West Midlands: Transport

Debate between Gordon Henderson and Simon Lightwood

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Simon Lightwood (Wakefield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is an honour to respond on behalf of the Opposition with you in the Chair, Mr Henderson. I congratulate the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) on securing the debate. I thank her for her contribution and for her dedication to such an important topic.

I will touch on some colleagues’ remarks. The hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) is right that effective public transport is critical to a thriving local economy and to the mobility of labour. The right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Gavin Williamson) is right that regular and effective train services are really important. Several hon. Members mentioned concerns about the accessibility of our train stations, which is something the Opposition strongly believe in. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), who spoke about the importance of buses and raised concerns about the significant cuts to bus services in her constituency. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton).

The Conservative record on buses can be summed up as delays, cancellations and cuts. We know how important buses are for accessing work, school and hospitals and for seeing loved ones. Labour knows that high-quality, accessible and reliable transport links are the difference between opportunity and isolation for millions of people. Naturally, our debate today has covered more ground than just buses, but as they are the most used form of public transport in Great Britain—58% of ticketed public transport journeys in 2023 took place on a bus—I hope that colleagues will bear with me while I focus on them.

Any discussion of transport funding in England must acknowledge that since England’s buses were deregulated in the 1980s, countless bus services in regions outside London have collapsed. The statistics are stark. There were 1.5 billion fewer annual bus journeys in 2019 than in 1985, there have been 300 million fewer bus miles per year since 2010, and thousands of viable bus services have been cut since 2010. All of that happened on this Government’s watch.

It is now widely accepted that the current bus funding system is not working, either for passengers or for the many operators trying to deliver services that people can rely on. The Government’s own bus back better strategy openly acknowledged the need for subsidy reform and committed the Government to working towards it, but far too little progress has been made on that objective. Bus back better was launched two Secretaries of State and, by my calculation, seven Transport Ministers ago, back when the hon. Member for Redditch was a Transport Minister. Passengers now rightly expect far more progress than we have seen from this Government.

I must make it clear that I know that significant numbers of operators, local transport authorities and—through enhanced partnerships—local councils are doing their best to buck national trends on bus decline and deliver for local residents. There has been commendable progress across all of those. I have been on numerous visits to local bus depots to see those developments at first hand, but the national picture is undeniably still one of huge inequity in the quality of bus service provision. The passenger watchdog Transport Focus’s 2023 survey “Your Bus Journey” makes that crystal clear. An unavoidable statistic in it is that the west midlands has the third worst overall journey satisfaction rating in the country.

The west midlands, as is often pointed out, has enormous economic potential. It already contributes more than £100 billion in GDP, with the UK’s youngest and most diverse population. But for the west midlands truly to fire on all cylinders, it must be underpinned by a high-quality transport network that connects the population to that economy. Whether it is connecting people to educational opportunities, to jobs or just each other, that transport network is vital. I was in the west midlands only last month, visiting the National Express depot in Smethwick with Labour colleagues, where we launched Labour’s plan for better buses alongside the fantastic then candidate for Mayor of the West Midlands, Richard Parker. I am delighted that he now joins the ranks of Labour’s 11 metro Mayors after last week’s truly seismic local and mayoral elections.

I cannot help recapping that the Mayor of the West Midlands now joins the Mayors of West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, York and North Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Liverpool, the North East, the West of England, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, London and the East Midlands as one of 11 of the country’s 12 metro Mayors with a decisive swing to Labour—11 metro Mayors who are working in lockstep to improve their local transport areas and united in their readiness to work with a Labour Government, should we be lucky enough to serve, to deliver for their regions.

Richard Parker’s vision for transport in the west midlands is of safer, healthier, greener and more efficient mobility across the region that meets the needs of the growing population of the west midlands. Central to his plans for his flagship policy is bringing buses back to public control. Those revolutionary plans will see the west midlands following in the footsteps of other trailblazing metro areas led by tireless Labour Mayors such as Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester. Manchester’s Bee Network has already started to revolutionise travel in the region, with ridership and reliability climbing thanks to his decision to pursue franchising.

Our Mayors are truly doing trailblazing work. However, Labour knows that access to high-quality bus services should not be restricted to just those living in metro areas. As we announced in Birmingham last month, Labour in government will grant every local transport authority, not just metro Mayors, the power to take back control of their local bus services through franchising. Under our plans to accelerate and streamline the franchising process, we will reform the six-year bureaucratic slog encountered in Greater Manchester, shrinking the franchising process to as little as two years.

Labour’s plan to extend franchising powers beyond metro Mayors is important here because plenty of communities in the west midlands are not within the remit of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority. As proud as I am of Richard Parker, who has turned the west midlands red, I am sure that the hon. Member for Redditch is already sick of me banging the drum for him this afternoon when her constituency does not come under his remit. That is why, within Labour’s plan to fix our broken buses, our longer-term plan is to provide everywhere in England with the option to take more control over bus funding. Labour will reform and combine bus funding streams to ensure that they are better utilised.

[Gordon Henderson (in the Chair)]

Order. Could you restrict your speech to the west midlands and not make it national, please?

[Simon Lightwood]

Okay. The west midlands transport network is more than just buses, vital as they are. The west midlands metro now severely lags behind tram networks in other cities. Greater Manchester’s trams, which predate the west midlands tram network by only seven years, have 64 miles of track across eight lines, compared with the 14 miles and single track in the west midlands. Richard Parker has pledged to finally open the long-promised metro extension from Wednesbury in Sandwell to Brierley Hill in Dudley, and invest in the much-needed extension to Solihull. Crucially, he will roll out contactless ticketing across all modes of transport throughout the west midlands. That seamless integration, which has worked so successfully for Transport for London and has been pursued by the Bee Network in Manchester, will revolutionise mobility across the region.

The west midlands has a proud and cherished heritage of problem solving and invention. With Richard Parker now at the helm to deliver for residents within the metro area, and a Labour Government delivering for so many other communities in the west midlands, we can harness that heritage to kick-start the regional economic growth that the west midlands so desperately needs. Labour is clear that high-quality transport befitting the UK’s second city region is at the very heart of making that possible.