High Speed Rail (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill — House of Commons, 2018-01-30
Topic: Transportation
Gareth Craig Snell (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), in this important debate. I disagree with him about the support that should be offered to the Bill this evening. The principle behind a high-speed rail network is absolutely fine, but the Bill should actually be entitled the devastation of Staffordshire Bill. It will lay an iron scar across our county, and it will bring very little in the way of economic benefits. All that it does is seek to take all the potential benefits and, through a bottleneck, funnel them down to London and the south-east, where there will be no benefit for my constituents or those of the hon. Gentleman I find myself in what some might describe as the invidious, or perhaps I should say unusual, position of agreeing with the hon. Members for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), for Stone (Sir William Cash) and for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy)—the holy triumvirate of Staffordshire Members when it comes to matters of logistics—who have drawn attention to the fallacies in the Bill. Like the hon. Member for Stafford, I have no problem in principle with high-speed rail. I have no problem with the idea of providing additional capacity for the west coast main line and an opportunity for new rail networks to come through Staffordshire and service his constituency and mine. What the Bill does not do, however, is match that aspiration with reality The hon. Gentleman has already pointed out that the services that will be coming north from London through our constituencies will terminate at Macclesfield. If we were serious about how we could provide better economic benefits for Staffordshire, the line would go all the way to Manchester. Crucially, that would also offer a new opportunity for a direct service from Stoke-on-Trent to Manchester airport. That would provide a huge growth opportunity for business and tourism, and it is supported by Staffordshire chambers of commerce, which has done so much to promote the venture. It would not necessarily involve a high-speed link, but it would involve the wider issue of funding the regeneration of rail networks out of Stoke-on-Trent. We must not focus purely on high-speed rail enabling us to get to and from London quicker than we currently can. The purpose here is interconnectivity of the regions going north as well, and what we are being offered in this Bill does not provide any sort of hope for that I want to look at what I consider to be a mismatch in Government policy. The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy highlights the potential benefit of a ceramic deal in Stoke-on-Trent, and the fact that Stafford is a growth point in our county and that we could have new jobs and regeneration and place-based economic growth through a potential ceramic park bordering my constituency and in the constituency of the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South. Yet although we are told that a place-based industrial strategy is important, we are also told that Stoke-on-Trent station, which has 2.8 million rail users a year, is not worthy of anything other than a single one-hour service that will only go north to Macclesfield and will terminate in London, when the journey time of the current service to London is adequate and capacity on the Virgin line is not too much of a problem The bigger capacity issue in Stoke-on-Trent and north Staffordshire involves the line run by CrossCountry that services Stafford, Wolverhampton and Birmingham and Birmingham International, where it is often standing-room only in some of the most unpleasant circumstances we can imagine. Yet while we are talking about trying to bring Government policy on regeneration strategy together, there is no economic benefit not to having a greater presence in Stoke-on-Trent There is the issue of where the services coming north go to. The hon. Member for Lichfield rightly pointed out that there are potential benefits in using existing railheads, and I was glad to hear the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South endorse the work done by Councillors Mohammed Pervez and Andy Platt on the Stoke option, which sought to use the existing rail infrastructure in Staffordshire to take high-speed trains north. The estimate done by the city council at that time suggested that that system could be delivered seven years quicker than the previous timescale and at £5 billion less We have here a system that does not necessarily deliver economic benefits for the people of Staffordshire, and it certainly does not help address the ecological issues raised by the hon. Members for Stafford, for Stone and for Lichfield, nor does it provide any great comfort that the northern powerhouse and the midlands engine will be properly connected The hon. Member for Lichfield stole most of the things I wanted to say, and he made the point that this is meant to be about connectivity but it really is not. Connectivity does not mean having to traipse across London to make a change, and it does not mean having to change stations outside Birmingham—and Birmingham Curzon Street to Birmingham New Street is quite a long walk for those carrying a bag or if there are a lot of people in the town centre that day The system does not address the east-west connectivity of Stoke-on-Trent, which is a greater issue. It does not look at the route that goes from north Wales all the way through to Derby. It does not seek to change the single-carriage railway we currently have that is often over-subscribed. It does not seek to deal with the fact that parts of the M6 are still not in the managed motorways system, so we drive north on the M6 and hit junction 13 and all of a sudden we drop down to three lanes and the traffic is a bit gnarly and not particularly flowing well, and then we reach junction 17 and all is fine again. That is part of the connectivity that we need The system certainly does not recognise the fact that junction 15 of the M6 is one of the worst junctions to navigate of all time. I have sometimes had to wait longer there to get on to the M6 than it has taken me to get to Birmingham once on the M6, simply because of the way that junction works. So if we are talking about connectivity and there being a need for greater integration of transport provision, we must look at that as well as looking at high-speed rail The Secretary of State is not in his place at present, but the new Minister is and I welcome her to her role. Can we get some clear and categorical commitments that the existing Virgin service that we have from Stoke-on-Trent will not be diminished? Every time we ask that question, we get a slightly different answer; we get some sort of, "Yes, but, maybe, if," but those terms do not fill us with confidence that any options that come out of the Crewe hub will not lead to a reduction overall in rail service from Stoke-on-Trent. If we include journeys from the constituency of the hon. Member for Stafford, we find that 5 million rail journeys are conducted out of Staffordshire every year. That is a large number of people, and they deserve to know what the future of their rail service will look like I would be grateful to the Minister if she gave greater consideration to ensuring that trains going north go past Macclesfield. There is a genuine economic boom to be harnessed in north Staffordshire and south Cheshire if we can have a proper high-speed rail link to Manchester and Manchester airport. That is a proposal that the local chambers of commerce have been putting together. I would welcome any words from her or her colleagues in the Department for Transport about the managed motorways system on the M6. We need to take a holistic approach if we are to make north Staffordshire and south Cheshire a good place to do business, deliver economic regeneration and, most importantly for my constituents, provide the rail service that they need. I support the principle of the Bill, but I cannot support its content, and if there is a Division on it, I am afraid that I will not offer my support to the Government this evening.