East Anglia Rail Franchise — House of Commons, 2015-12-16
Topic: Transportation
Chloe Rebecca Smith (Conservative, Centre-right): I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) for calling for this debate. As is eminently clear, we are a united team here tonight arguing for our rail network in East Anglia at a very important moment. When I was traveling back to my constituency a couple of weeks ago, the train was, rarely, a moment ahead of schedule and the announcer said over the tannoy, " Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to say you have arrived in Norwich…". He meant to say, "You have arrived in Norwich a minute early," which is a record-breaking feat. The surprise that nobody in the carriage felt was that we had arrived. It can take all too long sitting on those trains to East Anglia and not being entirely sure of arriving at all. That hapless announcer had managed to make one of the best jokes in the book—that people do arrive when they are trying to go to East Anglia I wish to thank the team of colleagues and the many businesses out in our constituencies who contributed to the report of the Great Eastern main line taskforce. I particularly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer), my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Sir Simon Burns). I pay tribute, too, to the work of the New Anglia local enterprise partnership, the Essex chamber of commerce and others throughout our three counties who have contributed extensively to this work, and I thank the passengers who have supported it, because it is for them that we do this work. It is for them that we make sure we have a bright future for our economy. It is for them, travelling every day on a poor service, that we want to make these differences When we launched the report, we had more than 111,000 passengers represented by the organisations behind the campaign. That is a force to be reckoned with and I know that my hon. Friend the Minister sees that as she looks at East Anglia. She knows the prize that we are aiming for—the opportunity to create jobs in Norwich, Ipswich, Chelmsford, Colchester, and up and down the line, including the smaller towns which are often forgotten but which are crucial. I am talking about figures of the order of 8,200 new jobs in my city, Norwich, just under 10,000 new jobs in Ipswich, and some 30,000 new jobs throughout Essex. That is what we stand to gain through this campaign, and that is why it is so crucial The Minister is well aware of the strength of the East Anglian economy. It is a regional economy. It is, in the phrase of my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich, the "California of Europe", or so it would be if it was served by better transport links, and that is the key point of our campaign. Let us not forget that it is also a major destination for many thousands of tourists who want to come there every year, but who get stuck. It is not good enough for people to be unable to get to the destination of our wonderful counties Let me give an example from the business world. One of our colleagues on the campaign team was escorting an investor from quite far around the globe to East Anglia to talk about a new business venture, the kind of thing that builds the jobs that we have spoken about. That investor stood on the platform at Liverpool Street contemplating the candy cane of the cancellations board and said, "But I can’t invest in this. This is no good. Is it normally like this?", and our colleague had to say yes. That is what sets our region back. We want an end to such disappointment It has not been good enough to have some of the oldest rolling stock in the country. It has not been good enough to have delays. It has not been good enough to have unreliability. I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) will talk about some of the day-to-day economic impacts that that can have. At a time of year when people want security in their working lives and security for their families, it is not good enough We have been looking this week at an astronaut going into space and we are all extremely excited to see Major Tim Peake’s progress. When I heard the numbers involved, I could not help but think of a comparison. When I understood that he was going to travel 250 miles from the orbit of earth to the international space station, I thought to myself, "Well, that’s only double the distance between London and Norwich." Then I heard that he was going to take six hours to cover the distance from the orbit trail to the ISS, and I thought, "That’s about a good day on one of the weekend services to our county," and I thought, "We could do better than that." Let us see rocket boosters on our rail franchise—that is what we need. We have the opportunity to do this. We have made significant progress so far. We are on the cusp of a franchise that will give us new trains, and on the cusp of proper investment through Network Rail that will enable us to have the investment in the track that we need My call to action is this: we need passengers to continue to have faith in this campaign.