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Sustainable Railways

My hon. Friend makes a good point, but he cannot help it if those from the north gaze rather enviously at the investment being made in the south-east. I believe that we should get on with the Manchester hub. Although it is called the Manchester hub, to take those bottlenecks out of the system will help to deal with congestion in Yorkshire, Cumbria, Lancashire and the midlands. It will enhance the entire railway system. I have some specific questions for my hon. Friend the Minister. I cannot make out from the high-level output specification whether the enhancements to Manchester Victoria station, and Salford Central and Salford Crescent stations, which form the simple part of the Manchester hub scheme, will take place in the specified period. We heard a great deal about aged rolling stock from the hon. Member for Southport. When work starts on the Metrolink, on the Oldham and Rochdale line in north Manchester later this year, I seek a guarantee that there will be no loss of capacity or of carriages and rolling stock from the Greater Manchester area. We have been told that the Department for Transport has decided that even if the rolling stock on that route is not taken away but put on the Bolton line, other rolling stock would be taken away, yet Bolton MPs tell me that the commute from Bolton is shocking and that passengers cannot board the trains. I refer again to the Transport Committee's discussion yesterday with my hon. Friend the Minister. That took us back to the debate on investment in the north and the south. I understood my hon. Friend to say that I was wrong when I spoke of a per capita expenditure on transport in London and the regions, so I checked London's figure against those for the Manchester area for 2007-08. London's figure was £667; Manchester's was £292; and for the north-east it was £244. I accept—I wish I did not have to—that London is the capital city and that when it comes to education, health and transport, London has greater cost and that it will cost more to invest there. However, over the past 10 years, the gap in expenditure on transport in the regions and London has grown. As a Labour Government has brought overall expenditure up, in education and health it has risen at more or less the same rate, but in transport it has not. The gap has got wider. We are now in many ways at a more interesting time in the history of railways than we have seen in the past 20 years. There are fantastic passenger figures, and the team of Ministers at the Department for Transport shows real imagination and vision, with talk of bringing in high-speed trains, which virtually every Secretary of State since we had a Labour Government has ruled out, and about electrification. That is to be welcomed. However, we are also hitting a recession, and I have some questions for my hon. Friend the Minister. After the Public Accounts Committee hearings the Select Committee heard again from the train operating companies that the Department has given red lights to five train operating companies. I should like my hon. Friend to tell us, either at the end of the debate or in writing, what criteria are used for giving red, amber and green lights to the train operating companies. I should also like to know—as I am sure other hon. Members would—what action he will take if the companies fail in their franchises. They have been circulating papers around the train operating companies saying that for their failure they want to be released from their obligations on fares—to be able to put them up higher than they would under the RPI plus 1 formula, which I think is what is used. They want to cut carriages and they want to run the franchise on a completely different basis. I do not know what my hon. Friend will say, but my advice to him is that if those franchises fail he should seriously think about putting in a publicly owned operator of last resort, so that within the rail system we can compare what a publicly owned train company would do, given that in providing a good service it would not have to make the excessive profits that some of the main transport companies have made. If he cannot do that, if the train operating companies default on their payments, and if he allows them to continue running those franchises—it is a question of billions of pounds, including a £1 billion payment expected from South West Trains and £1.25 billion, I think, expected from the eastern line franchise—the taxpayer, the public and the Government should get an equivalent stake in the equity of those companies for that failure, so that there is real public ownership. Will my hon. Friend name the five companies that have been given a red light? It is claimed that that is commercially sensitive information, but the knowledge that there are five such companies is potentially damaging to all the train companies. It would be helpful, from the point of view of democratic accountability, as well as commercially, if we knew which companies were in trouble, and against which criteria. Just under 10 years ago I took part in a debate in the House with Teddy Taylor, who was then the Member of Parliament for Rochford and Southend, East. We were arguing about the original privatisation of the railway. My contention was that the railways had been sold too cheaply and the public purse had been cheated. He argued that although might be the case, the railways would cost the public sector nothing after 2000. There is about £25 billion of public debt on Network Rail's balance sheet. The privatisation has cost the public purse a great deal of money. We need to make two decisions: first, to acknowledge that the public sector would probably be better at running the railway; and secondly, that the governance of Network Rail, by which its board in effect chooses its shareholders, to whom it is accountable, should be changed. I can think of no other structure or organisation that is set up on that basis. The £20 billion of debt locked up there—which is our debt, as representatives of the taxpayers—should give us all the more control, as far as starting to have a publicly owned railway. The report that we are debating is the second major report on the railways by the Committee in four years. The first was called ““The Future of the Railway””. Its conclusion was that the structure of the railway at the time was ““not fit for purpose””. There has been some slight change. Network Rail is better than Railtrack and the Strategic Rail Authority has gone; but there is nothing in the operation of the railways in their fragmented form that makes them fit for purpose now. More public sector control would make a better railway system.