Rail Services
Paula Barker Excerpts(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Mr Harper
Gladly. My right hon. Friend has indeed raised this issue on a number of occasions. First, my officials will be working with officials in the Scottish Government. This morning, I spoke to Kevin Stewart MSP, the Scottish Transport Minister, to explain the decision and how we will be working with the Scottish Government, looking at services currently under the operator of last resort, which cover the whole of the north of England, as well as cross-border services, which are important to my right hon. Friend. I also spoke to the elected Mayors in the North of England who cover those areas to explain the decision and confirm that we will be working closely with them on the best possible pattern of services going forward. I hope that that demonstrates the Government’s intention to use this reset moment as constructively as possible. I hope that everyone else will respond in like manner.
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a proud trade union member. It is interesting to hear the Secretary of State talk about renewal dates. In March, when the shambolic Avanti West Coast contract was renewed, 9.1% of its services were cancelled. In the same month, only 6.6% of TransPennine services were cancelled. Why is he punishing some operators for their failures and not others? Is it not time to fix the broken system once and for all and for him to put his own ideology aside and embrace Labour’s plans to bring our railways into public ownership?
Mr Harper
I think that I answered that question in my statement, if the hon. Lady was listening. When I made my statement about Avanti, I resisted calls to bring it into public ownership for very good reason: it was delivering on its recovery plan, and I said that I had confidence that it would continue to do so when I extended its contract by six months. Since I did that, its cancellation rate for cancellations it caused has fallen to 1.4% from 13.2% in January. It is continuing to improve, demonstrating that that was the correct decision and that I was right not to listen to calls from Labour to do the opposite.
Rail Services
Paula Barker Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Mr Harper
The majority of pre-covid services to the north Wales coast have been restored, and there are five trains a day in each direction between London and Holyhead. Avanti has recruited more than 100 new drivers, which needs to be sustained for it to continue delivering a reliable timetable without depending on rest-day working. We will work closely with Avanti to make sure that performance continues over the coming months.
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
During the period of Avanti’s improvement plan, the operator had the highest proportion on record of trains running more than 15 minutes late. By the Secretary of State’s own admission, Avanti has also lost the confidence of its customers. Why are the Government rewarding this gross incompetence with yet another six-month extension?
Avanti West Coast
Paula Barker Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Trudy Harrison
I spoke with a member of Andy Burnham’s office yesterday at the Women in Transport event, along with Avanti and the West Coast Partnership members that were there. I have every sympathy; I am disappointed with the service and frustrated that the hon. Lady’s constituent has had to endure such a difficult journey. The solution is to have train drivers working.
Whether we call this an unofficial strike action or not, a system whereby drivers were willing to work their rest days for extra pay has worked for nigh on 20 years, and with almost immediate effect one train company, Avanti, has not been able to persuade its drivers to work their rest days, resulting in about 40 out of 50 drivers who usually work their rest days not being willing to work more than 35 hours. I think I am setting out the challenge very clearly. Whether the franchise is state owned or privately owned, the challenge remains: these trains need to be driven, safely, by people who are trained. It takes two years to train a train driver. That is the challenge.
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
Today I think we have truly gone through the looking glass. We have heard from those on the Government Benches about unofficial strike action, but it is not unofficial, because the Trade Union Act 2016 makes sure that it is not. If Avanti thinks that it is, it has mechanisms to challenge it. The Minister has spoken about drivers working on their rest days, but the clue is in the title—it is a rest day, and there is no compulsion for a driver to do so. Does the Minister agree that the decision to award Avanti West Coast a £4 million bonus for operational performance, customer experience and,
“acting as a good and efficient operator”,
would have been better spent on training and recruiting the new drivers she keeps going on about? Is it not time that Avanti was stripped of this contract?
Trudy Harrison
I reiterate the point that the decision on those awards is independent from Government, and was based on last year’s performance data.
Rail Strikes
Paula Barker Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
No one in the country wants these strikes to go ahead. As we have heard, they would be a disaster for workers, passengers, the economy and the rail industry. The good news is that at this stage, they are not inevitable and the dispute can still be resolved. The bad news is that it requires Ministers to step up and show leadership to get the employers and the unions around the table to address the real issues on pay and cuts to safety and maintenance staff that are behind the dispute. Rather than demonstrating any responsibility, the only action the Government have taken so far is to send a petition to the official Opposition. The entire country is about to be ground to a halt, and instead of intervening to try to prevent it, the Government are more concerned with a data capture exercise.
Today, on the eve of the biggest rail dispute in a generation taking place on the Secretary of State’s watch, it is right to say, is it not, that neither he nor his Ministers have held any talks with the unions and the industry to try to settle this dispute?
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making extremely good points—[Interruption.] Thank you. Does she agree that it is utterly absurd that the Government of this country are petitioning the Opposition Benches to try to resolve these strikes when they would do better getting round the table to resolve the issues themselves?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. To Members who are just shouting out while the hon. Lady is trying to make an intervention, I say, please control yourselves. I couldn’t quite hear the hon. Lady because of the noise.
Paula Barker
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is utterly absurd that the governing party of the United Kingdom is so incapable of running this country that it has resorted to petitioning Her Majesty’s Opposition to resolve this dispute? Would not its time be better spent doing its job and trying to get round the table to resolve this dispute?
Louise Haigh
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. I am afraid that it is pathetic that the Government have chosen to petition the Official Opposition when in fact the Transport Secretary has not held a single meeting with either the unions or the industry for over two months to prevent this action from going ahead.
Transport Connectivity: Merseyside
Paula Barker Excerpts(2 years, 3 months ago)
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Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate my good and hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) on securing this hugely important and topical debate.
I will avoid wasting any time mincing my words and get straight to the point: the Minister’s Department, the Secretary of State and the Government are badly letting down the people of Liverpool city region. For all the talk of levelling up, excluding our city region from the Northern Powerhouse Rail network and introducing the integrated rail plan is an abject failure to support economic growth in one of the great cities of the north. Our metro Mayor Steve Rotheram called the new plan “cheap and nasty”, and those are words I echo without equivocation.
Alongside Members from the city region, the metro Mayor and the portfolio holder on the combined authority, I wrote to the Secretary of State in December to make our position clear. For the purpose of today’s debate, I will reiterate that the IRP will be remembered for what it does not deliver for Merseyside.
There will be no new line connection to Liverpool. That fails to integrate us into the High Speed 2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail networks. Upgrades to existing lines in and out of Liverpool will cause up to six years of disruption, which will be significant for the Liverpool city region, causing an economic hit of at least £280 million each year. The plan will fail to deliver transformational extra capacity, as it includes using the already congested west coast mainline into Liverpool. That means little ability to grow local services. In fact, some services will be lost.
There will be a detrimental impact to freight, as 88 freight trains will be unable to operate each week during the upgrade phase. That freight traffic may never return to Liverpool. The plan will constrain the port of Liverpool’s growth as the main deep-water port on the west of the British mainland. There will be no new station for Liverpool, which is vital to ensure the capacity for more long distance and local services. As the plan does not intend to commence work until the 2040s, there will be a slower delivery time. There are multiple caveats regarding the approvals and further progress. Do the Government have any intention of delivering anything beyond phase 2b to the west, and the west to east midlands link? Everything I just mentioned will prohibit the city region’s ability to achieve net-zero emissions.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
The original Transport for the North NPR plans proposed a real levelling up of the north of England, meaning that people in Liverpool city region and Merseyside could have economic opportunities in Manchester, Leeds and Bradford. It would have taken millions of cars off the M62, but these new plans bring us right back. The whole of the north will suffer, as will the whole of our economy, once again at the expense of London and the capital. Does my hon. Friend agree that these plans are letting down the whole of the north?
Paula Barker
My hon. Friend makes incredibly salient points, all of which I agree with. It is the whole of the north that will suffer under these detrimental plans.
As I was saying, support for HS2 in the north is largely predicated on delivering NPR in full, as promised, so that LCR and our regions can realise its full benefits. It is clear from the reply I received from the Department that cost is the driving factor in this deal, not the transformational change that Northern Powerhouse Rail would have brought. The IRP represents another broken promise from a Government who are intent on talking the good game of levelling up while delivering nothing of the sort. The consequences for the Liverpool city region and beyond in the north will be grave.
Rail Investment and Integrated Rail Plan
Paula Barker Excerpts(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
I will give way in a moment, but I think Labour Members will want to hear this. Perhaps it is why the Labour leader of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council said that the IRP was a “victory for common sense”.
Of course it is common sense. We have not just stuck to the original plans which would have spent an extra £18 billion. And what for—what would it have given the Labour party to include that extra £18 billion? It would have given 15 years of delays and just four minutes off the journey between Manchester and Leeds.
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
The Secretary of State talked about leaders and the quotes. I want to touch on the quote of the Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, Steve Rotherham. He said that the penny-pinchers at the Treasury have won the day to roll out a “cheap and nasty option”. Isn’t that the case?
Grant Shapps
It is an extraordinary idea that £96 billion is “cheap and nasty”, but maybe this is a question of language. Those in Liverpool should know that the current journey time from London to Liverpool is 132 minutes and that will be slashed to just 92 minutes—“cheap and nasty”, but 92 minutes.
The common-sense approach we have taken delivers a plan that under the original plan would have been years and years in the making—until well after many of us had stopped serving in this House. This plan benefits smaller towns and cities, which would have been ignored under the plans Labour still backs. The smaller towns and cities would have seen no improvements at all; in fact, in many cases they would have seen deteriorating services, and let us face it, these problems have been known about for years.
Oral Answers to Questions
Paula Barker Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Chris Heaton-Harris
We all look forward to staycations in Blackpool and maybe the odd party conference again, with those enjoyable days that some of us of a certain age used to have there. Coach companies have access to support measures such as the job retention scheme and bounce back loans, as well as locally administered funding. When it is safe to do so, the Government will explore opportunities to open up business for coach operators.
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab) [V]
Grant Shapps
I do agree with the hon. Lady. It is right that only essential work should be taking place at DVLA, and I will check the reports she mentions. It is absolutely critical. I pay tribute to the people ensuring that essential work for key workers, for example checking databases for the police, has been able to continue. I appeal to the public to please use online facilities wherever possible, because that prevents people from needing to go into the office. I should mention that the UK Government have provided 2,000 lateral flow tests. That is now being expanded to every single DVLA worker, something the Welsh Government were not providing, and is helping to protect people now.
Income tax (charge)
Paula Barker Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Andy McDonald
Those are indeed the sorts of responses that we hope to see emerge from the Government Dispatch Box later today. I entirely agree with the approach taken by the Welsh Government.
As I was saying—and my hon. Friend has echoed my view—the state should not bail out the private train companies. Indeed, the fact that those companies are already wanting to be bailed out demonstrates why it is irresponsible for public services to be run in the private sector. Rather than offering a bailout, the Government should offer to take back the keys and return the services to public ownership.
The aviation sector has been hit incredibly hard by the outbreak of coronavirus. We have already seen the collapse of Flybe with 2,000 job losses, not to mention the impact that that will have on jobs at regional airports and across the supply chain. Of course, many thousands of UK citizens are still overseas and will want to return, so the Secretary of State has my full support for his efforts to sustain services to facilitate such repatriation.
Indeed, it is not only a question of passengers: many vital goods and medicines are transported in the belly holds of aircraft. Can the Secretary of State tell us what specific measures are being taken to ensure that those supplies are maintained?
Clearly many people are going to extraordinary lengths to assist their neighbours and their communities, and I know that businesses will bend over backwards to help their loyal workforces at this time. That being so, will the Secretary of State send a message to major employers asking them to do what they can to sustain their employees’ incomes, and will he give an assurance that workers will also be supported by the underwriting of the majority of their wages by the Government should temporary cessations of trading be necessary?
Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that those with the broadest shoulders should bear the biggest burden in seeing our country through this crisis? If so, does he think it right that Richard Branson, the billionaire boss of Virgin, is asking his workers to take eight weeks’ unpaid leave?
Andy McDonald
My hon. Friend must have read my speech in advance. I was about to ask the Secretary of State to prevail on the very same Richard Branson to look to his own considerable reserves, built on the wealth created by his Virgin airline workforce, and withdraw his proposal that they should suffer eight weeks of unpaid leave. I note that he is asking for a Government bailout, but I trust that the Government may expect him to use his own considerable resources before that happens—perhaps when he is down to his last billion. He might be able to live without two months of income, but his workers cannot.
The Secretary of State’s decision—made in lockstep with the European Union—to end ghost flights involving empty aircraft flying simply to retain slots is clearly right, but can he advise us of the consequences for airline staff and ground crew and the support that they will receive, given that their risk of losing their jobs has undoubtedly increased significantly?
In that context, as my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition told the Prime Minister yesterday, the Government must now make commitments to extending full sick pay and lost earnings protection to all workers from day one, including insecure, low-paid and self-employed workers, during self-isolation and illness; raising statutory sick pay in line with amounts in other European countries; introducing rent and mortgage payment deferment options, and banning evictions of tenants affected by the outbreak; removing the requirement for people to present themselves for universal credit, suspending sanctions, and reducing the waiting time for the first payment from five weeks; and supporting local authorities working with food banks in the purchase and distribution of food stocks.
The road haulage industry is founded on an army of small businesses, and if they are to be sustained, it is essential for the cross-channel freight routes to be maintained. What assurance can the Secretary of State give in that regard? Northern Ireland should also have special consideration, given that it is of course dependent on goods coming from Great Britain—as, indeed, is the Republic of Ireland. What steps are being taken to ensure continuity of supply across the English channel and the Irish sea?
Over the past few days, it has been self-evident that the Government must commit themselves more fully to communicating truthfully and effectively with the public about the developments of the virus and their response to it. It should not be the case that we have Ministers giving anonymous briefings to select members of the press about facts known to the Government. Ministers must acknowledge that this poor communication has increased public concerns, and I reiterate what my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition requested of the Prime Minister when they met yesterday evening: I ask that the Government provide much greater transparency in their approach to tackling the outbreak. We must follow the advice of the World Health Organisation and see an increase in testing, along with provision of vital equipment such as ventilators and acute beds.
Sadly, because of this Government’s decade of crippling austerity, we have seen a slashing of over 17,000 NHS hospital beds since 2010, which has led to the disgrace of a private healthcare firm charging the NHS £300 a bed for coronavirus patients. Indeed, the outbreak of the coronavirus has illuminated what has been done to public services in this country over the last 10 years, and I fear that in the coming weeks it will become clear that the situation created by years of underfunding will become unsustainable.
The Budget announced last week showed that the austerity project has failed, even on the Conservative party’s own terms. We now know, once and for all, that austerity was never an economic necessity, but a political choice—a political choice that has left millions of working people across this country paying the price for the recklessness of the financial services industry, when it crashed the economy in 2008.
Today’s debate is focused on the “levelling up” of the economy, but far from levelling up, the Government have presided over huge inequalities on regional investment. In 2018-19, transport spending per head in the north-east, north-west, and Yorkshire and the Humber was £486, £412 and £276 respectively. In comparison, London received £903 per head in the same year. The OECD recently argued that
“addressing the regional productivity divide—between high-productivity areas like London and Southern England and low-productivity regions in the North—can be a key channel for fostering long-term growth and sharing prosperity across the country”,
recommending regionally focused investment in transportation as part of an industrial strategy to boost productivity. But this Budget fails to include such policies.
At the general election, Labour pledged to close gaps in regional transport investment by delivering projects including Crossrail for the north and HS2 to Scotland, and upgrading the rail network in the south-west, as well as providing transformational levels of investment for local public and sustainable transport. This Budget fails to even reverse Conservative cuts to the rail network, leaving in place the cuts to electrification in the south-west, the north and the midlands.
The Government have repeatedly talked up their commitment to Northern Powerhouse Rail, but they have not committed to the full £39 billion project, as Labour has done. Instead, they will commit money only to improvements between Manchester and Leeds. Critically, there is no commitment to resolve bottlenecks such as the Castlefield corridor, or indeed any of the selected flyover and electrification programmes described in the excellent Channel 4 “Dispatches” programme last night. I can see the commitment to the infrastructure works in my own constituency at Middlesbrough station, which are critical to the running of the entire northern network, but sadly, I have no grounds to believe that the necessary funds will be made available until 2023 at the very earliest.
Similarly, the Government are promising to reverse the Beeching cuts, yet have only made £500 million available, which is small beer in real terms and would be lucky to open a very small section of track.
I note the Government’s interest in buses. I have been banging on about buses for years, and it was good to see the BBC devote attention to buses in another documentary last night, but can I gently try to persuade the Secretary of State to look carefully at Labour’s proposals to bring back and expand routes, increase ridership, decarbonise the fleet and provide free travel for all under the age of 25 within a re-regulated bus network that is wholly integrated with other modes? Were he to do that, he would come to the inevitable conclusion that the only way to achieve all that was within a public transport system that was genuinely public in ownership and control.
When the coronavirus crisis is eventually over—we all hope and pray that will be sooner rather than later—we will still face the climate crisis, and sadly, this Budget does little to address it. Greenpeace commented that
“the Chancellor has completely missed the opportunity to address the climate emergency... he’s driving in the opposite direction.”
Friends of the Earth agreed, saying:
“This Budget contains a massive road-building programme which completely destroys any pretence of UK government leadership ahead of this year’s crucial climate summit.
Funding for cleaner cars, EV charging, action on plastics and more trees are just a few green sprinklings on a truly awful budget.”
The UK is way off track to meet its own climate change targets and is further still from meeting its commitments under the Paris climate agreement. This failure is being driven by a rising trend in emissions caused largely by increased traffic growth, which has left transport as the UK’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and the worst-performing sector when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. This failure is the result of deliberate Government policy encouraging traffic growth through an ever-expanding multibillion-pound programme of road building.
This Budget is destined to make the problem worse by pledging over £27 billion for new road building, which will increase car use, worsen congestion and increase air pollution and climate emissions, with little benefit for the economy and at the expense of concreting over large areas of the country. A huge part of the problem is that public transport fares have risen at more than twice the rate of wages since 2010 while fuel duty has remained frozen, meaning the cost of public transport has risen above the cost of motoring, discouraging more sustainable transport and worsening congestion and pollution. Yet the fuel duty freeze continues and there are no measures to reduce the cost of public transport, compounding the failure of recent years.
The contrast between what will be spent on new road building alone and what is pledged for cycling and walking and for public transport illustrates the Government’s priorities, with the investment in roads five times that in sustainable transport. The funding for local transport that the Government announced with significant fanfare simply will not cut it. Labour pledged £6.5 billion over the same period to reverse more than 3,000 bus route cuts in England and to invest in new services. It could cost around £3 billion to reverse the cuts made to bus services alone, yet the £5 billion pledged in the Budget is meant to fund bus services, build new cycle lanes and purchase around 4,000 zero-emission buses. This fund has been over-promised and will not deliver the investment in local transport needed to address the climate crisis and support local economies.
On electric vehicles, it is good that the Chancellor decided to continue the grants. It would have been highly damaging for the plug-in car grant to be scrapped, as subsidies for EVs are required until the up-front cost of EVs reaches price parity with internal combustion engine vehicles. But it should be pointed out that the grants had previously been cut from £5,000 to £3,500—a move condemned by industry. If the UK is to reduce transport emissions in line with climate targets, the cuts to grants should be reversed. By contrast, Labour had pledged to introduce 2.5 million interest-free loans, worth an additional £1,500, for the purchase of EVs so as to allow low-income households, those living in rural areas, and independent contractors and small and medium-sized enterprises to save on new electric cars.
Again, the £500 million investment in EV charging infrastructure is better than nothing, but £400 million of this fund is a reannouncement from the 2017 autumn Budget. This money should have already been invested and should have been supplemented by a further announcement in this Budget so as to provide an adequate charging network. By contrast, to jump-start the transition to electric cars and tackle the climate emergency, Labour pledged to invest £3.6 billion in a mammoth expansion of the UK’s EV charging network. A rapid roll-out of charging stations would eliminate concerns over driving range and lack of electric car charging infrastructure by providing enough electrical charge points for 21.5 million electric cars—65% of the UK’s fleet—by 2030.
On the greatest crisis facing humanity, the climate crisis, this Budget is going in the wrong direction. On the most immediate crisis facing us, the coronavirus, the Budget fails to provide the country and its workers with the safety and security they require. On the Budget’s central promise to level up the country, it is an abject failure, failing to reverse the austerity cuts of the past decade and to invest in infrastructure across the country. The coronavirus pandemic is a dreadful and most immediate crisis, but one day it will be behind us. When we are past this, the same problems of social and regional inequalities and the climate crisis will still be there. I worry that, on the evidence of this Budget, the Government do not have the vision or the ambition to tackle them. When we are through this, we should take the opportunity to reset our economy, so that it works for our people, as it always should.