Future of Rail Manufacturing

Iain Stewart Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. I add my congratulations to my comrade from the Transport Committee, the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris), on securing this important debate.

Rail rolling stock manufacturing in the UK has a bright future in the medium to long term, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell) pointed out. In the coming years, there will be significant new orders, not just from HS2 but from Northern, Chiltern, ScotRail, Southeastern and others, which will be putting through considerable orders. The challenge at the moment is how we get over this short-term trough of orders. I am heartened that my hon. Friend the Minister and the Secretary of State are meeting Alstom, Hitachi and others to find out how that can be resolved. Those conversations will be confidential, so I will not press him on that.

My main point today is that the peaks and troughs in the procurement of rolling stock and, indeed, other parts of rail infrastructure are not a new phenomenon. For many decades, the industry has had a tap-on, tap-off approach and we need to address that. There is an opportunity to do that with the creation of Great British Railways, the way for which was paved by the draft Rail Reform Bill my Committee is scrutinising. I believe that if that is done in the right way, it can help to knit together the industry’s objectives and create a long-term horizon that will engender investment from Hitachi, Alstom and others. I do not want to prejudge the outcome of my Committee’s work, but we have already received considerable written evidence, and that is what the industry is calling for. For example, the Rail Industry Association made that point forcefully.

It is not just about having a strategy of buying new rolling stock; it is about the type of rolling stock that is needed, which is why we require a whole-industry perspective for the long term. There is an ongoing and evolving debate about the extent and type of electrification of the network. For some lines, the cost of electrifying the whole line are prohibitive, so we can have what is known as discontinuous electrification with battery electric trains. To arrive at that point, which I think is eminently sensible, different parts of the industry need to work together. I believe GBR can do that, and that is one of the areas that the Committee will explore.

The second point I want to make in the little time I have left is that although the procurement of new rolling stock is important, another important part of the rolling stock industry is refurbishment. Rolling stock has a long lifespan—typically, 30 or 40 years—but it often requires a refresh halfway through. Avanti currently has a refurbishment programme for the Pendolino stock carried out by Alstom at its site near Widnes, which I had the privilege of visiting not long ago.

We can do better in other parts of rolling stock system, too. I will give a brief example from my own line—the west coast main line. London Northwestern Railway is about to take delivery of brand new rolling stock, which is great; it will be faster and have more capacity, and it will be warmly welcomed, but the units it will replace are not life expired; they are perfectly good trains. They might need a refresh and some new kit in them, but they can be used. There is a gap in the thinking about how we can most efficiently use that cascaded rolling stock elsewhere in the network, where it might be needed. I appreciate the short-term anxieties about Hitachi and Alstom, and I hope they are resolved, but we need a much longer term, holistic perspective for this industry.