To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the condition, maintenance, and long-term resilience of rail infrastructure on the Great Western Railway network; and what steps they are taking to ensure its reliability following recent flooding and extreme weather.
My Lords, Network Rail has robust plans in place to deal with resilience because of climate change. The Wales and western region will see a £2.6 billion spend on asset renewals and £1.6 billion invested to maintain assets from 2024 to 2029. There is also a comprehensive weather resilience and climate change adaptation plan focusing on safe- guarding assets, embedding resilience into daily operations and adapting to climate change impacts along the route.
My Lords, recent months have seen the western region suffer delays and cancellations through infrastructure issues. Signalling failure is partly to blame, but inclement weather frequently causes severe flooding. In particular, Chipping Sodbury tunnel, built in 1902, has been plagued by flooding issues since the day it opened. Successive Governments have funded remedial work over the years on a piecemeal basis, but, as the Minister is aware from his former role at Network Rail, this has not provided a solution to the ongoing problem. Can he therefore commit to resolving the issue in order to bring travel in the western region into the 21st century? As the operator, can he take steps to ensure that GWR provides a full set of rolling stock on its intercity services, as opposed to the frequently provided overcrowded half-set of carriages?
The noble Lord knows more about Chipping Sodbury now because I arranged for the route director for the western route to talk to him. He is right that it was opened in 1902. Great Western Railway built the cutting and the tunnel straight through an aquifer and it has been flooding ever since. The good news is that remedial work over the past five years has significantly reduced the delays created by flooding in that location. However, there are many other examples of flooding due to climate change, including, as he knows, one recently in Neath, which has never flooded before.
My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change. My sub-committee’s recent advice to the Government was that we need to prepare for 2 degrees of warming by 2050. That implies that, in many areas, typical weather will be rather like the extreme weather we see today, and extreme weather will be much more extreme than that, with maximum temperatures potentially towards the mid-40s. Can the Minister assure the House that the HS2 line to Birmingham and the recently announced Northern Rail developments will be ready for this weather?
The truth is that the whole railway network has to be adapted to weather that was once exceptional and is now common- place. The budget for Network Rail, as the current infrastructure owner, was at least quadrupled compared with 2019 to 2024, precisely to cope with that. I am sure that the new lines, such as HS2 and the Liverpool to Manchester line, will be built with that mind, but our greater preoccupation at the moment is our existing railway and its reliability.
My Lords, recent reports in the press have highlighted the serious shortages of carriages on Great Western Railway services, with one in three engines not functioning properly due to fuel pump issues. What are the Government doing to ensure a fully operating service now, as well as when the Government start to directly run this part of the railway?
The noble Baroness is completely right. At one stage, out of the total train fleet for long-distance services, with 400-odd engines in those trains, some 110 of them were not functioning due to a fault that appears to be something to do with fuel supply and fuel pumps. The good news is that the number is now down to 38. I am very frustrated by the time it has taken to fix them, but they are being fixed.
My Lords, I am confident that the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, will join with me in praising the care of the GWR staff. Nevertheless, both he and I suffer on our journeys, often together, from Swansea, because of the delays. Can my noble friend the Minister say where the GWR stands in the comparative performance rates of all the railways in this matter?
It was pretty good. It has got worse because of the engine shortage. Reliability has been very poor. I am expecting it to now recover. I am on its back.
My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, about the quality and care that GWR staff take in looking after their customers, of whom I am one.
I take the Minister back to his Written Answer about Chipping Sodbury. He knows that I raised that issue when I was Secretary of State and he was chair of Network Rail, and I was assured that work had been done to solve the problem. It has improved it, as he said. It delayed the flooding impact of Storm Claudia by 27 hours. He says that more work is going to be done in 2026-27. Is that work planned to fix the problem once and for all?
I think the noble Lord is a bit optimistic. If mother nature continues to pour water into the railway infrastructure, because of the way it is built, any fix will be related to what the climate is actually doing.
Network Rail is very confident that there can be further reductions, some of which will be through big infrastructure, such as building small reservoirs and fitting more pumps. So, I cannot guarantee that the tunnel will never flood, but I can guarantee that every effort is being made to reduce the delays when it does.
My Lords, the points that have been raised by the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Anderson, are absolutely right. In particular, west of Cardiff, there are severe problems going through to Carmarthenshire. This is probably due to underinvestment over a number of years. Can the Minister give a commitment that he will look at the situation running through to west Wales, in view of the recent experiences?