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New Trains (Investment)

I was grateful for what the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) described as her support for the decision, but she spoiled the effect by her subsequent observations. I have read carefully the Conservative party's proposals for the future of the rail industry. Nowhere does that interesting document refer to something that I thought the hon. Lady might mention today—Conservative party proposals to cut our transport budget by some £840 million. It might help us all to understand those proposals if the hon. Lady stated whether she intended to cut Crossrail or bus subsidies, or whether she would withdraw the concessionary fares scheme for the elderly and the disabled. An understanding of what the Conservatives intended to cut would put her proposals for railway transport into better context. The title of the Conservative document should have been ““Mind the Gap””—the gap between Conservative theory and practice. ...Clearly, my preparations for answering the hon. Lady's questions were longer than they should have been. I emphasise that the jobs are real jobs in the UK. I was interested in the hon. Lady's failure to mention a word that I thought would feature in any spokesperson's observations about a major commercial decision—““competition””. Nowhere did she mention the fact that such important commercial decisions are subject to competition, or that that is exactly how the issue was resolved. Bombardier is a great train maker. It has an order book of some 2,000 carriages, which, as I have indicated, will be added to by the announcement that I have just made, and it is bidding—with some prospects of success, I anticipate—for further orders in due course. That is important to the United Kingdom's economy, as is the decision that I have announced today. We anticipate that something in the order of 2,500 new jobs will be created, and that would have been the case whichever consortium had been successful. The contract is for both the construction and the maintenance of carriages. That means that a significant number of jobs will be created in the maintenance sector across the United Kingdom. It also means that jobs in the supply chain—the estimate is up to 10,000 jobs—will be protected and safeguarded, as they support the manufacture. Three quarters of the value of the contract will be spent in the United Kingdom. That figure means that the great majority of the benefit will be provided for United Kingdom jobs and the United Kingdom economy.