Transport Connectivity: North-west England

I beg to move,

That this House has considered improving transport connectivity in the North West.

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I am delighted to see so many Members here today. The issue at hand affects many constituencies in the north-west, including mine. Leigh and Atherton, once a beacon of industrial activity, lies between the great cities of Manchester and Liverpool. With our main source of industry gone, we are now part of a commuter belt, alongside constituencies such as those in St Helens, Warrington, Wigan and Salford. Our road networks, originally designed around mills and factories, now struggle to cope with the ever increasing volume of traffic, and I know the same is true in our neighbouring regions of Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumbria.

A lack of connectivity in one place affects another. Congestion that starts in Leigh does not just disappear when crossing a border; it blocks the roads of our nearest neighbours. The rush-hour struggle to connect to our motorway or city networks means that the A580 East Lancs Road is a source of constant annoyance for many. When my constituents are asked about public transport, they say that, without a rail or Metrolink connection in the centre of Leigh, buses are stuck in the same traffic—it is all part of the increasing frustration.

The lack of efficient transport links is a key barrier to growth. Leigh ranks in the top 1% of the country for transport-related social exclusion, meaning that people are unable to participate in routine, everyday activities because of a lack of viable travel options. A 2024 Transport for the North report highlighted that people in the north-west with access to a car can reach nearly six times as many jobs as those who rely on public transport. Poor connectivity, limited infrastructure and an overreliance on cars leads to high levels of social isolation.

I thank the hon. Lady for securing a debate on this important issue, and I welcome her back to the House and wish her well. She is outlining the issues in the north-west. Does she agree that social isolation in rural areas in particular is exacerbated by infrequent, costly public transport, and if we in this United Kingdom are serious about addressing mental health concerns in our rural communities, we need to bring them out of isolation, physically as well as mentally?

Yes, I do agree, particularly for those who are vulnerable due to age, poverty or disability, as this will have a hugely negative impact on their life chances.

This stark disparity underlines the need for better transport systems and new road networks—ones that boost economic productivity and ensure fairness and opportunity for all. Without the necessary infrastructure, these benefits will remain out of reach for far too many. The narrative often goes that people must leave to succeed, and I am determined to change that story.

We are a proud community, but we are often overlooked when it comes to investment. Growth goes where the growth already is, which stifles the potential for outside business investment and growth for existing businesses. Despite the many positives that Leigh and Atherton has to offer, we still see many young people with great potential leaving to seek opportunities elsewhere.

It can take over an hour and 40 minutes to travel the 18 miles from Leigh to Manchester airport by public transport, while a car journey takes only 30 minutes, if we are lucky—that is not in rush hour. This huge difference cannot be overlooked, especially given the economic and employment opportunities offered by Manchester airport, which provides thousands of jobs to the region. Many of my constituents are missing out on those opportunities due to poor transport links, or have no other option than to use their cars, which obviously does not help with emissions.

It is not just a matter of growth and job opportunities either. After speaking to our borough-wide police force, I discovered that response times in the Wigan borough are slower than in other Greater Manchester areas, and this is due to congestion. Our local health trust, operating sites in Wigan and Leigh, routinely factors in an hour’s travel time for consultants and staff moving between sites—it all adds up.

A lot of Members want to speak, and I want to accommodate everybody. The Opposition spokespeople have agreed to five minutes each, but the Minister will take the full 10 minutes. That will give everybody else four minutes.

It is a pleasure to have you in the Chair, Ms McVey. I congratulate the hon. Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) on securing a debate on this important topic for our constituents. Transport connectivity is about economic growth and opening up the world so that our constituents can make choices about their lives that allow them to fulfil their potential.

Reliable, affordable and accessible public transport is not just a convenience; it is an essential pillar of our economy, our communities and our future. Yet for too long the north-west has suffered from under-investment, unreliable rail services and disconnected transport networks that leave too many of our constituents struggling to get to work, school or essential services. That is why I am asking the Government for three things today. First, we need more frequent and reliable rail services with simple, affordable fares that encourage people back on to our trains. Secondly, I urge the Government to work with Stockport council and the Greater Manchester combined authority to bring Metrolink or tram-trains to my constituency. Thirdly, the Government need to make public transport the default for my constituents by expanding current bus and rail connections.

Many in my community and in the surrounding areas of Greater Manchester and beyond will remember the absolute chaos towards the end of last year when, almost every day, commuters on Northern-operated trains saw swathes of red cancellation notices. I received dozens of emails from constituents talking about how they could not rely on the trains to get to work or to pick up their children from school. Some even told me that they had to reject job offers because the trains were just too unreliable.

Since the pandemic, constituents commuting on the Rose Hill to Manchester Piccadilly line have faced an irregular timetable, and passenger numbers across the north-west have struggled to recover to pre-pandemic levels. I welcome the plan to integrate our trains, trams and buses, and I look forward to the streamlining of ticketing this will offer. However, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Metrolink does not yet extend into any part of Stockport. Our brilliant new interchange is Metrolink-ready, but we have no indication of when Metrolink will be ready for Stockport. We have even less idea of whether Metrolink or tram-trains will eventually reach into the towns and villages of my constituency.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms McVey. In the few minutes available to me, I would like to put transport in the north-west into perspective. I would not like anything I say to be taken as a criticism of the mayor or of Transport for Greater Manchester. The Bee network, which is an excellent scheme, has put Greater Manchester to the situation London has had for the last 45 years, which we see as progress.

As the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart) has just said, investment in transport is vital for economic growth. However, when we look at the national objectives, and as we have seen forever—since the second world war—more money is going into London and the south-east than the north-west. For all of Transport for Greater Manchester’s successes, it has had to fight the Department for Transport to get extra investment for Metrolink and fight Labour and Conservative Ministers to get money for investment.

There is great potential in the north-west. In fact, we would get more out of investment in transport links in the north-west than the south-east, because of what we are, in effect, doing when we invest in London and the south-east. All transport investment creates jobs and growth, but in London and the south-east we are then, in effect, subsidising congestion, because we get so much congestion that we need more investment afterwards. That is not the situation in Greater Manchester and the north-west. I am not against the Lower Thames crossing, but three quarters of a billion pounds has already been spent on assessing whether it will be any use whatever, and that money would benefit transport in Greater Manchester, and jobs and investment for the whole country, much more than it will the Lower Thames area.

[Dr Andrew Murrison in the Chair]

We have suffered, in that we are not getting High Speed 2 at the moment. I think the campaign to get the rail link from Birmingham to Manchester and Manchester airport should continue. It is extraordinary to see the billions of pounds that have been spent on high-speed rail from London to Birmingham, mainly on tunnels.

Does my hon. Friend agree that some of the benefits of HS2 have been masked by the name High Speed 2 and that one of the main benefits of HS2 is actually capacity, which we desperately need on the railways?

My hon. Friend is precisely right: the real case for High Speed 2, as I am afraid it will always be called, was capacity. We are not getting that extra capacity between Birmingham and Manchester without HS2. If that capacity were to happen—it should happen—it would lead to the necessity of extra investment in the rail system east, west and internally within Greater Manchester. It would lead to more investment, so we need to campaign for it. All we have at the moment is an extension to the London underground system, which will benefit London and Birmingham.

The hon. Member for Hazel Grove mentioned the Metrolink going to Stockport, and I agree with her. For the first time for nearly a quarter of a century, we do not have viable plans that we know will happen, and we may have to carry on fighting Ministers and the Department for Transport for the next stage. Obviously, I would like trams to go to Middleton, as I represent part of it, but I agree that trams going to Stockport and other parts of the conurbation—perhaps Leigh as well—would mean transport and economic development. So I think we have to keep campaigning and making the case that bucks spent on transport in Greater Manchester will get us more than money spent in London and the south-east.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) for securing this important debate.

My constituency is semi-urban and semi-rural. Without good public transport, my constituents cannot get around, and the visitors we so enjoy having in our area cannot get in. A lot of people in my community struggle with access to services such as GPs and hospital appointments and with getting to work. That creates more pressure on services such as patient transport services and GP home visits. It also affects the nature of my constituency, in that we have an ageing population, with fewer young families able to move in. My rural businesses and organisations that represent them, such as the Sedbergh Economic Partnership, also tell me that transport connectivity in rural areas is a massive bar to growth, because businesses cannot get the staff they need to expand.

Sedbergh itself is struggling at the minute. There has been a bus service change, so the service is now less accessible and frequent. At my suggestion, Sedbergh set up a bus users’ group—I am a big fan of buses and bus users’ groups. In Lancashire we have a fantastic bus users’ group, the Lancaster Bus Users’ Group, of which I am a proud member.

I thank the Government for their investment in bus services—£27 million in Lancashire and £4.2 million in Westmorland and Furness. I hope to see my local authorities take on the new powers that the Government will give them, so that we ensure we have rural bus services that serve my constituents, work together, fit together and fit in with people’s lives.

I am also a big fan of trains. My constituency has the highest main line train station in England, in Dent. It is beautiful, although it is not actually in Dent village, which causes some confusion. We have some other fantastic stations, such as Garsdale, which is also beautiful, as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) will know, and Arnside. However, we have real problems with accessibility, so older people and people with disabilities cannot get the train—when the train turns up. Because these are not areas with huge populations, they struggle to access grant services, such as the Access for All fund. There is real inequity in how some of the funds for station improvements are allocated.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) for securing the debate.

I will lay out my case in simple terms: north-west public transport is not up to scratch. Specifically, our railway journeys are nowhere near good enough. They are holding our region’s economy back, and we need change. Take my constituency, for instance: there is no direct public transport link from one side of the constituency to the other, despite it being overwhelmingly urban. Try to take public transport from Birkdale to Rufford—a journey of 10 miles—and a single ticket will cost £21, while the journey will take one hour and 11 minutes and involve changing trains three times. It is literally 10 miles away; it would almost be quicker to walk.

Even the rail services that we do have are incredibly unreliable. Just this morning, at 6.47 am, Merseyrail sent out a message on social media saying:

“Due to a train fault, some services on the Southport line face cancellations”.

The first reply said:

“Another day, another train fault”.

The second reply blamed the politicians.

The service to Manchester is even worse: in November, there were no services at all on Sundays for three weeks in a row, and more than a quarter of all journeys were either delayed or cancelled. When the trains do turn up, passengers are greeted with what the chief exec of Northern Rail has called

“some of the worst-performing rolling stock in the country.”

That cannot be allowed to continue.

The constituency’s connectivity has also been directly impacted by the well-known 1960s cuts to railway services. The closure of two simple railway curves in Burscough, just outside of constituency, means that the seven-mile journey from Ormskirk to Southport takes 85 minutes by train, and that the notional 20-mile journey to Preston involves passengers changing at Wigan, which is itself 20 miles out of the way. We are lucky, though, because unlike in other parts of the country, the railway curves at Burscough were never built over—they are still there, just overgrown and unloved. It would cost an estimated £30 million to reinstate them, which would once again connect the towns of Merseyside and west Lancashire, and strengthen travel-to-work routes, promoting the economic growth we all want so desperately.

It is a pleasure, albeit slightly unexpected, to serve under your chairship this morning, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) for securing this important and clearly popular debate.

I will focus my remarks on the rail network. In Pendle and Clitheroe, slow and unreliable rail services, along with disjointed connections, cause daily frustrations for my constituents. Those issues create barriers to work, education and healthcare, and ultimately hold our local economy back.

In my constituency we have two rail routes. The Colne to Preston line operates just one train per hour, taking an hour and 15 minutes to cover only 25 miles. The Clitheroe to Manchester line is no better—again, with just one train per hour, and taking an hour and 20 minutes to travel just 30 miles. If a train is cancelled in the south-east of England, there is often another coming in 10 or 15 minutes, whereas if one train is cancelled in an hourly service, the whole day is ruined.

Those routes are not fit for purpose; we all know that that level of service would not be tolerated on routes going into London. If we want to unlock the potential of our towns, we need investment in order to increase frequency, cut journey times and improve service reliability. Would it be so impossible to have two trains per hour on those routes and speed them up? Would more rolling stock be required? Yes. Would more staff be required? Yes. But can it be done with the right political will? Of course it can. The economic benefits would be profound.

Right now, the connection times do not even make sense. If someone took that slow train from Colne to Preston this morning, hoping to travel south to the capital city, they would wait nearly an hour at Preston for the next train. For public transport to be a viable alternative to car travel, services and timetables must be co-ordinated and designed around the needs of passengers, which currently is simply not the case.