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Sustainable Railways

It is a delight to take part in this debate. Two colleagues also wish to take part, so I shall keep my remarks as brief as possible. It is also a delight to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Ms Smith), who raised a plaintive cry for help from the Government. I do not come to seek help from the Government. I was able to talk to my hon. Friend the Minister yesterday—I shall refer to a particular case that we discussed. I think that the Government have already come to our aid, but I want to put on the record briefly how I think that that Government help can be delivered, to ensure that those of us from Gloucestershire go away from this debate on railway strategy somewhat happier than we were a few weeks ago. I would just like to pay due regard to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) and the excellent report that her Select Committee produced. It has given us every opportunity to say whatever we like about railways. Also, coming as it does hot on the heels of the Office of the Rail Regulator's rail strategy increased investment report, there is plenty of opportunity to say what we like and what we hope may happen in due course. In passing, I draw my hon. Friend the Minister's attention to early-day motion 794, which is in my name and the names of a number of my hon. Friends. It refers to what my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) was talking about earlier—some of the rail cuts in which Network Rail is indulging. Those of us who want to see the recession over as quickly as possible feel that that it is an adverse move on the part of Network Rail to be considering some reduction in expenditure, particularly in key areas such as maintenance and signalling. So I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will have some good news about that, to put Network Rail back on the straight and narrow so that we do not give the wrong signals—no pun intended—and to ensure that we invest in this area and so that investment is not just of the longer-term variety but of the immediate variety too. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) is not here, but if he were here I am sure that he would have spent quite a lot of time talking about rail freight. As far as I am concerned, he is Parliament's greatest advocate of the need to invest in rail freight. He would want me to say that, although this debate is not principally about that issue, promoting the shift of freight from road to rail is something that this Government have really tried to do. However, anything that we could do to encourage that process should be happening at this important time, not least promoting the idea of a central freight line. I know that my hon. Friend has done lots of work on promoting that idea and the Government, through Lord Adonis, the Minister with responsibility for railways, are increasingly taking it seriously. So, anything that my hon. Friend the Minister can do to steel Lord Adonis, to ensure that that central freight line is ever more likely to happen, would be a jolly good thing. My hon. Friend the Minister knows about this already and I am sure that he has all the facts about it in front of him, but the particular issue that I want to refer to is the redoubling of the line from Swindon to Kemble, which is on the Cheltenham to Paddington line. The line from Swindon to Kemble is a relatively short piece of line that is single-track. There was some madness about the time of the Beeching cuts, I think. We had a cut and lost one of our lines. That line was supposed to go all the way through to Gloucester, if not Cheltenham, which would have left us somewhat bereft. Thankfully, some wise person managed to stop that, so only the worst bit of track bed had to be dealt with by slewing two lines into one. We think that we are making progress on getting that reinstated. I attended a meeting on this issue three weeks ago, as did the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown), in whose constituency the line lies—of course, it also impacts on my constituency—and the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), so there is genuinely cross-party feeling on this. My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. Dhanda) has also been a keen advocate for that work to be done. It will open up all sorts of opportunities, not least regarding multi-modal shift and congestion problems, because when one train is late, it causes further delays on single tracks because no other train can get on to that piece of railway. On the three provisos, the Government have been true to their word in their press announcement this week. They will find £900,000 for the GRIP 4 rail evaluation—I always wonder where these things come from: GRIP stands for nothing more devious than Government rail investment programme—and they want the South West of England Development Agency, and allied bodies, to find £1.6 million for it. We hope that we have found the initial money to show that the project stacks up in terms of value for money. We will also have to find the remaining £40 million to ensure that things are done. In the great scheme of things, and given that the investment should be paid back within three or four years, this is almost a no-brainer. We hope that the Chair of the Select Committee will make some noises on our behalf, but we think we are on to a winner. At our meeting, three weeks ago, Lord Adonis said that he thought the region had the money, so I hope that the Minister will have some nice things to say about how negotiations with the region are going. It has been left to me to persuade First Great Western, if we get the track done at some point from 2010 onwards, to run some trains on it in addition to those it runs already, so that we will get a better service. My ideal would be a half-hourly service, one of which is a through train to London, but, first, let us just fill some of the gaps during the day and make sure that people are able to do what we want them to do—get on a train. I should like it to be a cheaper train than it is at the moment, but at least they would be able to get on a train. I should have liked this to be a pre-emptive move, before work on the north Cotswolds line began, but for some bizarre reason, that is an even worse line than the Swindon-Kemble, Cheltenham-London line, so it was given prominence over this work. None the less, if the team can be taken off the north Cotswolds line when it finishes in 2010 and moved on to this line, that would be good news, and we would accept that. I hope that the Minister has listened to my pleading, which is the only bit of local lobbying I shall do today. That work is important, because it could be such a good example of the multi-modal issue and how people's travel patterns can be altered. More to the point, it will pay for itself. It is a little-known fact that Kemble, which is at one end of the line, sells more first-class rail tickets than any station outside the big inter-city stations. We know what the Cotswolds is like, so that should not come as a total surprise. We need to get on with that work. A number of issues have been covered by my hon. Friends, and the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) has covered much of what I wanted to discuss, so I shall not spend too long on those points. The key issue with the rail strategy is how to get a relationship between what the state invests, what the user has to pay from the pocket for fares, and what the rail companies are currently able to invest from their profits. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North mentioned some of the profits that those companies are making, which some of us think rather obscene. Given the current discussions about what the bankers have taken out of the financial system, it is interesting that the rail companies are not far behind. I should like there to be a movement back to the public sector, but I shall say more about that later. The key point that I want to make about the current situation concerns the recession. The figures that have been calculated were predicated on a steady growth in passenger use. That growth might continue, because people might be even more inclined to use the railways given that, for all sorts of reasons, cars might become more expensive. There could be a downturn, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North has said, the problem with the franchise system is that companies could say to the Government, ““We are not making as much money as we thought we were, so we cannot invest in the improvements that we said we would invest in, and, by the way, you've got to give us some more money to keep existing services going.”” I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will tell us how the Government intend to deal with that. That might be hypothetical now, but if it becomes reality, there will be serious problems in that there will be a decline in passenger use, fewer trains and the system will deteriorate. As a member of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers rail group and the ASLEF group here, I am worried about jobs. We do not want any jobs to be lost, largely because we want to build a network. Anyone who knows anything about the rail industry will know that there has been a shortage of skilled work, particularly at the top end, in terms of engineers and people who are able to do the serious thinking about how to make services better and how to have more services. If we lose employees, that will endanger the system more than anything. I hope that we will get some clarity on how we will keep people employed. This is the green new deal writ large, but there is no clear way in which that could be taken forward other than by investing in railways and the people who work on them. Losing people from the railways will be entirely counter-productive. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North mentioned the letter from the three rail unions, which many of us think very sensible. Of course it is a lobbying letter, making a number of points, but as my hon. Friend showed when he read parts of it out, it contained some ideas that many, if not all, Labour Members present think incredibly good. It shows a sign of faith from the unions that they want to keep to their side of the bargain by helping the Government and the companies—I shall say more about that in a moment—but we need some stability, and we do not want job losses or any contraction in the Government's investment programme. I shall leave that issue there. Both my hon. Friends the Members for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) and for Islington, North have discussed accountability and structure. I should like to see a publicly owned railway, but I also recognise that there might be a stepping stone to that. The Select Committee's report refers to the unease between the current structure and accountability of Network Rail, which is a public company. It might be limited by guarantee and it might be a strange concoction, but we could find new ways in which it could meet the public good. Some of us would like there to be real accountability, and we could find ways of moving forward in that regard. As a Co-operative MP, I draw hon. Members' attention to the fact that the Co-operative party has produced a paper on how we could mutualise that organisation. I hope that paper is being considered seriously.