Cullompton and Wellington Stations

Debate between Gideon Amos and Sarah Dyke

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Butler. I am grateful both to my hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord), for securing this debate, and to the Minister; I really must be more punctual in asking a Minister’s permission to speak in future, and I am very grateful for his permission to take part in this debate.

A couple of weeks ago, a delegation of 30 to 40 local residents travelled the three or four hours from Somerset and Devon to Parliament to present a couple of letters to the Rail Minister, Lord Hendy, in Westminster Hall, one from Wellington town council and one signed by MPs throughout the Cardiff-Bristol-Exeter corridor. It is important to remember that the station’s reopening project, which combines two reopenings in one, will benefit the whole region, and my hon. Friend and I place on record our gratitude to the hon. Members for Exeter (Steve Race), for North Somerset (Sadik Al-Hassan) and for Weston-super-Mare (Dan Aldridge), who have all signed the letter with us and are fully supportive of the project.

For example, the project will enable thousands of young people who have no access to public transport, in west Somerset and elsewhere, to travel to colleges in Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. It will also enable thousands of customers to reach businesses.

[Sarah Dyke]

I intervene because Jonathan, a constituent from Somerton, hoped that his son would attend Richard Huish sixth form in Taunton, in my hon. Friend’s constituency. However, the nearest train station is 12 miles away, and there are unreliable bus services right across Glastonbury and Somerton, so it proved impossible for Jonathan’s son to attend the sixth form of his choosing. Does my hon. Friend agree that the lack of rail connectivity creates barriers to education?

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend highlights a practical example of how so many young people in Somerset, a place where sixth form colleges are literally few and far between, have difficulty accessing education because of the lack of public transport. This station project would enable thousands of people to reach Exeter college and the excellent Richard Huish college in my constituency, which is well known to be one of the best in the country.

As I was saying, the station’s reopening will allow young people to reach jobs along the Bristol, Exeter and Cardiff corridor and customers to reach businesses. It is no wonder that a key strength of the case for the project is its benefit-cost ratio of 3.67. For the cost of around £42 million, £180 million of economic growth would go into the region, which I know the Government would want to see. Frankly, there is no other rail project in the south-west that is ready to go and could be built and completed in the next two years, as the project is so far advanced. In fact, had it not been for the review in July last year, the spades would be in the ground and the platforms under construction, because the contract was about to be let and the detailed design was almost finished.

Our letter makes other equally telling points about the benefits of this station. Wellington is a growing town, which has had around 2,000 new homes in the last few years and has a projected 41% increase in housing numbers. That will mean about 6,000 more residents, and without the railway station, that is unlikely to be possible.

Finally, we asked the Department for Transport to tell us what the recent benefit-cost ratios were—the figure for our project is 3.67. The answer we received was that the Department does not routinely share or publish benefit-cost ratios. We were asking not for routine publication, but specifically for the benefit-cost ratio information. I hope that the Minister will look at releasing that information.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Gideon Amos and Sarah Dyke

2nd reading
Monday 24th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

The ability to have a home of their own has crept out of reach of a whole generation, while for others, decent emergency accommodation cannot be found; in the last five years, temporary accommodation was named as a contributing factor in the deaths of 58 children under one year old—babies. We urgently need to provide more homes that are genuinely affordable to local people.

That is why the Lib Dem council in Somerset is building hundreds of new council houses in parts of the county for the first time in a generation: 220 new council houses in north Taunton, in my constituency, and 100 additional council houses elsewhere, including zero-carbon council houses. Lib Dem councils in Kingston, Eastleigh, York, Portsmouth, Vale of White Horse, Westmorland and Furness, and Oadby and Wigston are building thousands more new homes.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

As a fellow Somerset MP, my hon. Friend will be aware that Somerset has had 18,000 homes stuck in a planning moratorium for nearly five years. While some of those have been unlocked, many are still in limbo. The Bill is meant to fix that impasse, but does he share my concern that the measures in the Bill may actually fail to unlock that housing, unless Natural England is given the resources it needs to monitor and enforce the nature restoration fund?

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend and neighbour is absolutely right, and that is why the Liberal Democrats were the only party to put in our manifesto the funds needed for Natural England and the Environment Agency to address the challenges she rightly sets out.

Lib Dem councils are also granting planning permissions, thousands of them—in my county of Somerset alone, 13,000 homes have permission but remain unbuilt.

Bathing Water Regulations

Debate between Gideon Amos and Sarah Dyke

Tuesday 4th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered bathing water regulations.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir John. It is a privilege to open this debate, and fantastic to see so many hon. Friends and Members. I am grateful to all of them, as well as the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore), and the Minister, for their time this afternoon.

We are fortunate in this country to have beautiful natural landscapes. We are blessed with an abundance of beautiful beaches, inland lakes and rivers, pre-eminent among them the River Tone, which runs through Taunton and Wellington. We are lucky to have French Weir and Longrun Meadow as one of the 27 new bathing water sites. I sincerely thank the incredible volunteers, the Friends of French Weir Park, who worked with me to apply for and achieve designated bathing water status there last year.

That means that for the first time we know the river’s water quality. It is variable and now proven to be poor, generally speaking. We now have that information because it is publicly available, and we can work towards getting the investment we need to improve the water. I am sure there are similar groups across the country in the constituencies of other hon. Members.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing forward this important debate. I know how much he enjoys a dip in the River Tone. The River Parrett in Langport is a well known and loved body of water for swimming and water sports, which I hope will soon become a designated bathing water site. Sadly, polluters discharged sewage into it 54 times in 2023, amounting to 453 hours of pollution. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is crucial to support such sites to obtain bathing water status, so that they are safe for all who wish to use them?

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend and neighbour is absolutely right. We need to see more bathing waters not fewer. That is one of the concerns I have in this debate. Bathing waters are not just places where people swim; they are part of the identity and lifeblood of our communities across the country. As in my constituency, they are places where people come together for swimming clubs, rowing clubs, kayaking, paddleboarding, or just to enjoy the natural beauty of the river.