Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps he has taken to assess how to achieve cost reductions in rail electrification.

We welcome the work of the Rail Industry Association and others on this. When delivering future schemes, we need to ensure that the supply chain has the capability to deliver electrification effectively, at pace, and at the reduced costs that the rail industry says it can deliver at.

For our part, as individual schemes are developed and bottom-up costs identified, we and Network Rail must learn the lessons from previous schemes and implement them to ensure that electrification is delivered more efficiently than in the past.