Railways: Passenger and Freight Traffic

Lord Faulkner of Worcester:
My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lord Berkeley on securing this debate. It would be churlish of me not to commend the Liberal Democrats on the ingenious way in which they have carved the debate up into bite-sized chunks. We look forward to the later contributions from those Benches in the afternoon.

I have no financial interests to declare although, as the House may be aware, I chair the Railway Heritage Committee, I am a vice president of the Campaign for Better Transport, which your lordships may know better by its old title of Transport 2000, and president of the Cotswold Line Promotion Group. Like my noble friend Lord Snape, I have spent the whole of my adult life campaigning for a better understanding and a fairer deal for our country’s railways and, like him, there were times in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s when I almost despaired, under successive Governments, for their future. The emphasis always seemed to be on contraction, cost-cutting, and closures. Indeed, I remember that when a senior official from the Department of Transport arrived as a new board member on the British Railways Board, he announced that he was there at the Minister’s behest to preside over the orderly rundown of the railways. That was the mood of the time.

Most of today’s problems of overcrowding and lack of capacity stem directly from the short-sighted decisions taken at successive Governments’ in the past 40 years, including many closures following the Beeching report and the singling of long sections of double-track main line railway, such as that from Salisbury to Exeter and the Cotswold line between Oxford and Worcester. However, at least we were able to prevent the implementation of the lunacy contained in the Serpell report, which would have left the nation’s railway network looking a bit like that of Argentina, with closed routes and rusted lines more or less everywhere.

How different it all looks today. For the first time that I can remember, we have a government White Paper that explicitly rules out all passenger line closures, and the discussion has moved on to how we provide for growth and not look at ways in which we choke it off by cutting services. As we have heard from my noble friends, the railway’s problems now are problems of success. We now run 19,700 trains each day, which is 20 per cent more than 10 years ago, and more than any other European country except Germany. Those trains carry over 3 million people each day, which is more than at any time since 1946, when the network was almost twice as large. Demand is growing at over 6 per cent a year, which is the fastest growing demand in Europe. The latest interim report from Network Rail shows that things are getting better in terms of punctuality. There was a long way to go there, but improvements have occurred. The punctuality figure of 90.87 per cent for the past six months is the highest for nine years.

In recent days, the most stunning success in the railway has been the opening of the new St Pancras Eurostar station and the completion of High Speed One, the Channel Tunnel rail link; all of it on time and on budget. I was particularly pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, and John Prescott MP belatedly got the recognition that they deserve for their part in delivering that project.

Less publicised and less recognised has been what has been happening on the west coast main line—a source of much irritation to your Lordships, certainly in the years that I have been in this House. The west coast main line modernisation is not yet complete. It will have cost far more than originally envisaged, but at least Virgin Trains is now able to demonstrate improvements in punctuality and service quality, with the promise of three trains off-peak an hour to Manchester and Birmingham. Picking up a point made by my noble friend Lord Berkeley, there is also a possibility that we may get close at last to a seven-day-a-week railway and an end to lengthy diversions and bus substitutions at weekends.

Virgin will just about be able to cope with that within the new Virgin high-frequency timetable, but there will be no spare capacity after 2012 unless the Government are prepared to allow Virgin to add two extra coaches to each train. To have those coaches in place by 2012, the order will have to be placed now and I hope that when my noble friend replies to this debate he will be able to offer some words of encouragement on that score.

Looking further ahead, I see that the Department for Transport already appears to accept that the London-Birmingham-Manchester corridor will be completely saturated by 2024. I am delighted that a number of speakers have referred to plans for a new high-speed line from London to the North of England and on to Scotland. I sit on an advisory board called Greengauge 21 as an honorary member. Until recently, one of our members was my noble friend Lord Jones of Birmingham, but he sadly had to depart when he joined the Government. It is a worthwhile project and I am pleased that it is getting support from your Lordships in this debate, because it will take the opportunity to take all long-distance travel off the existing network, which will be freed up for local traffic, commuting and freight. We are talking about a new railway built to a specification similar to that of the Channel Tunnel high-speed line, with all the advantages of links and interchanges to the conventional railway that can be achieved.

In the short term, a lot can be done to improve services, increase capacity and satisfy rising demand. One is to give Network Rail every encouragement to reinstate some double track on lines that were single 30 years ago—the sort of routes that I mentioned a moment ago, particularly on the old western region and in the south. Another is to embark on a programme of reopenings in England such as the east-west line from Cambridge to Oxford and that down to the south coast from Uckfield to Lewes. Much more is happening in Scotland and Wales in terms of line reinstatement and reopening than in England and we should give full marks to the devolved Administrations in those two countries for recognising the potential of rail.

I warmly welcome the commitment contained in the gracious Speech to proceed with Crossrail. It is an excellent scheme and it is a pity that it has taken so long to come to fruition. I hope that when noble Lords come to examine the Bill in Committee they will look very carefully at the proposed western terminus. Maidenhead is not the logical location for that. The obvious solution is to ensure that, when Network Rail spends its promised £455 million on enhancements at Reading, Crossrail platforms are incorporated into that station as part of that scheme.

Then there is the case for electrification referred to by my noble friend. I hope that the Government take seriously a letter that was sent to them recently by Iain Coucher of Network Rail and Adrian Shooter, the ATOC chairman. I do not have time today to restate all the arguments that they use, but they are absolutely right to question the assumptions contained in the Energy White Paper. I quote one section from the letter:

“Today we have absolutely no idea about the source of energy in the future. We can immunise the railway from changing fuels (and indeed the cost of new fuels) by an electrification programme that puts those decisions elsewhere. For example, it seems extraordinarily incautious to be spending millions of pounds equipping a railway to run on one type of fossil fuel … only to find we—as an industry—have bet on the wrong fuel type”.


I would like to see a commitment to electrify all our main lines eventually but I appreciate that is likely to be some way off. In the first instance we should be starting on a programme of infill electrification to link existing electrified routes and to provide extra capacity through the high acceleration electrification gives us. This should include lines such as Leeds to York, Liverpool to Manchester and from Bedford to Kettering and on to Leicester.

I cannot conclude my speech without saying a word about air travel. This is not an occasion for a debate about the wisdom of airport expansion in the south-east of England, although my noble friend will know that I intend to continue to oppose the third runway at Heathrow as strongly as I can, up to the point where I hope that the decision can be reversed. I would, though, like to draw your Lordships’ attention to a ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority on a complaint made by me about misleading advertising by Flybe, one of the low-cost airlines which seems to delight in knocking the railways. I complained about three statements made by Flybe, which included a claim that rail fares were,
“set to soar 30 per cent”,
and that its air fares were cheaper than the train. My complaint was upheld by the ASA in every respect. It said that Flybe’s ads breached the ASA code in six different ways, covering truthfulness, substantiation and comparison. I hope that it has taken notice of that.

Already, an increasing number of your Lordships who travel down here from Scotland prefer the train to flying, and I have no doubt that more will follow their example as the reliability of the west coast line continues to improve. I hope that those who continue to fly will take account of air quality and climate change issues too. They should remember that the CO2 output per passenger kilometre on a rail journey from London to Edinburgh is 11.9; and that for an equivalent air journey is 96.4.

The renaissance of the railway in recent years has been remarkable and astonishing, and I pay tribute to the thousands of men and women who work as members of the railway community in our country. They are generally unappreciated, often abused and yet set the highest standards of public service. I remember warning back in the 1970s that if the country were foolish enough to imagine that it could do without its railway, it would come bitterly to regret it in 20 or 30 years’ time. The fact that today’s debate is about expansion, not contraction, shows just how far we have travelled in our appreciation of how vital the railway is.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, before my noble friend leaves rolling stock, will he confirm that the review in January will cover the issue of the Virgin request for two extra coaches for its Pendolino service? That is crucial for matching the supply of seats to the demand that is likely to exist in 2012.
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© Lords Hansard 29 November 2007