Rail Connections to London: Rural Towns

Andrew George Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

I will make a very brief intervention, as I want to make sure that the Minister has ample time to respond to the many points that have been raised. I must congratulate the hon. Member for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley) on securing this debate, and I thank her for telling us about her wonderful constituency. It is indeed a very attractive constituency, but I am afraid it is second best to mine in west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly—we will no doubt have further debates about that. Nevertheless, I did not stand purely to make that competitive point.

It is to an extent justified for west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly to be engaged in all rail debates as the very first steam locomotive ran in Cornwall and the first steam rail service ran as a goods service from Angarrack to Hayle in west Cornwall, so we were there at the beginning of the story of rail and of rail services across the country. I am proud of the heritage that Cornwall has contributed to the United Kingdom in that respect.

My constituency is at the end of the Paddington to Penzance line, and the primary point that I wish to get across to the Minister is that we should not be mesmerised by speed. The whole High Speed 2 debate has been about cutting a certain amount of time off rail journeys to certain destinations. However, in the case of services from Penzance to Paddington and back, journeys generally take five or five and a half hours, and we have a sleeper service that takes eight hours. The issue in our part of the country is not speed, but reliability, comfort and competitive pricing.

[Anna Gelderd (South East Cornwall) (Lab)]

Yesterday I, alongside many constituents, was trapped on the main line—the one line we have between Cornwall and London—as a fire on the line caused havoc for businesses and constituents. I pay tribute to the emergency services, who responded so well to that incident. However, I want to highlight how a journey that should take a couple of hours became much longer—people were trapped, faced disruption and had to take taxis—which is a real indicator of how vulnerable we are in Cornwall. We need resilience built into that line. I look forward to hearing more about that in the debate.

[Andrew George]

I am enormously grateful to the hon. Member for making that point about vulnerability. At a number of points where the line is singled out—not just at Dawlish—a fire can have catastrophic consequences for the thousands of people seeking to travel on that day. One of my members of staff attempted to travel from Bristol down to the Lizard yesterday afternoon, and instead of that journey taking three hours it took over 11 hours. So often we hear those stories, especially about travelling to the far west of Cornwall—the further west we go, the more affected we are by those vulnerabilities.

My message to the Minister is that if we are to invest in the future of rail, what we really want is reliability, comfort, low pricing and space for people’s luggage. I know that the business community in Plymouth has previously lobbied to say, “If only we could take half an hour off the journey, it would change the economic perception of the city,” but taking half an hour off a five-hour journey means nothing to people in the far west of Cornwall. We also want reliability on the services so that the toilets do not constantly break down and people do not have to sit in the vestibule.

[Jayne Kirkham]

Of course, superfast satellite wi-fi has been tested on our part of the line. Although we have slow trains, we have the opportunity for fast wi-fi to be rolled out, so that while people will be sat on their trains for five and a half hours, they can at least work or watch a film.

[Andrew George]

Indeed, I was going to come to that point. Busy Members of Parliament, or other people engaged in busy lives, sat on that train do not want those five hours to be dead time in the working day. Reliable wi-fi services can allow people to continue their working days with online meetings and communication as they travel. However, at present, on the vast majority of services the wi-fi is often interrupted and is very unreliable. In contrast to the many billions of pounds required to achieve the HS2 standards set by successive Governments for north-south connectivity, in many parts of the country it would cost significantly less—many millions of pounds—to achieve the kind of comfort, resilience, reliability, superfast wi-fi and competitive pricing that I have described to the Minister this evening.