---

Rail Investment

In her second response to me at the Dispatch Box, the hon. Lady adopts a rather churlish tone. She talks about wanting decisions to be made. She will get decisions from this Government, but they will be properly thought through decisions based on value-for-money cases and proper consideration of all the matters that need to be dealt with; they will not be press releases made up on the spur of the moment by a Government who have gone on a regional junket and need something to announce to keep the regional press happy. The hon. Lady complains that we issued a written ministerial statement this morning, but she ought to be able to understand that the content of this statement, because it touches, in particular, on the procurement of the intercity express programme, is market sensitive, so it was essential that we made a statement this morning before the markets opened. The hon. Lady talks about fares, and I readily acknowledge that nobody in the commuter fraternity will welcome the increase in the cap on regulated fares that we have proposed for 2012 to 2015. But that is one of the tough decisions that we have had to take to protect the programme of investment in our railways. I have to say to her that I see no sign that anybody on the Opposition Front Bench is prepared to take tough decisions or to understand that without the ability and the willingness to do so they will simply have no credibility in the difficult debates on how we prioritise limited public expenditure. The hon. Lady criticises the delay in delivering the complete Thameslink project—the 24 trains an hour in both directions. I do not apologise to her or to the House for taking a decision that the programme, as originally set out, contained too many risks—there were risks of cost overruns and risks to existing commuter services into London Bridge station. With Network Rail, we have revised the schedule to create a lower-risk alternative that is both less costly and less disruptive to existing commuter services. The hon. Lady talks about the midland main line—she seems to have discovered it this morning. There was not a word about the electrification of the midland main line during the 13 years for which the Opposition were in government, but today she wants to bring it up as though it were some Labour priority we are abandoning. For the record, the case for electrification of the midland mainline remains strong and we will consider it as a project for control period 5, which begins in 2014. The hon. Lady attacks me for describing the 1,300 rail carriages to which her predecessors apparently committed as a work of fiction. She is new to the job, I understand, and these are difficult numbers—[Interruption.] I am quite new to this, too, and I can tell the House that they are difficult numbers. If she drills down and has a look, she will see that the figure of 1,300 was maintained early this year only by the inclusion of 400 of the 1,200 Thameslink carriages in the total—a complete and ongoing fabrication to avoid abandoning a number that was never sustainable. The Opposition could not have delivered them because they are not prepared to support any of the decisions that have allowed capital investment to continue. They do not support the fare increase, they do not support cuts in welfare expenditure and they do not support cuts in public expenditure to allow prioritisation of capital investment. The hon. Lady has the audacity to raise the issue of Wales, but, as she says, Wales has not one metre of electrified railway—after 13 years of a Labour Government. We will take no lectures from her on electrification in Wales.