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Kent Coast Railway Line

The hon. Gentleman will no doubt make his view known and I am sure that his constituents, such as Mr. Sargent, will pay attention. I am representing the daily experiences of real people who pay real money, after tax, to travel from homes along the Kent coast, through the Medway towns, and into London. Whether the hon. Gentleman likes it or not, the introduction of high-speed trains has had a dramatic effect on the performance of the standard service. Passengers are demonstrating with their feet that they do not want to go to St. Pancras. I have done that journey, as I am sure has he. After travelling to St. Pancras, it takes 25 minutes and costs £2.50 to get back to Westminster. The same is true for Aldgate and other places, as I will show. That is not an improvement. Mr. Sargent goes on to make that very point:""I cannot afford to use the High Speed trains and even if I could they do not take me to where I work. My office is a 10 minute walk from Cannon Street, so why would I want to get a train to St. Pancras and then have to pay for another season ticket to use London underground"?" It does not make any sense. No sane person would regard that as an improvement. No time is saved and money is wasted. By my miserable maths, people without season tickets have to pay an additional £13.50 a day for a standard return fare to London to use the high-speed service—and that is before paying to park. That is a lot of money for a mediocre service. I will be interested to hear the hon. Gentleman justify it. Trevor Allison from Preston, near Canterbury, states:""The introduction of the high speed service has resulted in an inferior service for passengers who travel to London from Kearsney, Shepherdswell, Aylesham, Adisham, Canterbury East and Selling."" Even for people coming from Ashford—the raison d'être of the high-speed link—all is not perfect. Julia Blackwell, a gold card, first-class traveller, reports that""until the introduction of the revised timetable in December I was travelling to and from Cannon Street by semi-fast service. What SouthEastern fail to understand is that High Speed to the wrong destination is no gain at all for many people."" Again, that is the point I have been making. She states:""St Pancras is useless for the City…as it takes at least 20 to 25 minutes journey by tube back to Aldgate…thereby negating the benefits of a fast arrival at St Pancras."" To add insult to injury, people who have to travel on the high-speed link, but do not pay the high-speed premium due to the failure of the train operator to provide adequate ticket purchase and upgrade facilities, such as Peter Jaquiss from Cliftonville and Sharon Gregory from Westgate, are faced with penalty fares on arrival at St. Pancras. Remember, this is progress. Even the local Kent services have not escaped the impact of this ill-conceived plan. Julie Gurr from Herne says:""I travel from Sturry to Chartham, a journey of 11 minutes each way on the old timetable but…it now takes over 35 minutes each way!!"" She continues:""It has been a complete nightmare because if the train from Chartham is delayed or cancelled I can't get the connection at Canterbury. I thought the idea of public transport was to take cars off the road but with this new timetable I think that the opposite is going to happen."" I think so too. I will bring this litany to a conclusion shortly, but I said that I would refer to the impact that this matter has had on leisure traffic. Terry Davidson from Folkestone tells me that""we have lost the fast trains to Charing Cross twice an hour on Saturday…and one is forced to use the high speed line to have a sensible journey time.""The old Saturday service…was 1 hr 20 mins to London and to save just 20 mins it is nearly double the cost"." Almost finally, there is Paul Twyman, who is a former under-secretary at the Department for Transport—I do not know whether he is known to the Minister—and a member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. He reminded me that journey times are now""longer than in the age of steam"—" the trains in 1927 were faster than they are today. He asks:""How can Thanet attract tourists if journeys can take up to 3 hours (my last journey at the weekend…was spent either waiting for a 'replacement bus' or journeying on it all round the highways and byways of East Kent; we nearly froze to death on Faversham Station)."" He adds that high-speed trains""are no good for me. I do not want to pay more to go to a place that I do not want to go to."" A letter from another Southeastern customer relations officer, Dan Westlake, to Mr. Les Turner—this is brilliant—helpfully indicates:""I should first of all explain that, when selling you a ticket, a railway company does not guarantee to carry you on any particular train (unless seat reservations apply) or that you will arrive at a particular time. The timetable is a guide to services that a train company intends to operate but it does not guarantee that trains will run in accordance with it"." So now the cat is out of the bag. I am deeply indebted to Roy Coppins and John Nicholson of Herne Bay and to Bob Parsons, Terry Morland, Alastair Coles, John Cherry and many others for the painstakingly gathered information that they have provided me with. I am also grateful to Tunde Olatunji of Passenger Focus in the south-east for his staunch support and to the many hundreds of members of the travelling public who have signed John Nicholson's Downing street petition because they are, quite simply, at the end of their tether and their tolerance. In a recent Kent Messenger newspaper article, Lord Adonis, having taken a brief train journey with his junior Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Gillingham, said:""The message I'm getting is that trains are working successfully, they are very reliable and they have slashed journey times, so they are proving increasingly popular with commuters"—" 17 per cent. of them. He continued:""The trains were introduced at the same time as the severe weather when all trains were subject to delay and disruption, but since that weather ended, the high-speed service has been running extremely well."" I do not know what planet the Secretary of State inhabits, but I do understand that the upper House is not yet elected, so he might pause to consider that a number of his parliamentary colleagues in the Commons currently occupy Labour marginal seats in the Medway towns, South Thanet and Dover. Their constituents and mine would like— not in three years, not in months, but immediately—to see a cut in fares to reflect the poor standard of service; a return to the sensible timetabling of trains to destinations that travellers actually wish to reach in central London; an end to short-form trains and the provision of adequate seating in clean units; an end to the practice of skipping stations between Faversham and east Kent; and, in response to John Nicholson's Downing street petition, an apology for the manner in which the Department for Transport and Southeastern trains have to date failed the high-fare-paying travelling public of east Kent.