Transport Secretary: East Coast Franchise

Paula Sherriff Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

Thank you for calling me in this important debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. Like my party’s Front Benchers and others, I really am very happy to see this Government, with no hint of irony, realising the virtue of a rail franchise being taken into public hands, operated in the interests of the many, not the few. Let me be absolutely clear: the failure of Virgin East Coast, and this Secretary of State’s handling of it, shows this out-of-touch Government at their self-serving worst, looking after their rich pals in big business while people across the country are left to pick up the pieces. In January, we were offered the ridiculous suggestion from Virgin that the Government’s bail-out of the east coast franchise was somehow the pragmatic solution. Why is it that this Government can always somehow find the money to bail out their friends in the big corporations but refuse to help increasingly frustrated railway passengers, such as the ones who contact my office every day? What is pragmatic about that?

I have long been a supporter—since before I came to this House—of putting our country’s railways back into public hands. Real pragmatism would involve just that: giving power and control to passengers—giving the public ownership of our railways, because the utter failure of the franchise system is there for all to see. I worry about the precedent that the Secretary of State has set with the east coast line to companies such as Virgin, sending out a message loud and clear, “Under this Government, no matter how badly your business is doing, don’t you worry, we’ll be there to make sure the taxpayer looks after you.”

The public are paying these big companies more and more of their hard-earned money in exchange for a shoddier and shoddier service. Even just last week, I and other regular users of Virgin East Coast received a rather odd email. It was Virgin congratulating itself on the service being

“in a really good position thanks to the positive transformation we’ve started”.

Perhaps I missed that. I am sure regular East Coast users, both in this House and outside, will have been happy to see that Virgin was signing off with a good crack at a joke—that is all it could have been.

Our railways are in a significantly worse state than they were in 2010, and it is not just Opposition Members saying it; the public also know that things are now so bad that something has to give. Some 76% of the public and 90% of Virgin East Coast staff agree. What this Government just do not get is that their party’s privatisation of the railways 25 years ago has been such a deep, unmitigated disaster that the public are now willing to try something different. They are, frankly, sick of seeing a Secretary of State who comes to this House time and again to tell me and colleagues that our constituent’s experiences of travelling by train—trains overpriced and late, people packed in like sardines—are not accurate and do not reflect the real picture.

Every week that this Secretary of State remains in his position—I note he is no longer in his place; perhaps he has something better to do—is yet another week in which mistrust of his Department grows deeper and deeper. Grand promises to improve the daily commute for people in my constituency are being made in one breath, only for the Secretary of State to turn his back on passengers in another.

“It is a bit of a cheek for a Member…to lecture and question us about rail investment when the Government have made so many promises that they have failed to deliver.”—[Official Report, 5 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 221.]

I hope Conservative Members agree, because those are not my words; they are the words of this Secretary of State when he was the Conservative shadow transport spokesman, more than a decade ago. We do not even have to go back 12 years with this flip-flop Transport Secretary. In 2016, he said that nationalisation is “an expensive, reckless idea”, and in 2017 he called it Venezuelan. This January, he said, “We must never forget how badly nationalisation failed key public services.” Now, four months later, he talks of his excitement at bringing back one of Britain’s most “iconic” state-run brands. Well, the chickens really have come home to roost, have they not? If he cares to return to the Chamber, will the Secretary of State tell the House why he suddenly changes his mind on nationalisation and his seemingly long-held principles against it when nationalisation becomes a means of bailing out Richard Branson?

In Yorkshire, what have we had from this Secretary of State? My Labour colleagues and I have come to the House time and again to demand a fairer deal and highlight the concerns of our constituents, only for Transport Ministers to turn their backs callously on northern commuters. We have had the downgrade of Crossrail for the north. Yorkshire has been hit with the biggest fare increases anywhere in the country. We have seen the Secretary of State ducking and diving meetings with me and colleagues when we simply wanted to discuss our constituency concerns. If we continue to say that we will cut the Secretary of State’s pay if he continues with some of these incompetencies, I am worried that he will end up on less than the minimum wage.

Northern passengers have been told that twice as much is spent on them as is spent in the south, although through a rather imaginative calculation, that ignores London. Just this week, we have seen new timetables cause complete meltdown throughout the region, with barely an eyebrow raised in Westminster. And now this: an accidental renationalisation. On behalf of my constituents, who have quite frankly had it with the state of public transport across Yorkshire, I say this: surely the buck has to stop somewhere. The Yorkshire Post recently took the unprecedented step of calling on the Secretary of State to resign; with a record like his, surely the right hon. Gentleman should and must consider his position. The Opposition stand ready to transform our country’s railways for the better, and my constituents are crying out for it. Surely that is not too much to ask for.

--- Later in debate ---

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

As we have heard from right hon. and hon. Members, the railways always stimulate passionate debate, even if some of the arguments made by Labour Members do not seem to have moved on much since the 1970s.

Leaving aside Labour’s unwarranted, ad hominem, vindictive attacks on the Secretary of State, which only serve to underline how thin its substantive arguments are, it would have us believe that our future lies in returning to the bad old days of British Rail. However, scores of Conservative Members have used this debate to restate the merits of what has been achieved since privatisation, and they are entirely right to recall its considerable successes.

As my hon. Friends the Members for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) and for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) made clear, privatisation has transformed the railway. Passenger numbers have doubled, with 1.72 billion journeys in 2016-17. Passenger satisfaction has increased—ours has the second-highest satisfaction levels of any railway in Europe—and we have unprecedented levels of safety, meaning that the British railway is one of the safest in Europe. The public and private sector, working together, have responded to demand by delivering more services to more stations across a busier network. Some 71 more stations are open today than in 1994-95, and more than 7.3 million passengers services were planned on the Great Britain rail network in 2016-17, which represents an increase of 29% from 1997-98.

[Paula Sherriff]

The Minister seems to be referring to some utopian paradise with his talk of all the great things about the current rail system. Has he looked at Twitter this week and seen the complaints of many thousands of people, including many of my constituents, who are experiencing a living hell just commuting to work and college?

[Joseph Johnson]

We are of course dealing with the challenges of managing a busy, successful and growing network. The hon. Lady will acknowledge that we have just introduced one of the biggest—if not the biggest—timetable changes in the history of the railways to reflect the surge in demand for rail services. We recognise that there are problems, of course, and we are focusing on them so that we minimise disruption, but we should acknowledge that we are dealing with the challenges of success, rather than failure.

Let us not forget about freight either—it is one of the great success stories of privatisation. The private rail freight operators that took over from British Rail in the 1990s brought a new spirit of commercial enterprise and customer focus, and an innovative approach, to operations. That transformed a sector that had been in steady decline into one that, over 20 years, has doubled its share of the land-based freight market.

Privatisation has driven innovation, new private investment and customer service excellence, drawing in more than £4 billion of private investment in our railways since 2010 to deliver faster, more convenient and more comfortable journeys. Thanks to private investment, 7,000 new carriages are to be introduced on the rail network between now and 2021.