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Crossrail Bill

Perhaps that is an instruction to me as well, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend raises an important point on which my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, West and others have also touched. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West (Doug Naysmith) is right that trains coming into Paddington experience delays. That is partly because the lines to the west of Paddington, like those in many other parts of the network, could have done with investment to improve signalling and track capacity over many years. I shall not get into the argument about that problem again because we all know why it happened. Part of the Crossrail proposal is to spend something like £1 billion on upgrading those lines and making it easier for freight trains to get on and off the main line. If a freight train comes off the main line and goes into a siding at the moment, it can effectively block the line for six or seven minutes. That might not seem like a long time, but if that happens several times a day, the problem soon mounts up, so that is one reason why my hon. Friend’s trains sometimes get held up. The intention is that Crossrail will use existing slow lines, not the fast lines. The fast lines will benefit from the additional electrification to ease freight train access to which I referred, and fast train services ought to be able to run. Some of the stories appearing in Bristol and further south-west about 40 per cent. cuts in capacity are absolute rubbish. It is one person feeding off another and such stories are not justified. There is no way that I would sanction anything in London that would result in a 40 per cent. cut in trains from the south-west of England.