Transport Links: Nottinghamshire

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate; I congratulate the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) on securing it and on his powerful and detailed case. It is also, of course, a pleasure to follow the erudite contribution of my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker).

As an east midlander, Mr Hollobone, you know that I am making a brave decision by wading into the age-old debate about whether the city of Nottingham is part of Nottinghamshire. I suspect that it is slightly in the eye of the beholder, but I am chancing my arm by speaking in the debate. We have time, so I hope the hon. Member for Mansfield will be generous in allowing me to make a couple of points.

First, the midlands rail hub is an excellent scheme. I know that Transport Ministers and Treasury Ministers have had the details for a while now, because I secured a debate last month on east-west rail connectivity that focused on it. In the context of infrastructure schemes it is relatively cheap, but in bang for buck it is exceptionally impactful. It would mean 24 extra services an hour east-west, 36 more freight paths and 6 million more rail journeys per year. It would be a very good project not only for business in our community, but for the environment. Its pricing makes it a really good investment case for this country, so I am very interested to hear the Minister’s reflections on it.

[Sir John Hayes]

Brian Chesky said:

“Travel is a new experience that can transport you out of your everyday routine”.

However, that is only true if people can get to places quickly and conveniently. In respect of rail, the hon. Gentleman is right that further investment is necessary in Nottinghamshire—and in Lincolnshire, by the way. It is vital that our smaller railway stations have regular services into the evenings and at the weekends, to allow people to enjoy those new experiences and be transported beyond the routine. I hope that he will support my call for the Minister to confirm, today, that he will make that extra investment in Lincolnshire, in places such as Spalding, and in Nottinghamshire.

[Alex Norris]

I have learned a veteran lesson about how to get Spalding into a debate about Nottinghamshire, but I absolutely agree with the right hon. Gentleman’s point. The hon. Member for Mansfield made the case very strongly for the Robin Hood line; I would say the same about Bulwell station, and my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling talked about Netherfield and Carlton stations. Our stations are critical, and we know that our constituents value them. When we talk about nationwide projects, we have to understand that our communities access those services through local stations, so they need to be of high quality. I will say more at the end of my speech about the importance of connecting towns to big cities.

The arguments for the midlands rail hub are very strong, and I hope to hear the Minister’s reflections on them in due course. I will also be writing to the new Prime Minister, along with other hon. Members—I encourage colleagues present to sign up—about the hub, in the hope that we can give it the best possible airing as soon as possible. A lot of the arguments for it are also strongly true of HS2, which I also wish to mention because I believe that it will have a transformative impact on our community.

There are a lot of similarities between Mansfield and Bulwell, and the north and west of Nottingham in general. We know that successive decades of deindustrialisation have meant deep-rooted social challenges in both our communities, and that work is the way out of those challenges. Projects such as HS2 at Toton, the expansion and support of East Midlands airport—now the biggest pure freight airport in the country—and the development of the power station site when it comes on stream with green energy and green technologies have real potential to add tens of thousands of skilled jobs to our communities. We need to come together to support them.

I hope that the Minister and his civil servants recognise that the east midlands is speaking with one voice. Pretty much everything that the hon. Member for Mansfield said, other than his references to Mansfield, could have been in my speech two weeks ago. We in the east midlands used to be criticised for not getting out of one another’s way; it was said that one of the reasons why other areas got investment, but we in Nottinghamshire did not, was that we could not agree between ourselves so we gave a non-verbal cue that we were not serious. I hope it is recognised that that is not the case now. We have significant plans, we have broad buy-in and we are ready to go.

[Vernon Coaker]

I emphasise to the Minister, and to his civil servants who are listening, that what my hon. Friend says was demonstrated only last week when the all-party parliamentary group on the east midlands reached cross-party consensus on the importance of the area around Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station and East Midlands airport and the new industrial development there. There was cross-party agreement that it can be a hub and a driver for the whole region, both through transport links and through industrial development.

[Alex Norris]

That cannot be stated enough. That triumvirate of sites is the future for my community. In the future, my constituents—my neighbours—will look to Toton as much as to Nottingham city centre. The time for these projects is now, and they portend a very exciting future for our region, which I am proud to be part of through the all-party group and beyond.

Let me finish by returning to a central theme of this debate, which all our speeches have mentioned—the idea that we ought to have high ambitions for infrastructure at a national level. We ought to be really robust about those projects, because they are not only good at stimulating the economy in the short term; they are the building blocks of a thriving and productive country.

When we talk about those projects, when we understand them and design them, we have to link them up to the communities that they are there to serve. If it is just about connecting city centres, whether in Derby or Nottingham, to somewhere like Toton we will have missed the point. We will have lost the full financial impact of those projects, and we will have lost the hearts and minds case as well, because people in Bulwell, Bilborough, Aspley or Bestwood will rightly say, “Hang on a minute. What is the value to me if I have to go 20 minutes into town to then go out again?” There is a real challenge there, and we have to be really creative.

That could be through light rail, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling has mentioned; we have a great light rail network in Nottingham, with real scope to develop it further. It could be through buses, which as we have heard are the mode with which the majority of people will engage. It could be on foot or by bike, but we have to link up those big projects with our towns. In that way, people will get the benefits from those projects and support them, and we will all get the growth that we are seeking.