West Coast Main Line

David Simmonds Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison, for the first time. I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Connor Naismith) on securing the debate. Hon. Members will know that I am not the usual face to respond to a debate that sits with the transport team, but colleagues are busy discussing sustainable aviation fuel this afternoon, so I stepped into the breach. It has been an informative debate and I highlight the contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) and my hon. Friend the Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth).

The line that we are debating passes through my constituency. Hatch End station, although not served by high-speed trains, provides an opportunity for my constituents to see them go past and wish that they had access. I am familiar with the line, having travelled on it a great deal in my working life before Parliament.

Hon. Members, sharing the pain that we have all experienced when stuck on a long-distance railway journey, set out a number of important and detailed points. I am sure that Ministers will consider those as they look for improvements while addressing the points made powerfully by hon. Members on both sides of the House, including how to ensure a high degree of integration between the line and the important population centres, economic development centres and other transport nodes that lie along the route.

If the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) were here, I am sure he would highlight that the west coast main line is also an opportunity for those wishing to travel in the direction of Northern Ireland, and Strangford in particular, because of connections to lines across north Wales and over to Anglesey. Indeed, as an MP whose constituency not only includes that line but the HS2 line, I empathise with the points about why we did not start HS2 in the north and build it down in the direction of the south. That is a sentiment that my constituents would wholeheartedly agree with, because they are very much of the view that rail connectivity is about benefiting the whole country. Improving and investing in connectivity, including in the north and the midlands, is therefore vital, not only for improving standards of living and quality of life in those places but for taking some of the development pressure off London and the south.

I will address a couple of points that were highlighted. It is striking to me, as a spokesman for the Opposition, that there is a high degree of consensus about the issues that exist around the west coast main line and about their possible solutions.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills made specific references to stations in her constituency, and my hon. Friend the Member for Chester South and Eddisbury talked about her constituents’ need to access the west coast main line and all the routes it leads to via effective and affordable local public transport. Under the previous Government and now under the new Government, the concept of Great British Railways has been a key part of the strategy to begin to create a sense of coherence and integration and to make sure that the connectivity highlighted by a number of hon. Members is delivered in practice.

Many hon. Members have spoken about the growth in rail demand. We know that our country’s population is increasing. The levelling-up agenda started under the previous Government, but it has been committed to— perhaps more in spirit than in word—by the new Government. There is also demand for increased rail freight capacity, which has been spoken about in the context of the work being done on the west coast main line. Having travelled on the line just last week to go to the Local Government Association’s conference in Liverpool, I know that, in striking comparison with some other rail lines, it is very visible infrastructure and it makes a considerable contribution to removing freight traffic, in particular heavy lorries, from the already busy motorway network. As I say, there seems to be a high degree of consensus about the investment required for stations, the public benefits that would be delivered through that investment, and the role that such investment would play in the economic development and opportunities that people across and adjacent to the west coast main line route can expect to benefit from.

As an outer-London Member of Parliament, I am very conscious of how good-quality and reliable commuter routes are valued and the economic contribution they make, and therefore the extent to which the absence of such routes in parts of our suburbs acts as a drag on opportunity. That is not purely confined to the north of England or the midlands; it is an issue that affects all of us. We need to make sure that is properly considered as the Government look at the rail system and transport in the round.

I am sure that right hon. and hon. Members—particularly those who served as Transport Ministers in previous Governments—would want me to draw attention to the fact that the sense of priority around the railways is reflected in the numbers. For example, maintenance spending on our railway network has gone up on average 3% every year since 2010. Previous Governments—both the coalition Government and Conservative Governments —therefore recognised that rail maintenance was a high priority.

At the end of the last Labour Government, there was £7.4 billion of rail spending. In the last full year for which we have accounts, which was when the last Conservative Government left office, that figure had risen to £26.8 billion. Although there will always be some disagreement about whether the delivery was what it should have been, and about whether the optimal priorities were selected, there is no doubt that all political parties represented in this House have a strong sense that improving and upgrading our rail network is critical, alongside improvements to motorways and local transport, and that we need to see it being delivered.

I will close by making two final points. The first is the value of learning—a number of hon. Members referred to the importance of open access—from the improvements that have been delivered in recent years. Not everything has been a success. In particular, we know that the impact of people working from home during the covid years on our rail network, including on the revenue gained from ticket sales and ridership, was absolutely catastrophic. The consequences for the system that we had in place at the time were very significant and we know that the Government acted by nationalising some railway lines to ensure that the travelling public could access what they needed to access.

There have also been strengths, however, such as the model on the east coast with Grand Central, which is often referred to positively, including by colleagues who use it to come to Parliament. We need to make sure that we do not simply assume that everything was a disaster and that we recognise those real strengths—not just the priorities for investment, but the things that have improved the quality of the service and that we can learn from and apply in the new model of Great British Railways.

The second point is the need to enhance integration. It is clear that the UK is a very politically centralised country, so transport projects tend to be delivered and funded by central Government rather than in a decentralised manner. The devolution White Paper has landed with Parliament, so we will be considering the roles that the Government envisage within that for elected mayors and regional authorities in developing and improving the transport network, but it is striking how many hon. Members in this debate talked about the need for additional scope so that their constituents could benefit from the speed and capacity that exists on the west coast main line, or the need to invest in other forms of local transport, including affordable public transport, to make that process more straightforward.

Coming back to HS2, it is striking that a huge quantity of the available investment has been sunk into very large national projects that are slow in materialising their potential benefits and that are creating huge cost overruns. All of the evidence appears to suggest that it is investment in locally-led transport—in the systems that make it possible for those who need to access trunk routes such as the west coast main line to do so—that produce the biggest economic benefit. That is something that many hon. Members have articulated, and I hope the Government will consider that as they look at their overall strategy for the United Kingdom, so that everybody can benefit from the additional investment that has been spoken of today.