Rail Infrastructure: Wales

I beg to move,

That this House has considered railway infrastructure in Wales.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, and an honour to chair the all-party parliamentary group for rail in Wales. My hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) is the previous chair, and I am trying my best to maintain his high standards.

My passion for trains and everything to do with railways began when I was a young child of about three. I was born and brought up in a small village in south Wales called Kenfig Hill. My grandmother, whom we called Mam, lived in nearby Porthcawl, which is a seaside town with lovely beaches and a funfair—every child’s dream. We did not have a car, so my mother tried many times to take me on a bus to Porthcawl to see Mam, but I suffered, and still suffer, from travel sickness. We sat at the front of the bus and managed to travel only a short distance before the driver, who knew me well, would see me turning a terrible shade of green and have to stop to allow me to make a quick exit so as to be sick at the side of the road. However, a train ran from the adjacent village, Pyle, to Porthcawl, so my mother tried it. I was fine—no sickness—and I loved the journey.

However, when I was a teenager, along came Beeching, who closed the rail link from Pyle to Porthcawl. Infrastructure has been removed, but I have a dream that one day the freight line that runs from Neath town to Onllwyn at the top of the Dulais valley in my constituency will be converted and once more be a passenger line. Many of the original stations are still there, the freight line gauge is compatible with passenger trains and a global centre of rail excellence is being developed in Onllwyn. I will say more about the global centre later.

Members should think about the benefits of such a scheme. For example, people could take the train to work, and tourists could experience the beauty of the countryside in my constituency while riding on a train. Just before the pandemic struck, Neath Port Talbot Council leased a passenger train to drive up the freight line and test it out. Alas, the test never happened.

A famous local historian lived in Onllwyn. His name was George Brinley Evans, and we all called him Uncle George. Sadly, he passed away last year aged 96. I met Uncle George when I became Member of Parliament for Neath, and he was as passionate about trains as I am. Uncle George lent me many books about trains and railways, and he told me many stories about the rail infrastructure that existed in his time. His dream was to reopen the passenger line from Swansea to Brecon and across the borders. Maybe one day, Uncle George, we will achieve that.

There is one drawback to my love of trains, as some Members here today might know: I am a travel jinx. People who find that out then go out of their way not to travel with me. I could tell the House many stories about my innate ability, over which I have no control, to cause car, train, boat and plane journeys to go horribly wrong. I will tell just one today.

A few years ago, we held a joint event in Pontypridd with the then Welsh Government Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Infrastructure, my friend Ken Skates MS, who represents Clwyd South, and the then shadow Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald). After a successful event, we caught the train from Pontypridd to Cardiff. So far, so good. Then the shadow Secretary of State and I caught the train from Cardiff Central to Paddington. We got to the next stop, Newport, but the train was paused for longer than usual. We waited patiently until an announcement was made that there was a cow on the line between Newport and the Severn tunnel, so we would be bussed to Bristol Parkway.

The train was packed, and it took a long time for us to get off and make our way to the front of Newport station, where we queued for buses. We managed to get the front seats on top of a double-decker, and I prayed that I would not be sick and embarrass myself in front of the shadow.

We arrived at Bristol Parkway, only to be told that there was serious flooding on the line between Bristol and Swindon, so we would be put on a train from Parkway to Temple Meads and hopefully be able to get the cross-country train to Paddington. The journey was exhausting and stressful and took six hours instead of one hour and 50 minutes. While we were waiting in Bristol Parkway, we found a plaque on the platform about the then Secretary of State for Transport, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), opening the new platform; I still have the selfie that we took in front of the plaque. Needless to say, my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough has not travelled with me since.

Setting aside my dysfunctional relationship with public transport, it is important to recognise that railways have played a crucial role in the development of the UK and Wales, connecting remote communities and facilitating trade and travel. However, despite that rich history, the railway infrastructure in Wales has faced its fair share of challenges in recent years. Today I will discuss the state of the railway infrastructure in Wales, the challenges it faces and the opportunities for improvement.

The railway network in Wales is made up of about 1,600 miles of track connecting cities, towns and villages across the country. It is a vital part of the transport infrastructure, providing a safe and efficient means of travel for both passengers and goods. However, the infrastructure is ageing and there are concerns about its safety and reliability.

One of the main challenges facing the railway infrastructure in Wales is the lack of investment. Although some improvements have been made in recent years, such as the electrification of the south Wales main line, there is still a significant funding gap in the infrastructure’s maintenance and modernisation. That is particularly concerning given the network’s age, with many of the tracks, stations and signalling systems in need of repair and replacement.

On the electrification of the south Wales main line, my hon. Friend will know that David Cameron promised that the electrification would reach Swansea, but it ends at Cardiff. Does she think that that is a half-done job?

I thank my hon. Friend for his really important intervention. He has been a champion for the cause of electrifying the line between Cardiff and Swansea. There is also the air quality aspect; I believe he is still the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on air pollution. He will remember our visit to Vortex, a really important small business in my constituency that develops futuristic air testing quality equipment that looks like a black motorbike helmet, which gets put at the side of the road. I thank my hon. Friend very much for coming to Neath and for his intervention.

Another challenge is the fragmented nature of the rail industry in Wales. The network is owned by the UK Government via Network Rail, but the train operating companies such as Transport for Wales Rail are responsible for running the services. That can lead to a lack of co-ordination and accountability, with different companies prioritising different aspects of the network.

Additionally, the railway infrastructure in Wales faces challenges relating to the country’s geography. Wales is a hilly and mountainous country, which presents difficulties in building and maintaining railway infrastructure. The terrain can make it arduous and costly to lay new track, maintain existing infrastructure and provide reliable services in areas with limited access. Despite those challenges, there are opportunities for improvement in the railway infrastructure in Wales.

The Welsh Labour Government have recognised the importance of the railway network and have made significant investments in recent years. One such investment is the south Wales metro, which is an integrated transport network that aims to improve connectivity across south Wales. The project includes electrification of the valleys lines, new rolling stock and the development of new stations and transport hubs. The metro will also incorporate other forms of transport such as buses and bicycles, making it a more sustainable and integrated transport system. A similar plan is being worked on to develop a Swansea bay metro.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on her excellent speech, and in particular commend what she says about the disbenefits of HS2, which is clearly a scandal. The project shows a total disregard for the devolution settlement, and it is a disgrace that it is not classified as an England-only project. If the Minister will not listen to Opposition Members, will he consider listening to members of his own party, including members of the Welsh Affairs Committee, which produced a report on rail infrastructure that states that

“HS2 should be reclassified as an England only project”?

Only last month, all Members of the Welsh Senedd, including members of the Minister’s party, unanimously passed a motion calling on the UK Government to redesignate HS2 an England-only project, and to provide Wales with the resultant consequentials. That is the right thing to do. It gets worse, because Northern Powerhouse Rail will also be classified as an England and Wales project, despite the fact that none of the track will be in Wales. Does my hon. Friend agree?

I thank my hon. Friend for her ongoing support; it means a lot to me. I am sure the Minister has heard the points she made, which I totally agree with, and will answer them. I thank her for her sterling work on the Welsh Affairs Committee, and I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) for his work on that Committee.

Not only does HS2 lengthen journey times on the south Wales main line, when the initial electrification investment aimed to reduce journey times, but it is all done for the benefit of an HS2 business case that no longer works, and there is nothing but disbenefit to Wales. Under the levelling-up agenda, it would not be unreasonable to extend electrification at least to Swansea, and/or make available other investment for Wales. That would help us to recover some of the five minutes lost by trains calling at OOC, and would be a fraction of the cost of the overspend on HS2. It would also mean that Wales would, for the first time, benefit from HS2, even if in a roundabout way.

Investment in Wales is now much harder to get, due to significant budgetary cuts, but investment in HS2 continues, with the business plan forever changing to fit the emerging and ever changing HS2 railway. There is no possibility that current HS2 plans would ever have been deemed acceptable in a business case review; they would never have seen the light of day. Wales suffers while billions continue to be swallowed up by a project that no longer works, when a relatively modest investment would allow Wales to at least share some of the supposed benefits of HS2.

Does the Minister agree that investment in Wales’s rail infrastructure is important both to our collective decarbonisation obligations and to the need to support economic development across all parts of the UK? On that basis, will he acknowledge the detailed work of Transport for Wales and its metro development teams over the last two years, and support the substantive rail enhancement plans that they have set out for Wales, and services over the border that impact on Welsh rail services, which will help us to meet those objectives? Primarily, we need the UK Government to commit to funding and supporting the delivery of a range of rail enhancement schemes up to 2030. That includes the upgrade of the south Wales main line, as highlighted in the recent Western Gateway 2050 rail vision.

Excellent.

My hon. Friend is chair of the APPG for the Western Gateway, which is why she is cheering. The upgrade of the south Wales main line should include the new Burns stations in south-east Wales, Cardiff Parkway and the electrification of the Swansea and Vale of Glamorgan lines—and of Filton Bank to Bristol Temple Meads. The enhancement schemes should also include the upgrade of the Borderlands line to connect Wrexham and north-east Wales to Liverpool and Merseyside, using Merseyrail’s new battery-powered Stadler 777s; capacity enhancements at Chester and on the north Wales main line; a first phase of Swansea bay metro to help to deliver an economic boost to the region; and immediate action, including development funding via Network Rail this year, to help to address network capacity issues at Cardiff West junction. Resolution of those issues would improve the operational capacity and efficiency of the entire core valley lines network—a requirement that was omitted from Network Rail and the Department for Transport’s Cardiff area signalling renewal project in 2012 to 2015. That enhancement could be most efficiently combined with planned Network Rail renewal works.

Thank you for your patience, Mrs Cummins. I will finish with some good news—I always try to end on a happy note. This morning the global centre of rail excellence announced that it has signed heads of terms for Transport for Wales to become a major commercial premium client. That secures a long-term partnership for Transport for Wales, so that it can use all the world-class facilities at the global centre of rail excellence. The announcement follows the recent deal with Hitachi, which will also be using the premium-quality testing, product approval, training, innovation, research and development and storage facilities at the global centre of rail excellence. Those agreements indicate the global centre’s commercial strength, and are great news for Neath, Wales and the UK.

It is a delight to serve under your chairship, Mrs Cummins. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Christina Rees) on securing this important debate on rail infrastructure in Wales. Like her, I am a keen speaker on rail issues in this House, because they are so important for my constituency. I am pleased to be a vice-chair of the APPG for rail in Wales, which my hon. Friend chairs with great enthusiasm.

I look forward to seeing the global centre of rail excellence up and running in my hon. Friend’s constituency in 2025. The expertise of CAF, a Spanish-owned train manufacturer in Newport East, will feed into the work of the centre. Will the Minister look at that company’s work in manufacturing trains and trams? It is an excellent company that builds great trains in my constituency. Our Welsh Labour Government deserve huge credit for co-ordinating and financing, alongside private sector partners, this very exciting project in my hon. Friend’s constituency.

I share my hon. Friend’s frustrations with the UK Tory Government’s chronic underfunding of our rail network. It is important to note that, as she says, much of Welsh rail infrastructure is not devolved. The buck stops with the UK Government, and Tory mismanagement has deliberately held back fair rail funding for Wales. It is often mentioned but worth repeating that Wales accounts for a significant 11% of the route network in England and Wales combined, but receives just 1.6% of rail enhancement funding. A conservative estimate of the underfunding of Welsh railways by 2029 is £2.4 billion, but it could be as high as £5.1 billion. That is shocking. Welsh taxpayers and rail passengers have been totally short-changed by this Government, who have wilfully had their eye off the ball when it comes to Wales.

We have seen the same with HS2, as my hon. Friend said very well. The HS2 project is wholly in England and will provide little benefit, if any, to any area of Wales. Indeed, by the UK Government’s own reckoning, HS2 is likely to cause economic detriment to areas of south Wales. Like my hon. Friend—and others, I am sure—I would be grateful if the Minister spelled out once and for all why HS2 continues to be classed as an England and Wales project, which deprives Wales of consequential funding through the Barnett formula. As my hon. Friends the Members for Neath and for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) have said, it is not just Labour Members who are querying that discrepancy. The Minister will be aware of the Welsh Affairs Committee’s report on Welsh rail, overseen by the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb), which states:

It is great to serve under your chairpersonship, Mrs Cummins, and a big congratulations to the hon. Member for Neath (Christina Rees). If, in the aftermath of the King’s coronation, the Government are serious about the Union, they should stop starving Wales of its resources and making it relatively poorer, year after year. The average wage in Wales is 72.7% of the UK level; it was £21,000 in 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. By comparison, in Scotland, the average wage is 92% of the UK level, or £26,572. The driving force behind that is the fact that over the past 20 years, Scotland has had 8% of rail infrastructure investment and Wales has had 1.5%.

As my hon. Friends have pointed out, the Tory Government have decided to classify HS2 as applying to England and Wales, even though it does not go through Wales at all. In fact, while it will reduce journey times from London to Manchester from 2 hours and 10 minutes to 1 hour and 10 minutes, the journey time from London to Swansea will remain at 3 hours. We will therefore see a distribution of investment and jobs out of Wales. Despite that, we will not get a penny piece from HS2. Scotland will get an 8% investment, or £8 billion, in line with its population figures. Wales is being robbed of £5 billion, which works out at £3,700 per household.

At a time when the poorest nation in the Union is on its back, and receives 73% of average wages, we are to get even less. That is completely unacceptable and disgraceful. That is why the all-party Welsh Affairs Committee, on which I serve, unanimously agreed that HS2 would not make up for the history of starvation that we have suffered under the Tories, and indeed before this Government, but we thought that at least we would get our fair share in the future. The Committee unanimously agreed that the project should be classified as England only, so we would get our Barnett consequentials, as Northern Ireland and Scotland do. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter), the Senedd unanimously—the Tories, Plaid and Labour—agreed that we should get our fair share. I have had meetings with Professor Mark Berry and the Minister who, to be fair, has been friendly and accommodating in those meetings, but the bottom line is that he needs to persuade the Government to provide the resources that we need to build a stronger, fairer and greener Union, in which Wales gets its fair share.

We talk about Wales and Scotland, and on occasion people say we are putting out a begging bowl. We have to bear in mind that London gets the highest regional funding per head through the equivalent of the Barnett formula for England. That needs to be reiterated. If that level of transport funding is good enough for London, why is it not good enough for Wales?

Precisely. The money is poured into London, which already has the wealth and the best transport system. There is an idea that there will be some sort of trickle down. In transport generally, the only place we have publicly owned transport that works is London; elsewhere, it is a complete mess because it is not controlled in the interests of the public.

Investment is the core issue I am focusing on, and we are completely starved of the resources we need. The Minister knows that Transport for Wales has worked up £2.5 billion-worth of projects that can be delivered over the next 10 to 15 years. That is half the consequential funding it deserves. I have spoken about this before, and perhaps the Minister will mention it when he responds to the debate. I hope that his officials in the Department for Transport are engaging with Transport for Wales to get some of those projects up and running.

Some projects have been mentioned already, including the Swansea metro and connectivity in south Wales. The reality is that 3 million people live in Swansea, Cardiff and Bristol. That economic and population cluster should be connected up, but connections between Swansea and Bristol run about once an hour, while connections between Leeds and Manchester—an equivalent area—run about eight times an hour. To rub salt in the wounds of Wales, we have just been reminded that the Government have decided to classify Northern Powerhouse Rail as an England and Wales project, so more money will go into that project instead of to Wales; we will get nothing. We also need more connectivity between Holyhead and Crewe. There are plans for a freeport, and at the moment the strategy is that everything is going to be sucked out of Wales and into Liverpool.

We should all share a vision of a stronger, fairer, greener future for all the United Kingdom, but in particular for Wales, where we have the opportunity to build renewables and green energy. We know that freight, for example, is going to grow by 30% by 2035. The Government should be investing in Wales rather than putting us down and not letting us achieve our true potential.

On the point of a green future, we are facing a climate crisis. My office in south Wales has been doing some work on the development of an integrated transport system in Wales. If Wales had what I regard as its entitlement—£5 billion in consequentials, because HS2 is an England-only project—that would fund the Wales and Swansea Bay metros and the integration of the north Wales line with Merseyside, and allow us to connect Aberystwyth and Swansea by train. Does my hon. Friend agree that the UK Government have a duty to properly fund public transport so that we can address the existential crisis facing our planet?

Precisely. The Welsh Government, in their wisdom, have quite rightly decided that we need to shift our focus from personal car use and diesel to public transport and rail. However, they are not being accommodated by the UK Government, who give us the money we need to provide infrastructure that enables people to move around more modestly, and to work from home and so on, in order to save the planet and build the economy.

We will face an election next year, and there is a question about what, precisely, the Labour Government are going to do about this. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) will respond to that, but I will make a point about the numbers. If we had half the money that we require—£2.5 billion of the £5 billion—the schemes that have already been worked up by Transport for Wales could be delivered in 10 to 15 years. That represents 5% of the 5% share that Wales should get from the £28 billion that the Labour party is promising each year in green investment.

I hope that my hon. Friend will respond to that point, but what I am saying is that the Labour party has already put forward a plan for green investment that can easily accommodate our needs in terms of rail. What is the Minister doing about it? I fear that he is not doing anything. It is about time we had a stronger, fairer, greener future for Wales and we got the rail investment we deserve.

I call Liz Saville Roberts.