Oral Answers to Questions

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Well, of course, a number of the Scottish ports are trust ports. I have been to the port in Montrose. I am very keen to see ports like that expand and I am working with a local Member of Parliament—a fantastic new Conservative Member of Parliament—to ensure that we provide the support and the opportunities for such ports to grow and develop.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Ind)]

4. What recent assessment he has made of trends in the cost of railway infrastructure; and if he will make a statement.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Joseph Johnson)]

Information on trends in infrastructure costs on the railways are published by the Office of Road and Rail in its UK rail industry financial report, which is found on its website. Spending by Network Rail was £7.3 billion in 2016-17, an increase of half a billion pounds, or 7% in real terms, on the previous year.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Since rail privatisation, the costs of rail infrastructure works have gone through the roof, multiplying several times. The Minister may have seen a recently published analysis showing that electrification, for example, now costs seven times more in real terms—stripping out inflation—than when British Rail electrified the east coast main line. Is it not obvious that we should not only nationalise train operations, but rebuild publicly owned in-house works capacity and save billions for the public purse and for passengers?

[Joseph Johnson]

I remind the hon. Gentleman that Network Rail is responsible for most railway infrastructure work in this country and it is, of course, in the public sector. He rightly highlights the need for Government to ensure that they get the greatest possible efficiency and value for money from all our infrastructure investments. That is why we have set up a mechanism to benchmark costs across the industry in the most rigorous way possible so that we get full value for money from the record sums that we are investing in our railways— £48 billion over the next five-year period.