Transport

Debate between Andy McDonald and John Redwood

Wednesday 5th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andy McDonald]

My hon. Friend has made a very good point. Access to public transport should be treated as a right, so that disabled people can travel spontaneously as other people can. Many of our policies say exactly that,.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

rose—

[Andy McDonald]

I will give way one more time, but then I really must crack on.

[John Redwood]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Would he accept that the UK has done more than practically any other country in the world to cut its carbon dioxide emissions since 1990, whereas China, for example, is greatly expanding its coal extraction and coal power? What is the Labour party’s message to China in the run-up to the conference?

Confidence in the Secretary of State for Transport

Debate between Andy McDonald and John Redwood

Tuesday 19th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andy McDonald]

I agree with those comments, and I will come on to that in a little while.

Franchise agreements assume ever-growing fare revenues, so the downturn in rail use increases the likelihood of more failed franchises and further taxpayer bail-outs. Fares have soared at three times the rate of wages since 2010, pricing passengers off the railway, while disruption encourages more people to revert to driving. That is exactly the wrong modal shift that we need our transport policy to achieve if it is to fulfil our environmental obligations and remove traffic and fumes from our towns and cities. Polling conducted by Which? found that three in five respondents affected by the timetable changes said that those changes had a negative impact on both their work and family life, with four in 10 saying that they had a negative impact on their health.

Considering the scale of the disruption, I am sure the whole House will agree that passengers must be adequately compensated. Yet at present 72% of those affected by the disruption said they had not been informed, either on the train or at the platform, about any compensation they may be entitled to receive. The Transport Secretary should have ensured passengers were made properly aware of the compensation they are owed. In addition, considering the scale of the disruption, a compensation package that goes above and beyond what is currently available must be delivered. The Transport Secretary has indicated some such package is being considered, but he has not provided detail. I ask him to do so today to ensure that the amount of compensation is commensurate with the scale of disruption and, importantly, that it is funded by the train companies, not taxpayers and passengers. They should pay voluntarily. If they refuse, he should make them.

It is important to step back and review the key steps in how we have come to this sorry state of affairs. This year’s timetable changes, introduced on 20 May, are the most extensive and ambitious undertaken in decades. More than 50% of the network schedules have been revamped. Four million trains have been retimed: about six times as many changes as is usual for a timetable change. It was clear before Christmas that there were going to be difficulties in implementing the new timetable. In February, the rail industry body, the Rail Delivery Group, confirmed it would not be able to complete timetables 12 weeks ahead of travel from 20 May for about six months. That should have set off alarm bells.

Since 20 May, 43% of Northern’s trains have been delayed or cancelled each day. From 4 June, the train operator cancelled 165 trains a day, including all services to the Lake district. In the first week of the new timetable, GTR delayed or cancelled a quarter of its trains and announced the schedule for the next day at 10 pm each night.

Today’s industrial action on Northern is a reminder of the utter despair felt by the rail industry’s workforce. Both Northern and GTR have waged war on their staff for three years and four years respectively. They have done so at the explicit behest of the Secretary of State for Transport and his senior officials.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

How does the hon. Gentleman explain that the Labour Mayor of London has been unable to run strike-free transport in London, although he promised to do so? Did he also anger staff in this way?

[Andy McDonald]

We can have that discussion, but today I am dealing with these services and I am going to concentrate on them.

Senior officials directly interfered. Let us not forget that the managing director of passenger services at the Department for Transport, Peter Wilkinson, said two years ago:

“we’re going to be having punch-ups and we will see industrial action”

and that he wanted to run people “out of my industry.”

The introduction of the May 2018 timetable required change on an unprecedented scale. The process of managing change requires co-operation, dialogue, engagement and good will. The Government and the management of Northern and GTR have destroyed their relationships with their employees. Millions of passengers in the UK are paying the price for the belligerence and the antagonistic approach of the Secretary of State.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

We have been invited by the Opposition to debate a general motion of no confidence in my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary. I have full confidence in my right hon. Friend. He inherited a difficult task from the last Labour Government and the coalition Government. I think that he fully understands the magnitude of that task and that he is coming up with a number of creative proposals to try to improve the position.

[Andy McDonald]

It is a disaster.

[John Redwood]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman that, for 13 years, Labour did not invest in our roads and railways to give us the capacity that we need. I fully accept that during its five years in government, the coalition was unable to invest on the necessary scale because of the financial disaster that it inherited from the outgoing Labour Government. We have had almost 20 years of totally inadequate investment in road and rail capacity. We now have a growing economy. Many more people have jobs and need to get to work, many more children need to get to school, and many more people want to go to the shops or need to go to hospital, so we are simply running out of road and rail capacity. My right hon. Friend is trying to use every method he can legally lay his hands on to address that chronic lack of capacity.

In my constituency, another 12,000 new homes are being built quite rapidly, and the pressures on our infrastructure are enormous. I witnessed some of the difficulties due to rail delays on Thursday and Friday when I was trying to use services in and out of Reading and there were disruptions. My right hon. Friend has asked the extremely well-paid leaders of the railway industry to get a grip on their services and ensure they deliver on the infrastructure available. But he has gone further than that: he has said to the railways that they will need much more capacity in the years ahead to deal with fast-growing places such as Wokingham, and he has therefore said that digital technology will make a big difference. I fully support his strong initiative. The very lengthy and expensive process of creating entirely new railway lines is not a feasible solution across the country, so the way to get more capacity out of our existing railways is to use digital signalling, meaning that instead of being able to run only 20 trains an hour on perfectly good track, we can run 25 or more trains an hour, giving a big boost to capacity for a relatively modest investment.

My right hon. Friend is also right to recognise that he will need private sector as well as public sector investment. I noted that the Scottish National party spokesperson, who clearly did not know the figures, was unable to respond to an intervention about how, in his party’s fully nationalised world, it would replace the large sums of capital and the considerable sums of revenue that the private sector tips into the railways as the partnership model develops.

The Labour party is with the SNP on this. It always denies that any fault rests with the nationalised section of the railway, yet in the latest set of problems, particularly in Northern rail, big errors were made by the heavily subsidised nationalised part of the industry. I am very glad that my right hon. Friend says there will be new leadership there, because new leadership is desperately needed to supervise the expenditure of the very substantial sums that this Parliament has voted for that industry and to make sure they are well spent.

Another reason why I have confidence in my right hon. Friend is because he recognises that we need road as well as rail capacity, because the overwhelming majority of all our constituents’ journeys are still undertaken by car or van or bus, and they require road capacity. The most welcome thing he has done so far is to say we need not just to expand the strategic national highways network, which of course we do, but a strategic local network so that we can beef up the A roads. That would mean that we could have more through traffic, meaning that vehicles would be taken away from residential areas and town centres, where we do not want conflict between traffic, pedestrians and cyclists. It would also free some of the blocks on the existing highways and provide better journeys.

I hope that as my right hon. Friend goes about selecting that strategic local route network with councils, he will look favourably on the bids from West Berkshire and Wokingham in my area. We have put a lot of thought into them and wish to make progress, but we will need substantial investment to create better access routes to the main cities and centres of employment, because the existing network is already well over capacity in terms of congestion.

I hope my right hon. Friend will also consider the interface between the rail and road networks. One of the big issues in my area is that we cannot get over the railway line. We rely on level crossings, but their gates are down for a lot of the time at busy periods for the railways, meaning that we get massive onward congestion in the road system. We therefore need money for bridges.

I also hope that work on the strategic local road network will involve looking at junctions. A modest way in which we could get much more capacity out of the current road network would be to improve junctions. It is often a good idea to have roundabouts rather than traffic lights, and another good idea is the better phasing of traffic lights. Traffic lights can be fitted with sensors so that if there is no traffic on an approach road, that road does not get a green phase. Roads should get a green phase only when somebody needs that.

There are many things that can be done. I have every confidence that my right hon. Friend wants to do them, so will he please get on with that, and will Parliament allow him to do so?

Haulage Permits and Trailer Registration Bill [Lords]

Debate between Andy McDonald and John Redwood

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 14th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andy McDonald]

My hon. Friend has got it absolutely right. It is indeed lamentable that there has been a complete absence of those discussions. It is a question of hit and hope, finger in the air and everything will be alright on the night. This is not the right way to go about it. The Secretary of State has come to the Dispatch Box and said that he does not speak for the other 27 Governments. I sometimes wonder whether he speaks for the one of which he is a member. A damaged and disrupted logistics sector will result in a damaged and disrupted British economy.

[John Redwood]

Will the hon. Gentleman just tell the House what additional contingencies he would make if he were the Secretary of State?

[Andy McDonald]

If the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to continue, that is exactly what I am going to outline during the course of my speech.

I hope that this Bill represents the dawn of the realisation of the catastrophe that would flow from a chaotic Brexit. A few months ago the “beast from the east” left supermarket shelves across the country empty, while logistics problems forced fast food chain KFC to close hundreds of outlets because of supply shortages. These examples provide the merest glimpse of what shocks to the supply and distribution chain will look like for British consumers and businesses if the free flow of trade is not maintained following our departure from the European Union.

The Bill has serious implications for the UK’s music industry, particularly the concert haulage industry, which supports the music industry in the UK and the EU. Concert haulage operators require a community licence for road transport to the EU, which will be lost after Brexit. The Road Haulage Association says that a permit system will not work for concert hauliers, and estimates that the UK will run out of permits in 2.5 days. I have to ask: when will the Government listen to business and accept that there has to be a continuation of the current trading and transport environment, if a massive disruption of the flow of goods and produce is to be avoided?

As an island nation, ports are and will remain vital to our trading relationship with Europe and the rest of the world, so it is quite extraordinary that no Minister from the Department for Exiting the European Union has visited Britain’s most important gateway to Europe—the port of Dover. Half of the UK’s international road haulage traffic comes through Dover alone. I ask the Minister, is transport really a top priority in the Government’s Brexit negotiations?

High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Andy McDonald and John Redwood

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy McDonald]

I think I used the word “consensus” not “unanimity”. I sincerely thank the Minister for his constructive approach to this issue and for adding his name to mine by way of support. There is agreement across the House that both jobs and skills are a core part of the case for HS2, and I note that the recent Shaw report calls for much deeper strategic engagement of trade unions across the rail industry. Accordingly, may I take this opportunity to congratulate the Minister and HS2 Ltd for their positive engagement with the TUC in securing an agreement to make sure that trade unions, HS2 and its suppliers work together to maximise HS2’s economic and labour market potential?

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Is the hon. Gentleman at all worried about the possible job impact on the existing railway, because most of the passengers for this line are going to come from journeys that would otherwise have been made on existing trains? Presumably, there will therefore be a decline in fares, revenue and job opportunity on the existing railway.

[Andy McDonald]

The right hon. Gentleman misses the point: this is about having a positive impact on capacity issues. That is the singular and most important purpose of this development.

In the words of the magnificent Frances O’Grady:

“It is clear that trade union engagement is vital to ensuring that HS2 is delivered to time and to budget—and that it is delivered in a manner that reflects the best of socially responsible development.”

The agreement contains the commitment to pay the voluntary living wage—and the voluntary London living wage—and to offer a minimum number of apprenticeships and workforce skills development, among other things. The agreement is an excellent example of how industrial relations should be approached from the outset in projects of this magnitude, and indeed throughout the construction industry, and I hope that it can be the template for good practice throughout industry. The construction of such infrastructure projects places demands on a nation to provide the necessary skilled workforce, creating opportunities for people, and younger people in particular, to equip themselves with not just the vocational qualifications to assist in the construction of this railway, but the tools necessary to forge careers that will be of benefit to both themselves and the nation long after the completion of HS2. Labour Members welcome the fact that, following on from the success of the Kings Cross construction skills centre, a National College for High Speed Rail will be located both in Birmingham and Doncaster, providing specialist vocational training to the next generation of engineers working on HS2 and beyond. We also welcome the fact that HS2 Ltd will provide £4.1 million towards a Euston construction skills centre.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy McDonald]

Of course I welcome it; it would be churlish not to. Why would I not welcome that? It does not mean that the system is right, or, for goodness’ sake, that the trains are getting to the right places.

It is difficult to see how east coast’s brilliant delivery for the taxpayer and for the commuter could be seen as a failure, or in any way undesirable. It simply does not make any sense for the UK taxpayer to subsidise foreign state-owned companies so that citizens of Germany, Holland, France and elsewhere can enjoy cheaper and superior services.

Quite simply, the rejection of even the possibility of public ownership is driven by an outdated ideology and is totally out of kilter with the views of a large majority of the public—including many Conservative voters—which is why I am so pleased that Labour is committed to a publicly owned service that puts the passenger first rather than the profits of private or foreign state-owned companies, as is currently the case.

[John Redwood]

rose—

[Andy McDonald]

No, I am going to move on.

We have heard the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Transport and others speak in glowing terms about how High Speed 2, when completed, will be a proud national achievement, and I completely agree with that. The scale of the project, the amount of talent that will be utilised in its design and construction, and the dedication over the years ahead will be a mark of pride, and represent a proud feat of British engineering and ingenuity.

It is my contention that if we, as a nation, are good enough to build a world-class high-speed railway, then we are good enough to run it, too. From the initial privatisation to the Government’s re-franchising of the east coast main line, Tory rail policy has always been far too focused on its “private good, public bad” ideology. However, new clause 20 would not require the sort of Damascene conversion that we witnessed from the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) earlier this week. It asks only that the Government keep an open mind. New clause 20 would allow, but not require, High Speed 2 passenger services to be run in the public sector. A similar clause was part of the Crossrail Act 2008, leaving open the option to run passenger services in the public sector. Indeed, we have worded this new clause so that it is as similar as possible to section 26 of the 2008 Act.

May I remind the Minister and the House that the Conservative party did not reject the idea of at least keeping an open mind about who might be the best operator to run Crossrail—or the Elizabeth line—in future years, and it would be disappointing to see the Conservative party move from a position of pragmatism to one of sheer ideology. It would be talking Britain down to suggest that private companies and the state-owned rail companies of the Netherlands, France and Germany are able to run successfully passenger services on our railways, but we ourselves are not. I hope that the Government do not have such a pessimistic view of our capabilities as a nation and will vote in favour of new clause 20.