Cullompton and Wellington Stations

Debate between Richard Foord and Sarah Dyke

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the potential merits of reopening Cullompton and Wellington railway stations.

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Butler. The Minister may have heard some of these arguments before, but there have been developments in recent months that he should hear before any decisions are made in relation to Cullompton and Wellington stations.

The south-west has suffered from chronic under-investment in transport infrastructure—a legacy of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, when communities were cut off as many stations across the country, including Cullompton and Wellington, lost their rail services. The campaign to bring back those stations commenced almost as soon as they were lost. In 1996, Devon county council commissioned a preliminary design for a new station at Cullompton, and by 2013 the metro board had been established, bringing together MPs, local councils, the rail industry and enterprise partnerships.

Since then the metro board has met more than 30 times, co-chaired in recent months by my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and me. The studies have culminated in the submission of a final business case to the Department for Transport in May 2024. Later that summer, my colleague and I received letters from the Chancellor pulling the plug on Restoring Your Railway funding. That was a gut punch for communities across the country with less well-established programmes, but I am pleased to say that Restoring Your Railway had already done a lot of the hard work relating to Cullompton and Wellington stations.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

Somerton and Langport is the largest area without a station between London and Penzance; it represents a 28-mile gap between Taunton and Castle Cary. I have worked hard with constituents in the area, who indeed put together a robust business plan and applied for the Restoring Your Railway fund, only to find that all their work had been turned down, scuppering their plans to build a station in the area. Does my hon. Friend agree that that decision denies my constituents the economic and social opportunities that the connectivity of a station would provide, which would enable them to bring business and new homes into the area?

[Richard Foord]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning economic and social opportunities. I too have been contacted by constituents about how they think a station in their town would provide those. Neil Perry, a resident of Cullompton who commutes daily to Exeter for his job as a teacher, told me that he spends nearly 10 full days each year stuck in Cullompton traffic—time lost to him simply because there is no local rail option. He leaves the house at 7.30 am to beat the worst of the congestion, and must leave work at 2.30 pm to avoid a 25-minute journey turning into an hour-long ordeal. The train from Tiverton Parkway to Exeter takes just 11 minutes, and we could see a journey of a similar time from Cullompton. Neil estimates he would save over £2,000 a year in parking, fuel, and car maintenance and points out that Cullompton would become an up-and-coming and much more prosperous town, which would help to drive growth.

This Labour Government are very keen on economic growth, particularly the role that development and housing infrastructure plays in it. They have set an ambitious target to build 1.5 million homes by 2029, and its success hinges on delivering the necessary infrastructure to support those homes. I hear time and again from the people I represent in Devon that they do not want to, and cannot, see the homes built in advance of infrastructure that just does not arrive.

Nowhere is that more evident that in the Culm Garden Village project. Located just east of junction 28 of the M5, the proposed development would bring over 5,000 new homes to Cullompton. Without a railway station, those new residents would be reliant on the motorway. That motorway is already under severe pressure; junction 28 sees queues on to the inside lane, making it already a very unsafe motorway approach road to use. Residents welcomed the recent news of funding for the Cullompton town centre relief road. It is a step forward but, on its own, that relief road will not be enough. We have already seen the consequences of building homes without the right infrastructure: gridlocked roads, overstretched public services and growing frustration among residents. We cannot see that mistake made again in Cullompton.

Another of the people I represent from Cullompton, Tim Pethick, has worked in mental health services at Torbay hospital for 20 years. He was recently diagnosed as unfit to drive due to epilepsy, and now faces a 34-mile journey to work using public transport. Cullompton has no direct rail link. He has looked into using a bus pass, but that is not possible because bus passes cannot be used before 9.30 in the morning and the bus journey takes more than two hours. Here is somebody who has worked solidly for the NHS for the last couple of decades and whose career might be over if he cannot get good public access through the train. Those are just two examples, but my concern is that they are just two of many people who feel isolated and forced out of the workforce because of the lack of rail infrastructure in Cullompton.

Thinking more broadly, the south-west as a whole is a region where social mobility is a challenge. The South-West Social Mobility Commission’s 2024 report confirms that our region is one of the worst performing in England for disadvantaged young people. By age 19, 34% of disadvantaged young people in our region have achieved a level 3 qualification, compared with 42% nationally. We can see that the south-west has quite a high proportion of disadvantaged students, but a low proportion of disadvantaged students who progress to higher education. The University of Exeter commissioned a 2019 report called “Social Mobility in the South West”, which revealed that only 17% of disadvantaged pupils in the region went on to university—the lowest rate among all regions in England.

A major contributor to that poor performance is transport infrastructure. Young people in rural towns and villages—places such as Cullompton and Wellington—often struggle to access college, sixth form and any sort of further or higher education. For young people without access to a car, getting to college or university is not just difficult; it is impossible.

The reopening of Cullompton station would be transformative, as would the reopening of Wellington station in Somerset. It would open up opportunities to get to Exeter college, the University of Exeter and FE establishments further afield, and would be fantastic for generating new apprenticeship opportunities. As the Labour Government have said, if we want to get Britain working, apprenticeships will be an aspect to that.

Just two weeks ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington and I met the Rail Minister, Lord Hendy, and 30 local residents who had travelled to London to lobby him. Together, we made the case directly that reopening the railway stations would not just be a transport upgrade; it would be life-changing for our communities.

A single journey by rail produces up to 75% fewer carbon emissions per passenger than the same journey by car. We know that transportation as a whole accounts for 27% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, so the railway stations would support and bolster the Labour Government’s climate change mitigation aims. The reopening of Wellington and Cullompton stations is not just some idea that will benefit a few people in the south-west of England; it is very much thought through, supported on a cross-party basis, economically sound and environmentally responsible, and it could be socially transformative.

National Resilience and Preparedness

Debate between Richard Foord and Sarah Dyke

Tuesday 7th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the civil contingencies legislation in this country puts a lot of the onus on the devolved institutions and a lot of the responsibility on local government. We cannot afford for national Government to therefore shed all their responsibilities and simply rely on local and devolved institutions.

Resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly; I suggest that the UK Government do not currently offer us that. The covid-19 pandemic exposed critical weaknesses in the planning and preparedness for large-scale emergencies. While the UK has made great strides in terms of our recovery—and we did after the pandemic—we may still lack the capacity to withstand other crises. Our vulnerabilities to emerging climate change, to food security risks and to hybrid threats from the UK’s adversaries leave us unprepared to endure shocks and unable to recover swiftly.

On covid-19, module 1 of the Hallett inquiry was a crucial call to action. The report concluded that the nation was “ill prepared” and that citizens were “failed” by the systems we had in place at the start of 2020. I think of how Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister at the time, was wandering around hospitals shaking hands while the national guidance proposed that we should do something completely different. The report revealed that the UK’s emergency planning was too much focused on influenza and failed to account for any other sort of pandemic.

One of the most critical failings identified was the “unduly complex and labyrinthine” nature of the UK’s civil emergency planning structures. Responsibility for pandemic preparedness was dispersed across multiple bodies, leading to inefficiencies and a lack of clear leadership. The inquiry also scrutinised the Government’s risk assessment processes, finding five major flaws that significantly affected the UK’s preparedness, including a lack of focus on prevention and insufficient consideration of interconnected risks, including economic and social vulnerabilities.

The 2016 preparedness exercise Exercise Cygnus, which simulated the impact of a flu pandemic, identified critical gaps in the UK’s preparedness, including insufficient capacity in the health system and a lack of essential supplies such as PPE. The recommendations from the 2016 exercise were not acted on, and when covid-19 emerged the same shortcomings persisted, with delays in the provision of PPE, inadequate testing, and healthcare services that became overwhelmed in some places.

Over 200,000 excess deaths have been attributed to covid-19 in the UK, many of which may have been preventable with better planning and better resilience. The pandemic also inflicted severe economic damage, with the UK experiencing one of the deepest recessions among the advanced economies. Businesses closed and jobs were lost. The strain on the public sector and on public services like our NHS is still being felt to this day.

The inquiry’s report set out key recommendations to overhaul the UK’s approach to civil emergency preparedness. The recommendations included regular pandemic response exercises and enhanced data sharing. Yet just last Thursday, Clare Wenham from the department of health policy at the London School of Economics stated:

“We’ve had the biggest pandemic of our lifetimes”

yet in 2025 we are

“we’re worse prepared than we were when we went in.”

When the Minister responds to the debate, it would be interesting to know where the Government are in relation to the World Health Organisation pandemic preparedness treaty. One of the 10 key recommendations from the covid-19 inquiry’s module 1 report emphasised the importance of enhanced data collection and data sharing. The emphasis on domestic resilience—the subject of this debate—has to be balanced with the obligation to co-operate internationally. Pandemics do not respect borders and require global solutions. The Government should act swiftly to implement the inquiry’s recommendations, engage with international frameworks such as the World Health Organisation treaty, and rebuild public trust in the nation’s ability to protect its citizens.

Covid-19 also highlighted some of the difficulties in other aspects of our resilience. We need only think about the supermarket shortages we saw and how people reacted: that was a reminder of just how vulnerable Britain is to food supply shocks.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing forward this really important debate. The latest food security report from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs found that fewer households were food secure in 2023 than in 2020. No element of national resilience can be more important than food security, so does my hon. Friend agree that the Government should introduce a comprehensive national food strategy that tackles rising food prices, ends food poverty, ensures food security and improves health and nutrition? Does he further agree that we must give the Groceries Code Adjudicator more powers not only to protect consumers but to address unfair price rises?

[Richard Foord]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I shall now get into the subject of food security. She draws attention to the Government’s food security report. Since the 1980s the UK’s self-sufficiency in food production has declined, going from 78% in 1984 to just 60% today. The statistics emphasise what my hon. Friend said. As for the Groceries Code Adjudicator, my hon. Friend is dead right: we need supermarkets to honour their deals and pay on time.

NHS Dentistry: South-west

Debate between Richard Foord and Sarah Dyke

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered NHS dentistry in the South West.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I am grateful to the Chairman of Ways and Means to have been granted a debate on NHS dentistry in the south-west of England, which has particular problems.

I know that the new Minister will have encountered enough problems with NHS dentistry as it is, but the south-west is a special case. To illustrate: if we were to go back to 2015, 51% of adults in the south-west could see a dentist. That was also the case across England at the time, with 51% of patients who wished to see an NHS dentist having access to one. By 2024, however, that figure has declined sharply. Now, the current average across England is 40%, and in the south-west it is just 34%.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. In Somerset, the percentage of adults who have seen a dentist has dropped by 20% over the past decade. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that we should guarantee access to an NHS dentist for everyone needing urgent and emergency care?

[Richard Foord]

That is exactly what is needed for urgent and emergency care. My hon. Friend draws attention to Somerset; the situation is bleak in Devon too. In Devon in 2015, 55% of adults were able to see a dentist, but that has since dropped to just 37% today.

I have had so much correspondence from my constituents on this subject, and the decline, as I see it, is a direct result of 14 years of Conservative neglect of our health services and of NHS dentistry in particular. I find it really troubling that the situation is affecting people in some of the most vulnerable categories, such as older people and children,

Children in Devon are missing out on crucial dental check-ups. Once upon a time, they used to have check-ups twice a year; now, it is not possible for children to be registered for NHS dentistry in many dental practices. It is therefore no surprise that tooth decay is now the leading cause of hospital admissions for five to nine-year-olds in the country. I talked to one primary school and was told that pupils are going to hospital in Bristol to have their teeth removed—often between four and 10 teeth at a time. The number of NHS dentists in Devon has dropped from 549 to 497, so the reality is that NHS dentistry is simply no longer available for all.

Local Government Finance

Debate between Richard Foord and Sarah Dyke

Wednesday 7th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Dyke (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

I was pleased to debate local government finances in Somerset with the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) at the beginning of the debate, but it would have been better if some of his Somerset colleagues had been here to do that with me.

It is easy to criticise local government and burden it with blame, but let us face it: it is the perfect scapegoat to distract us from the real-terms cuts inflicted by this Tory Government. I am proud to be an active Somerset councillor, and have had the pleasure and honour of serving my local community both on Somerset Council and in this House. I know councillors of all colours are working hard in Somerset to deliver for their residents, but the funding system for local government is simply broken. I am desperately concerned for the future of local government; it needs major reform.

I have spoken on multiple occasions about the issues facing Somerset Council, because of the national problems facing all local government. The council had to declare a financial emergency just last year owing to a £100 million funding gap for 2024-25. The Government have offered a £5 million payment to try to plug the gap, but that is woefully inadequate. While the additional support through the financial settlement is welcome, it is simply not enough. I thank the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), for engaging with me and the council; that engagement has been very much appreciated across the county. However, unless the Government can provide substantially greater funds, this will not work.

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sarah Dyke]

Of course.