Railways: Reliability

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 31st October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for this debate. I, too, extend my welcome to the Minister. She will have quite a lot to contend with, not just with railways but with transport as a whole. I am not going to take a tour of my local railway line but talk about a very important railway line on which I rarely travel.

The business case for extending the electrification north of Bedford to the east Midlands was stronger than that of the Great Western, but the Government of the day decided otherwise. Subsequently, an expensive scheme of electrification was initiated on the Great Western when skills were at an appallingly low level. The trains themselves were developed by the Department for Transport, rather than by railwaymen. The result has been an extraordinarily expensive electrification scheme on the Great Western that has absorbed all the money which it had been hoped was available for electrifying the midland main line. The east Midlands cities of Derby, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield have paid a high price, and they are justifiably furious that this is so.

There is a way out of this if the Government will listen. As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, mentioned, Network Rail has recently stated that it would let private contractors bid for and deliver “big schemes”. A competition put to the market would allow a contractor to bid for the whole of the electrification scheme, including any modifications to the signalling. I am quite sure that this would attract bids from a number of multifunctional operators, or even from the regions in Network Rail itself if it were freed from the cloying influence of the infrastructure section of that company. The risk would be mitigated by coming to a long-term contract with the bidders, who would be responsible for delivering and maintaining the system, and who would, of course, be paid only on the results that they achieved. As a railwayman of long standing, although I have no interest to declare, I am absolutely certain that the whole scheme would come in at a price very much lower in unit cost terms than the Great Western, and it would avoid the expense and poorer performance of producing bi-mode trains. The plain fact is that straight electric trains are lighter, provide a more reliable railway, use less power, are cheaper to run than bi-modes and require less maintenance. They benefit far more than bi-modes from regenerative braking and I am quite certain they will make a significant reduction in journey times. I estimate a reduction of six minutes in the London to Sheffield journey time, which is very significant.

If this option were on the table, it would come in at a price level that would prove an attractive proposition—one that Ministers would be willing to accept—and it would give the east Midlands community something that it would accept. I beg the Government to look at this proposition very seriously, and I am willing to help deliver it. As the east Midlands franchise is now in course of development, now is the time to take a completely new look at this.