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Sustainable Railways

When Railtrack was going to upgrade the west coast main line, I think the bill was £13 billion. It was only as we brought it back out of the private sector that we got the figure down to a reasonable level. There is a quandary and a question in relation to that and I do not think that people are prepared to face up to that situation. May I now talk about the skills shortages? If we are going to have a modern railway, we need the skills. If we look at what went wrong on the west coast main line in early January—apart from the aeroplane crash, which was unavoidable and tragic—it all boils down to bad workmanship. That was the problem. It was the contractors that were used at the time; it was the lack of skills; the lack of supervision by managers; and, probably more than anything else, it was the lack of project managers. We need to get those into the industry. Network Rail is doing quite a lot. It has an apprentice training system through which I think they train more than 600 apprentices a year. There is a residential course, but unfortunately, as far as I am concerned, it is on the south coast, which is a long way for my constituents to go. We also need graduates to come into the industry. Perhaps if they are not all going into the banks, some of those high flyers will go into the rail industry, because they will have a future there. The other problem is that the TOCs are not taking on people to gain the skills to maintain the trains because they have a franchise. On franchising, we have a 30-year plan, but one thing is for certain: the franchises will not last for 30 years. I come from a railway family. My grandfather was a railway man and my father was a railway man. I know that privatised railways do not work. That was why the railways came into the public sector in the first place —it was not because we were greedy; it was because they collapsed. The franchising system was introduced by the Conservatives and has given us the worst of all worlds. A company can run a good franchise and treat its staff and customers well, but that counts for nothing, because, when it goes for the next franchise, it is a blind process—the Government do not know who puts in the bid. So, when a company comes to the end of its franchise, why should it bother? It gets no credit whatever. I must be careful with my next point, because I got it wrong during a Select Committee sitting. I said that I liked virgins, and it caused a problem. However, I actually think that Virgin Trains does quite well.