Oral Answers to Questions

Johnny Mercer Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I know that these works have taken longer than intended. I have spoken to Highways England and we want to get this situation resolved as quickly as possible. It is certainly the case—I speak as somebody who travels from time to time to Old Trafford—that the area is surrounded by roadworks on the motorway and the work on the new extension to the Metrolink. I hope the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge, however, that this is a sign that the Government are making sure there is investment in, and resource provided to, Manchester, where transport investment on this scale has not happened for a long time.

[Johnny Mercer (Plymouth, Moor View) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend will know from our many previous conversations that the people of Plymouth have waited too long to see improvements on their rail link, so I am grateful for his Department’s response yesterday, but when can they expect to see something delivered—some work completed—on Dawlish, which I know is his No. 1 responsibility?

[Joseph Johnson]

Protecting the line at Dawlish is a national priority of utmost importance and we are determined to find a permanent solution for this vital connection. Some £15 million of funding has been provided to Network Rail to take this forward and planning and development work is well under way. There will be no unnecessary delay, and we will complete this work as soon as we can within the law.

Exiting the EU and Transport

Johnny Mercer Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Chris Grayling)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered exiting the EU and transport.

If I may crave the indulgence of the House briefly, I would like to say a couple of words about the situation on the railways in the south-west. As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, there has been considerable disruption as a result of storms, including line closures and very extensive delays. I can inform the House that following the flooding that closed the great western main line between Exeter and Tiverton, the line has now just reopened. The Barnstaple branch is due to reopen this afternoon. The Looe branch is still closed, but I hope it will reopen on Thursday. There was also disruption when the South West Trains route was closed. I am immensely grateful to all the staff at Network Rail. They sometimes get a hard time when things do not work, but they rally around when there are major incidents and deliver solutions quickly. I thank them all very much for their work.

[Johnny Mercer (Plymouth, Moor View) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for speaking to the House about this matter because it is not good enough for the south-west to be cut off again, or to be the poor relation of the national rail network. The report by the Peninsula Rail Task Force that was presented yesterday must be the framework for a fair deal going forwards, so will he commit to doing everything in his power to deliver on this piece of work and to make sure that Network Rail delivers for my constituents?

[Chris Grayling]

I absolutely understand the importance of the task ahead of us. The report, which I have read carefully, shares my view that the No. 1 priority is the sea wall and the cliffs at Dawlish. My hon. Friend will also be aware that last Thursday I announced—this was also in today’s autumn statement—the provision of £10 million for the next stage of the project. I am committed, as is the Chancellor, to making sure that it happens. It is a strategically important project for our nation—the south-west cannot be cut off via its principal railway routes—so I assure him that we will move ahead expeditiously with it.

Great Western Railway Routes

Johnny Mercer Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gray]

rose—

[Johnny Mercer (Plymouth, Moor View) (Con)]

I think my hon. Friend was there.

[Kevin Foster]

That is very ungentlemanly of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer). I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bradshaw]

I forgot to mention that broadband is terrible in standard class. It never works. I just use 3G, or 4G, if I have it, on the train. I raised this issue with First Great Western a number of times, but it still has not been resolved. I am told that it is fine in first class, but who travels first class? MPs certainly do not; not in my experience, anyway. I never have and since the new expenses system came in we are quite rightly not allowed to.

As hon. Members will remember, two years ago last week we had the catastrophic severing of the line at Dawlish. As the hon. Member for Torbay said, it had a huge impact on the region’s wider economy. Flooding then cut the line on the Somerset levels and this weekend there was flooding between Taunton and Castle Cary. My train was diverted from Exeter because of flooding. There are a lot of resilience problems throughout the network. As we all know, with the growing threat from climate change there will be increasing occurrences of extreme weather events. There has been meaningful and substantial investment in the railways, including in the south-west—although not as much as in other parts of the UK. Following the Hatfield disaster, hon. Members will remember that under the Labour Government there was a major programme of work to make signalling and track safer. That work is ongoing. Improvements at Reading have already made a significant positive difference to the reliability of the service. There used to be regular delays, in particular when coming into Reading on the return journey.

There have been improvements, but we in the far south-west, as opposed to the Bristol-south Wales corridor, where major electrification is planned, still feel the poor relation when it comes to investment. There were a lot of generous—I will use that term rather than grandiose, because we took them at their word—promises made by the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Transport Secretary after Dawlish and particularly in the run-up to the general election. I lost count of the number of times the Chancellor and the Prime Minister appeared in Devon and Cornwall wearing a hard hat and a fluorescent jacket and promising us more than £7 billion of rail and other infrastructure investment. They will be held to those promises. A whole swathe of Conservative MPs were elected in Devon and Cornwall on those promises. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] They are laughing, smiling and “hear-hearing” now, but if those promises are not delivered the smiles will be on the other side of their faces come the next general election. It is up to them to get their Government to deliver.

I feel sorry for my Conservative colleagues. We are friends—we have regional solidarity—and I feel sorry for them. In the past two weeks, we have had an absolute public relations fiasco over a tiny sum of money. The Peninsula Rail Task Force in the south-west is a group that got together after Dawlish. It is run by a Conservative councillor. All the councils have taken part and most of them are Conservative. It came up with a fantastic document, on which the hon. Member for Torbay based most of his speech, about what needs to happen in the south-west. Its very small initial ask is for £250,000 for the necessary feasibility studies into electrification and resilience, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. We were promised that this would happen. There was going to be a press release. It was going to be announced last week on the second anniversary of Dawlish. I hope the Minister will use the opportunity this evening, when she responds to the debate—it is not a very good time to put out such a fantastic news story that our media in the south-west would absolutely love—to come up with this small amount of money. It is £250,000 for two feasibility studies. Nothing has been said about when the work will happen.

[Johnny Mercer]

Will the right hon. Gentleman concede that Network Rail committed to paying for the studies? The Government have not given money to a project and then taken it away. The money has fallen through as a result of what Network Rail has done. We have asked the Government to step up and deliver in its place.

[Mr Bradshaw]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that the Government have never come up with the money. I am suggesting that they should. Network Rail is not able to come up with the money because of the massive cost overruns and delays on the whole of the rest of its infrastructure investment projects; not just the huge cost and time overrun on the Great Western line into south Wales but on its overall investment all over the country. Incidentally, the Government knew about that before the general election when they were making all those great and grandiose promises about what they were going to deliver to us in the south-west. Those are the conversations the hon. Gentleman needs to have with his Front Bench colleagues. I will leave that to him and wish him the very best of luck.

It is completely obvious to me why the money has not been made available. Network Rail has not got it because it has massively overspent and overrun on all its other projects. I hope that when the Minister responds we can hear a little bit more detail on exactly what we can expect in the far south-west and when. If she cannot tell us about the feasibility study money this evening, perhaps she can tell us: when we might be able to hear about it; when we might have some hope about the prospect of electrification beyond Bristol into our part of the region along the lines that have been suggested; and when we might have some idea about the timetable for an additional alternative line to Dawlish.

I completely agree with the point made by the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston). We do not want to lose the line at Dawlish. It is beautiful and the people of Dawlish do not want to lose it. However, the fact is that if we talk to any engineer or climate change scientist about the long-term viability of the route, they do not just talk about storms and sea level rises but the fragility of the cliff. The biggest problem with the block last year was that the cliff kept falling down. It is a multiple problem and the line is between the sea and quite a soft cliff. As hon. Members will know, there was a plan back in 1939 to build a sensible, slightly inland alternative from Powderham Castle to Newton Abbot. That did not go ahead because the second world war broke out. There are other options. I can understand that people in north Devon and north Cornwall like the idea of the Okehampton line being reopened. Let us have a look at that and have some idea about what is going to happen and when. As the Prime Minister himself said, we cannot afford to have the south-west cut off like that again. Our economy cannot afford it. I was on the right side of that block, so it did not affect me, but the Plymouth, Cornwall, South Devon and Torbay economies were seriously affected by it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Johnny Mercer (Plymouth, Moor View) (Con)]

You will be delighted, Madam Deputy Speaker, to know that my speech will be very brief indeed.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) for securing this debate. I shall not repeat what has already been said. I am going to disappoint my father again—I am no railway engineer. He dragged me round, trying to introduce me to the lost art of trainspotting when I was a young man, but it never caught on.

I want to talk about why the rail connection is important to my city, Plymouth, and why we as a Government need to get it right, to deliver for that part of the world. I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray). For much of the time we have a remarkable service, though there are some serious challenges to be faced. We must rise to the challenge of severe weather, without denigrating everything we have already achieved. That would do us a disservice.

Almost two years ago exactly, the Dawlish rail disaster happened. The railway fell into the sea, cutting off my city, as has been mentioned. The idea that the Government have done nothing since then is one of the myths in the literature from the Opposition that is piling up in my office. In the past two years, £70 million has been invested to keep that railway open and to increase resilience generally in the south-west. That is not an insignificant sum. We have that resilience at Dawlish. Admittedly, it sometimes faces challenging weather, but the weather may be a little beyond our control.

I urge the Government not to heed the divisive words of those who seek to further their own personal agenda in this rail debate. Many of us in the south-west feel that we have had investment to a point, but we now need to go to the next level. Let me explain why that is important. As I said, I am no rail engineer, but I am an extremely mediocre politician. That gives me the opportunity to knock on people’s doors in Plymouth and hear what is important to them. People often ask me why, despite our history in Plymouth and our astonishing Janner spirit that has seen us conquer the seas and make the largest contribution to this country’s defence in matériel and men, and despite reviving ourselves spectacularly after a devastating blitz during the second world war, we still have in our city some of the most deprived communities in the United Kingdom. The reasons are many, and clearly far too varied for this debate, but the answers are part of it. We must address the life chances we give people in Plymouth. If we were to cross a particular bridge in Plymouth tonight, we would see the average life expectancy drop by seven and a half years—that is seven and a half years in my city.

We must aggressively fight our way out of the state dependency that has dominated our city since the heady days of the 1980s, when 35,000 Plymothians worked at the dockyard. As the economy and society have changed, we as a city have changed with them; the central economy based around the dockyard has given way to a bright, positive and emboldened city that has become a hub for small businesses and start-ups, driving an astonishing 48% drop in unemployment in the last Parliament.

We have two world-class universities, but they are further from an airport than any in the UK. Marjon University is ranked first in this country for social mobility, which is really important in Plymouth. We as a Government must do everything we can to assist its onward development in that respect.

[Kevin Foster]

My hon. Friend is making some powerful points, which also relate to my constituency, where we, too, are trying to diversify. Does he agree that that is what makes the debate so important, particularly given the comments by the right hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) about the need for western access to Heathrow, which acts as the south-west’s key air link?

[Johnny Mercer]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. At its heart, this is about developing opportunities and bringing skilled employment to places outside London—to communities that have been deprived for so long.

Plymothians have adapted to the challenge of modern Britain in a way that only they can—with a positivity and a spirit that make some of us proud to call Plymouth our home. However, we as a Government must now play our part in that revival and tackle the single totemic issue that will fuel this onward journey towards a better, more prosperous and more healthy Plymouth. The biggest, most rewarding and highest-pay-off issue the Government could get right in the next five years is this railway. The jobs, the opportunities for our young people and the skilled manufacturing opportunities will come only if we have a transport link that is resilient, fast and befitting of a 21st century Britain. I say again that this is the totemic issue for this Parliament for us in the south-west.

At the last election, Plymothians showed their true colours and, for the first time, elected three Conservative Members of Parliament. Plymothians have aspirations, and they want life chances, and we need to do everything we can as a Government to enable them to achieve those and to provide them with the ladder, so that we can bring my city forward and enable it to achieve the potential it so clearly has. The rail link is the single thing that will do that to the greatest effect.

[Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer). I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) for bringing this debate about.

I would like to talk for a few moments about my experience with the Great Western railway and about how beneficial the railway has been. I was not previously a huge user of the railways, having not travelled from north Cornwall to London that much. However, I use them regularly now, because I have to travel up to London and back twice a week. For me, the best part of the week, as the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) mentioned earlier, is getting back on the train at Paddington. I use the sleeper train, and I would urge him to use it as well; there is nothing better than leaving London at midnight and waking up in God’s country, in the south-west, at six o’clock before going back to work on Friday morning. It is an excellent service.

I represent a constituency that is barren in terms of its railways. North Cornwall has no branch railway links. The south-west saw huge reductions under Beeching’s cuts, and North Cornwall lost stations in Bude, Launceston, Padstow and Bodmin, which served the original Great Western railway. I pay tribute to the Peninsula Rail Task Force, which has worked tirelessly in the south-west to attempt to deliver a plan for the south-west. In recent days, we have seen that plan and presented it to the Chancellor and to the Transport Secretary. I hope that later we will hear some positive announcements regarding the funding for that plan.

We have also seen in recent days how groups of MPs can join together and work for a region. Today we had the example of the securing of the local government funding settlement and the increase for rural areas, which has been hugely beneficial to residents in Cornwall, and I am grateful for that. We have a rather seamless tide of blue in the south-west, and it would be beneficial for us all to work together to try to get the best we can for our region. The Great Western Railway franchise, or First Great Western as it used to be called, has had a significant presence in Cornwall. In the past, other operators such as Virgin, CrossCountry and Wessex have come and gone, but trains operated by FirstGroup have served the Cornish people for many years. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for her continued support for the train network in the south-west and for recently agreeing to meet us.

We noticed how resilient Cornwall and Devon can be when we saw the events in Dawlish in 2014. Those events cannot be ignored. Dawlish is a fantastic place to pass on the train—it is one of the best advertisements for the south-west. For any Members who have not ridden through Dawlish on the train, if you look over to the left-hand side, you can see a huge amount of sea and swell. That is exactly what the south-west is about—it is coastal, it is rugged—

[Johnny Mercer]

Like you.

[Scott Mann]

Thank you—likewise!

Millions of people from across the world saw the scenes of the railway hanging into the sea at Dawlish. At that time, we were reliant on the one arterial road that comes into Devon and Cornwall, and that was difficult. We saw the orange army out working—they did a huge job for us, and I am very grateful—but I feel that we should explore other opportunities and other branch lines that might well help us out. An Okehampton link on the line from Exeter to Plymouth would be viable, and it would bring benefits to tourism not just in North Cornwall but in the area represented by my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) and in other parts of the region. I am sure that Great Western Railway would welcome the opportunity to serve more stations and facilitate the return of trains to North Devon. That would help thousands of people right across North Cornwall and North Devon, many of whom have to travel huge distances to access trains.

I might be the only speaker in the Chamber this evening who does not have a branch line running through their constituency, and I would very much like one, so I am going to make another case—for a Bodmin central branch line. There are only two standard-gauge railway stations in North Cornwall, both of which are served by the Bodmin and Wenford steam railway, which runs to Boscarne and is fantastic. However, Bodmin Parkway is located about five miles outside the town centre, which means that it is not easily accessible if there are roadworks or problems on the roads. I would therefore like a proper dedicated mainline link to be implemented between Bodmin Parkway and Bodmin General. The steam trains do a great job in the summer, but we need a 365-day-a-year link. I would welcome Great Western Railway considering putting in a link to connect Bodmin town up to Bodmin Parkway.

[Scott Mann]

I do agree. The more branch services we get, the better. Our public transport system in Cornwall and Devon is not great, and we struggle to provide sufficient bus services. As my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View said, if we make these investments, that will drive jobs and drive the economy in our areas.

I thank the Minister for the investment that has already gone into the south-west, including in the points systems in Penzance, the new bimodal Hitachi trains, which will be ready for use by 2018—that is a fantastic investment and we are grateful for it—and the sleeper trains. I talked earlier about being rocked to sleep on the sleeper trains, which are a fantastic service. A gentle relaxation and a rocking to sleep is a lovely feeling, and it takes six and a half hours to get from Paddington to Bodmin Parkway, so I look forward to those sleeper trains coming online.

The bimodal trains will reach Cornwall faster, so we could do with them. It is also imperative that we look at electrification and line speed improvements. I know that is not going to happen overnight, but I would like the Minister to consider it. The sleeper train is an integral part of south-west connectivity. With the region being three to six hours away from London, night sleeping is important because it means you can have a restful night’s sleep and then get to work first thing on a Friday morning.

I thank the hon. Members for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) and for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who is no longer in her place, for raising the Heathrow proposals. For me, Heathrow is not a London issue; it is a countrywide issue. Linking up areas such as the south-west means faster journey times to Heathrow and it connects us to onward travel. I am grateful to the hon. Members for pointing that out. In 20 years’ time, we could be living in a region that has direct flights from Newquay to Heathrow, and direct trains from the region to Heathrow. People from Cornwall could then fly to Heathrow in an hour, and people in east Cornwall and Devon could hop on an electric GWR service and alight at Heathrow in under three hours.

[Johnny Mercer]

I am very much enjoying my hon. Friend’s stories of rocking the sleeper to sleep, or whatever it is. Does he agree that in order to upskill our part of the world and change the character of the south-west economy, it is fundamental that we attract bigger manufacturing companies to give our young people the skilled opportunities and skilled manufacturing jobs that will keep them in the south-west?