defective track between London Paddington and Reading meant trains having to run at reduced speed on some lines. On 14 December, due to a fault with the signalling system between Paddington and Heathrow and between Heathrow terminal 5 and Reading, some lines were blocked. On 15 December, due to a fault with the signalling system between London Paddington and Reading, all lines were blocked. The lines were closed on 24, 25, 26 and 27 December because of work at Old Oak Common. On 28 December, emergency services were dealing with an incident between London Paddington and Reading, and all lines were blocked.
I congratulate my near neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on securing this important debate. I have regular contact with the Rail Minister, who is absolutely excellent.
I will just run through some of the projects we have locally. We are trying to reopen the Bristol Road Stonehouse line, which was closed under the Beeching cuts, to make sure that we have access into Bristol. This is a 25-year dream of my constituents. I grasped it, and we managed to get investment from Government to do a proper feasibility study. I am waiting for the Minister and Government to give us information about the next stage for the outline business case. I understood that it was going to come before Christmas, so it will be helpful for my constituents to hear a little more about that. Stonehouse Town Council is working particularly hard on that.
On step-free access at Stroud railway station, there is a lasting image—a picture is better than a thousand words—of me dragging up a toddler, a buggy and trying to balance a baby and all sorts of different things. I have huge sympathy with people who tell me that they are struggling to get around the station, or are disabled, have luggage or are elderly. We are really hoping to be in the Access for All pitch. I am just putting that underneath the Minister’s nose.
On the Cam and Dursley station, I have made a pitch, speaking to GWR and others about the reality. It is a really popular station, and we have a lot of homes being built around the area. We think there needs to be improved shelters for rain and all weathers, and I know that some constituents would like to see the frequency of services increased as we go along.
I do want to echo colleagues’ comments about GWR. They may disagree, because I know I am a total pest about the railway on behalf of my constituents, but I feel I have a good relationship with the organisation, and indeed Network Rail. I have had cause to contact them many times, sometimes just for run-of-the-mill, day-to-day things, but also sometimes on sad occasions, when there have been deaths on the lines. We have had good responses, and they are responsive, so I am pleased about that.
5:08 pm
Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on bringing forward this debate. I represent Truro and Falmouth, which is in the heart of Cornwall, so I have the opportunity to experience the rail network myself on a weekly basis, as I often go all the way from Paddington back to my constituency. My constituents and I all have tales of unreliability on GWR’s longer-haul services. My inbox has received several complaints from those who have to commute out of Cornwall for work and from plenty of students who go to and from Penryn back to their families each term. Any additional support we can give to these rail lines would be appreciated.
However, it is important to acknowledge the improvements that have been made to our railways since 2019. I always try to make this point to remind our really talented students at the University of Exeter and Falmouth University that their journeys today are actually an awful lot better than they were about five, 10 or 15 years ago. It just would not have been practical for many of them to come and enjoy being a student in my constituency at all.
Since May 2019, we have had a half-hourly service between Plymouth and Penzance, which has greatly boosted passenger numbers and had a positive impact on the Cornish economy. GWR has also worked to improve reliability with its new rolling stock of inter-city express trains. There is also the Night Riviera Sleeper service, which I have used many times. The sleeper lounge at Truro station in my constituency has encouraged more people to travel to London by train rather than plane. We have seen an exponential rise in passengers since covid. Many people have now moved to Cornwall and can commute to London for a couple of days a week using the Riviera service. I believe it is out of service for refurbishment at the moment, but it is very popular.
I know that my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), will come on to this in greater detail, but I am proud that the Government are working with Cornwall Council, and its delivery partners GWR and Network Rail, to build the Mid Cornwall Metro. It will do exactly what it says on the tin: ensure that people can commute from Newquay via Par and Truro down to Falmouth, so that students do not have to live close to the university; we can all spread out and enjoy both coasts. We will see £50 million of levelling-up funding injected directly into Cornwall’s rail links. Hopefully, we can expect to see that up and running in 2025-26.
Our communities in Truro and Falmouth are incredibly mixed, with a large number of car owners. It is incumbent on the railways to recognise that we are dualling the A30 all the way through my constituency. That means that at the moment, with the service unreliability that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) has just set out, more people will choose to use their cars, which is not the direction of travel that we want. The dualling project will be completed early spring, and we want to ensure that the railways remain competitive. Getting the Mid Cornwall Metro over the line will transform connectivity for the groups—students, tourists and communities alike—who are most reliant on public transport, and hopefully alleviate pressure on parking in our town centres, particularly during the summer months.
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The new hourly direct services between Gloucester and Paddington also benefit all my colleagues in Gloucester. The new pay-as-you-go smartcard has been helpful in a number of ways not originally anticipated, particularly when the station underpass has been closed to access. Work is going on as we speak to deliver further improvements, particularly on the underpass, which is a sensitive bit of infrastructure that links the hospital to the city centre and which Great Western has gallantly taken on. There will also be a big improvement in the electric vehicle charging stations, the forecourts, bus services and so on.
I want to highlight for the Minister that although the journey time to Paddington has been reduced by 15 minutes since electrification, there is an opportunity to increase the speed of the services simply by renegotiating how long the trains stop at Gloucester. That time is currently 10 minutes, to allow the driver to walk from one end of the train to the other, but even at a slow amble that journey could not possibly take more than a minute and a half.
It is also important to recognise some of GWR’s community contribution and community projects, such as the Getaway project for independent rail travel. Its biggest contribution to community, however, comes from station staff, who are coping, calming and carrying on. When strikes happen, no one shouts at a train driver, because they are not there. It is Steve, Mike, Alan, Naomi and all their colleagues who cop it at Gloucester and all the other stations along the line. They deal with the drunks, the drugs and even the MP who left his bag on the train. I salute them all.
This debate has to touch on problems as well. I will highlight four. The first is the continuing strikes by train drivers, which damage trust and confidence, and put a lot of strain on other Great Western Railway employees. The second is the extraordinary feature that train drivers do not have to work on a Sunday. I cannot think of any other transport system—I was an airline manager once—where the driver or pilot would be allowed to decide whether they rock up on a Sunday. That ruins many weekends for families.
The third problem is the business of Network Rail’s infrastructure, particularly the failures in the Thames valley. It is easy to criticise Network Rail, but there are some real problems and anything the Department can do to improve the infrastructure in the Thames valley will make a huge difference to all of us. The last problem is the taxpayer subsidy. We must let managers manage and civil servants hold them to account. That is the only way in which we will get the railway operators to innovate and to continue to improve with better rolling stock and low-carbon operations that support travellers and help families and growth.
All those things matter. There are opportunities for big projects ahead. The Filton Bank electrification promoted by the western gateway to electrify and speed up journeys between Bristol and Birmingham in particular would be a very good project for the DFT to support. Just before coming into this Chamber, I heard from my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) that Great Western Railway has decided to open the line from Swindon to Oxford, which will have a lot of advantages for many travellers.
I see the opportunities and the improvements at Gloucester station that have happened and are happening. I will certainly continue to work closely on all those, because ultimately, railway stations and railway operations are in danger of being an orphan. They are not well managed by county councils. It is up to us here both to hold them to account and to encourage them to innovate. I hope that I and all my colleagues in Gloucestershire and elsewhere will continue to work closely with Great Western Railway to achieve the necessary improvements.
On 2 January, an object was caught on the overhead electric wires. On 4 January, travel was disrupted when the police took control of the line and closed it because of an incident. On 5 January, there were disruptions from flooding. On 7 January, damage to the overhead electric wires between Paddington and Reading meant that some lines were blocked. On 8 January, urgent repairs to the track between Reading and London Paddington meant trains having to run at reduced speed. On 9 January—today—there was a speed restriction between Reading and London Paddington. Frankly, from the point of view of my constituents, this is not good enough.
What hon. Members and the Minister will have seen from this is that the vast majority of those incidents were about Network Rail and its response to problems with overhead wires and on the track. Just before Christmas, I held a meeting with GWR and Network Rail. Everybody understands the issues, but the question—and what I will look for from the Minister—is whether we can ensure that we will get sufficient support from Network Rail to resolve these problems such that my constituents can continue to have the service they expect and deserve.
The hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) mentioned the economic importance of Slough. Maidenhead is also an economically important place and is important to GWR in terms of the footfall from Maidenhead. My constituents need to know that they can rely on the train service. Sadly, with the way that Network Rail is behaving at the moment and how it has been dealing with the track and overhead lines, we are not seeing the service that they need.
I hope the Minister will be able to give me some confidence and comfort. We want to get people out of their cars and on to the railways. Sadly, if they see disruptions and cancellations, they will go back into their cars. That is not good for the planet—it is not good for any of us—so, Minister, over to you.
I do want to mention costs. Constituents of Stroud are talking to me about the difference between the cost of travelling from Stroud to London and other lines. At the moment, a single peak one-way fare is £95. That is absolutely prohibitive for people who want to travel to work. I know many more people are working at home, but there should be more choice. For off-peak it goes down to £46, then down to £33 at 10.30 am. A ticket on the Worcester to London line, which is a longer journey, at 7 am—when I had my £95 ticket for—costs £50. I understand that there are historic boundaries drawn up for Network Rail, and I have written to the Minister, who has kindly written back and talked to me about writing to the Rail Delivery Group, but I do think these historic boundaries and the unfairness that is built in for my constituents do need to be looked at.
One gentleman wrote to me:
“I’m really concerned by crippling rail costs; it’s proving more and more difficult for me as a freelancer to be able to commute into London because the costs are just astronomical. If areas such as ours aren’t going to be cut off from the rest of the country, a cheaper rail network is vital. FGW could operate within the rail network allowing people like me to take advantage of a rail network card that would greatly improve the costs for rail fares within the south of England. Currently, this is only reserved as far as Reading”.
It does not stretch to us, so I urge the Minister to have a look at that, and I urge all of the companies to do so, too. If it is prohibitive to get on the trains, we will lose it as a service and it will become the preserve of the rich. That absolutely should not be the case.
I will not go on for too long, but changing our infrastructure for the better and levelling up our communities in the south-west is always going to take time. However, if we do not do it, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) said, we will get cut off. The sheer amount of investment from the Government, Cornwall Council and Network Rail into the railway lines in the south-west has given us a real leg-up in the last few years. It is our job now to continue to work with those partners to keep the current projects on track, and to promote other value-for-money schemes that can help our towns and villages get that little bit closer. We are very precarious, and if we do not keep investing, it is easy for Cornwall to fall off the map.