Great Western Railway: Infrastructure

Lord Harper Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords—

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, it is the turn of the Labour Benches, and then we will come to the Conservative Benches.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

It was pretty good. It has got worse because of the engine shortage. Reliability has been very poor. I am expecting it to now recover. I am on its back.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, about the quality and care that GWR staff take in looking after their customers, of whom I am one.

I take the Minister back to his Written Answer about Chipping Sodbury. He knows that I raised that issue when I was Secretary of State and he was chair of Network Rail, and I was assured that work had been done to solve the problem. It has improved it, as he said. It delayed the flooding impact of Storm Claudia by 27 hours. He says that more work is going to be done in 2026-27. Is that work planned to fix the problem once and for all?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I think the noble Lord is a bit optimistic. If mother nature continues to pour water into the railway infrastructure, because of the way it is built, any fix will be related to what the climate is actually doing.

Network Rail is very confident that there can be further reductions, some of which will be through big infrastructure, such as building small reservoirs and fitting more pumps. So, I cannot guarantee that the tunnel will never flood, but I can guarantee that every effort is being made to reduce the delays when it does.