Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps he is taking to increase the amount of freight which is transported by rail.

The Government is committed to growing rail freight. We are undertaking a number of initiatives including setting a long-term rail freight growth target, which will be announced later this year, and a review of the Mode Shift Revenue Support scheme. I host bi-monthly roundtable meetings with key rail freight stakeholders. Network Rail also continues to work closely with freight operators to improve performance, with increases seen recently in Network Rail’s Freight Delivery Metric.