Rail 2020

Debate between Damian Collins and Iain Stewart

Wednesday 3rd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Iain Stewart]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that. I think I anticipate where her question is leading—it perhaps relates to high-speed rail—and I hope she will forgive me for not commenting on that. However, I agree that there is potential for expanding rail use outwith the peaks. Although the whole west coast main line franchise process had to be suspended, FirstGroup’s bid submission contained an ambitious but, I thought, deliverable wish to increase patronage of the railways outwith the peaks. That will help to generate more income and bring about a shift from other modes of transport to rail.

On investment, I was mentioning some of the larger projects that are going on, but much smaller-scale, incremental improvements are being made, particularly on the west coast main line. Passengers in my constituency are already benefiting from the lengthening of the Pendolino trains from nine to 11 carriages; and on London Midland’s commuter lines the speed of many trains has already been increased to 110 mph and it is in the process of procuring additional carriages to provide more capacity on those trains. so substantial investment is being made at the moment.

That investment compares very favourably to the situation not that long ago—two or three decades ago—when our railways were in a period of marked decline. The Serpell report in the 1980s was commissioned by the nationalised British Rail, and its most radical option would have truncated the national network. There would have been nothing north of Newcastle, nothing west of Exeter and the network would have been reduced to the core inter-city lines in a bid to cut out loss-making lines and deliver the railways to profitability.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

My hon. Friend will welcome, as I do, the transformation of rail services in Kent thanks to High Speed 1 and, in particular, the additional investment in extra trains and services resulting from the popularity of that new route.

[Iain Stewart]

I am happy to endorse the point that my hon. Friend eloquently makes. I have travelled on that line and seen at first hand many of the improvements that have been made.

The point has been made that the rail network requires subsidy to operate, and I agree with that. Many lines would not be profitable in themselves, but for social and environmental reasons they require subsidy. We need to take into account not just the operating profit and loss of an individual rail service, but the opportunity cost: the cost to the country if that rail line did not exist and people had to travel by car or another mode of transport. We can only imagine the congestion on the roads around our major cities if we did not have commuter rail lines. They might not, in themselves, be profitable, but the environmental and financial cost of having those passengers travelling by car or another mode of transport would just be too much to bear.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to continue to subsidise large parts of our rail network, but we cannot escape the conclusion that Sir Roy McNulty and others reached in their report, which was that we should be looking to make our network as efficient as possible, in order to achieve his aim of a 30% reduction in the unit cost. Our network is comparatively expensive to run compared with others. I believe that that is a product of history, not just of one approach, be it the franchise model or the nationalised model. It is a cost that has been built into the system over many decades, particularly because until relatively recently we have had a period of managed decline of our network and what investment there has been has been made on a “make do and mend” basis. Additional costs are hard-wired into our system, but the system we now have is sensibly evolving.

[Iain Stewart]

It is always a pleasure to take an intervention from my fellow Select Committee member. If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not rehash the debates of the 1990s as I am more interested in what happens from here on. In an earlier intervention, he made the point that the Government are seeking to return the east coast main line to private hands as a matter of ideology. Equally, I could argue that it is because of ideology that the Opposition want to renationalise it. I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the conclusion of Richard Brown’s report on franchising, which concluded that the franchising model was not fundamentally flawed and that although the detail could sensibly be changed, the investment in and success of the railways could not have happened if the franchising was fundamentally flawed.

Let me turn to a number of initiatives that, I believe, can deliver a more efficient railway. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside mentioned the development of alliances between Network Rail and train operating companies. That is a very helpful and sensible development. The one large-scale alliance, between Network Rail and South West Trains, has not been in operation long enough for us to make any sensible assessment of what savings it can deliver, but as the real expert, Nigel Harris, said in evidence to the Select Committee, it

“is the only game in town”

at the moment and requires a fair wind to achieve the savings that it hopes to.

Such alliances are not the only form of alliance available. One or two other examples provide evidence that such an arrangement can deliver useful savings and efficiencies in the railway. The project in Scotland to electrify the branch line to Paisley Canal on the Greater Glasgow network was an alliance between Network Rail, First ScotRail and Babcock engineering. They were able to electrify the branch line at a substantially lower than expected cost and two years ahead of the planned development because the power was devolved down to that level, meaning that the various experts and operators could get together and deliver the project very efficiently.

I am doing a fellowship with the Industry and Parliament Trust on the rail industry and I have spent a good number of days going around parts of the railway system. I have seen two separate examples of an alliance between a train operating company and the rolling stock manufacturer, which enables a much more efficient system of maintenance and refurbishment of the rolling stock. I visited the Kings Heath depot, jointly operated by London Midland and Siemens on the London Midland franchise, and—this will interest my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins)—the Hitachi depot where the Javelin trains are maintained with Southeastern. Those depots are delivering a much faster and more efficient turnaround in train maintenance. They are not “grands projets” or exciting stuff, but they deliver a much better service for rail users at a much lower cost.

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend mentions the Southeastern trains. He might have noticed that the Javelin trains perform much better in poor weather, as they can cut through the snow and, effectively, open up the lines for the more traditional services.

[Iain Stewart]

That is another excellent point from my hon. Friend. As we continue to procure new rolling stock, there is greater scope for the more efficient method of alliancing between operators and manufacturers.

High-Speed Rail

Debate between Damian Collins and Iain Stewart

Thursday 31st March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I add my congratulations to my hon. Friends the Members for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) and for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) and to other right hon. and hon. Members who lobbied for the debate.

I wanted to speak for three reasons. First, I have a long-standing interest in the subject. One reason why I came into politics was to help shape the big strategic decisions that we have to take as a country. I do not want us to look back in 30 or 40 years and realise that we have made the wrong decision.

Secondly, I have a local, constituency interest. My Milton Keynes seat is not on the proposed route for High Speed 2, but it could benefit from the knock-on effects that High Speed 2 would deliver in freeing up capacity on the west coast main line for both commuter services and longer distance stopping services. Anyone who wants to commute from Milton Keynes in peak hours will know that we are severely overcrowded. My other local interest is that although the line does not come through Milton Keynes, it comes close enough for me to have a real understanding of the fact that communities along the line of route will be severely affected. We should not just dismiss the concerns of local residents as though they were Lady Ludlow in “Cranford” objecting to the coming of the railways. They are real communities with real concerns about the impact of the line.

Thirdly and most significantly, I am a member of the Select Committee on Transport and we have recently agreed to conduct a strategic inquiry into high-speed rail. It will not relate specifically to this line of route, but look more widely at the strategic cases for and against high-speed rail in the United Kingdom. I can genuinely say that I will consider all the arguments and evidence objectively. If the strategic case is not made or the detailed plans do not meet the strategic need, I will not support them. However, my starting point is to give high-speed rail in the United Kingdom a fair wind.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), who is no longer in his place, and my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) have mentioned, the other countries that have developed high-speed rail networks—Spain, Germany, France, China and Japan—cannot all be wrong. Yes, there will be differences of detail, but they cannot all be wrong, so we must give high-speed rail a fair wind.

It is clear that we need additional north-south rail capacity in the United Kingdom. Anyone travelling on the west coast main line knows that. I will not go into the detailed arguments now, because of the time constraints. Upgrades could be made to that line and to the east coast main line. There is the Rail Package 2—RP2—project. There are measures such as lengthening trains, improving signalling and removing some of the pinchpoints. All those things can and, I would argue, should happen, but I fear that that is not the complete answer. Those upgrades would buy time. If the High Speed 2 proposals went through, the first trains would start running in 2026—15 years from now. The upgrades to the classic rail network would buy us time over those 15 years, and they should happen, but we need to consider what comes next, because I fear that the upgrades have a finite capacity. This is not an either/or situation; we need to consider both.

The nub of the issue is this: what long-term strategic capacity do we need on our railways? I hope that in the course of our investigation in the Select Committee, we will be able to test robustly the likely demand in respect of freight and passengers, for both inter-city and commuter journeys. All the evidence is that there will be upward pressure, but we need to test that robustly. We also need to consider whether High Speed 2 will be active or passive in meeting that demand. Do we simply assume that that increase in demand will happen, or is there a finite point at which, without any other economic change, a total number of journeys will be reached? In my view, it should be active in looking at how high-speed rail can stimulate economic growth.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire referred to the university of Barcelona, but there are also many other studies. I draw right hon. and hon. Members’ attention to the work of Professor Roger Vickerman of the university of Kent, who has written widely on this subject and gave evidence to the Transport Committee in a separate inquiry that we conducted into transport and the economy. I will not summarise all his work—it is very detailed and complex—but one of his findings was that the issue is not just putting in a new line. That in itself will not be enough. It is what else happens, connecting towns and cities around the sites of the termini—the extra capacity and the linkage that go in there. That makes a difference.

[Damian Collins]

Of course, my constituency is at the end of the High Speed 1 network. I do not think that we would find anyone in east Kent who does not see the High Speed 1 connection as a catalyst for further economic regeneration that will be delivered for many years to come.

[Iain Stewart]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. We need to consider that broader strategic case. Yes, we are considering the first phase, from London to Birmingham, and then the second phase, the Y shape, to Leeds and Manchester, but we need to go further than that. We need to consider the case for connecting this to Scotland. Recently, I was at a launch jointly held by the leaders of Glasgow and Edinburgh city councils, who have proposed that as well as building from south to north, we should build from north to south. We need to ensure that we consider the case for connecting the airports and for freeing up capacity on the classic lines to ports so that increased freight can be transferred there. All those lessons can also come from abroad to influence our considerations here.

I come now to the environmental points. Again, we need to consider what has happened abroad. The proposed high-speed line will have an operating speed of 250 mph, which is a significant increase on the operating speeds of most high-speed lines in the country. I urge caution on that point. Let us consider Japan, for example. The new generation of the Shinkansen or bullet train can operate at about 250 mph, but it is being limited in its speed because of noise pollution concerns.

I would need to dust down my physics textbooks from school to go into the detail, but there are concepts such as tunnel boom noise—if a train operates at such a high speed, it creates additional noise pollution that does not affect conventional TGV lines. We need to consider that. It is significant because some of the possible routes for High Speed 2 have been ruled out by the 250 mph operating speed. That has to do with the curvature of the line. If we conclude that we can operate a high-speed network at a lower speed, at about 180 or 190 mph, we open up the possibility of looking at the high-speed line following the line of route of an existing transport corridor—perhaps the M40, the M1 or the M6. We need to consider all those points.

I am conscious of the time; I know that many other hon. Members want to speak. The point is that we need to consider all the arguments carefully. This is one of the biggest and most significant transport infrastructure projects that we have had to face for a generation. Get it right and we will have a world-class transport system in this country. Get it wrong and we will have wasted billions of pounds and disrupted many communities without having proper gain from it.