Chris Gibb Report: Improvements to Southern Railway — House of Commons, 2017-07-04
Topic: Transportation
Thomas Georg John Tugendhat (Conservative, Centre-right): What a pleasure it is to see you in your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thank the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) for all he has done, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames), on the all-party parliamentary group on Southern rail. I hope that the group will reform as soon as he is ready This is a particularly important debate for me and it is one that is very close to my home, in the sense that I live very near a station on the Southern line, from which I take a train to get here. This situation has had a huge impact on my life and the lives of many of the people I have the privilege to represent. People around our communities cannot get home. Children cannot get to school and therefore the parents, even if they could have got to work, cannot go because they do not have emergency childcare I have been working very closely with my hon. Friend the Minister, who has done enormous amounts of work of late to ensure that the rail network gets the money it requires. But in the Gibb report we find many indications of why this is not just about money. It is about so much more. It is about huge amounts of time and infrastructure, and that is why I shall skip over the industrial relations that have been so adequately covered by many of my right hon. and hon. Friends and over some of the aspects of union power touched on by those who are my friends, even if they sit on the other side of the House. I shall focus instead on areas in which we need to take the Gibb report seriously As various people know, electrification of the Uckfield line has been spoken about since the 1970s. It was, I believe, the last track to use a steam engine for regular commuting services, right up to the 1970s, and now that legacy is coming through on the diesel line. Surely enough is enough. It is 2017, Thomas the Tank Engine is on an iPad—he is not even a book any more—yet we have diesel trains running on what should frankly be electric tracks. Please, Minister, can we have the electrification we need? Can we catch up with the iPad generation There are many people from Edenbridge and District Rail Travellers Association with whom I have been working very closely who have spoken about this and about how we can get this done: how to get the lines dualled—or rather, redualled, as the dual line was removed in the 1990s. Perhaps—here is the real chance—we can get the line to run beyond Uckfield. Imagine that, Madam Deputy Speaker: taking your holidays and deciding that instead of driving down—you do not want to do that, through Croydon and south London, on all those crowded roads—you will get on the tube at Westminster. You take the Jubilee line straight through to London Bridge, where you get on the train. You will travel down some of the most beautiful tracks in Kent, but then you end up by accident in Sussex. However, you will still go through beautiful parts of Kent, travelling on from Uckfield down to the coast. Imagine that, Madam Deputy Speaker, for an evening in Brighton after a day in the House. I can see that you are already desirous of those moments I can see that that is something that we can all aim for. There are many issues that we can touch on: the parking at Cowden and Hever; the fact that many folk have to drive to stations such as Hildenborough or Sevenoaks, rather than getting on at the station nearest to them, which has an impact on the environment and road safety. These are narrow lanes with cyclists and horse riders. That is a danger for all of us Perhaps the most important issue is the fact that we have to invest in our future. Time and again, we have lived off the legacy of our great-grandparents’ thoughts and dreams—those investments that built the trains, bridges and roads. They were built by the Victorian and Edwardian generations, and in this new Elizabethan age surely we need to emulate that investment, because when we spend on the rail networks we are not spending on getting to London five minutes quicker; no, we are spending on making our nation great, and we are doing it because London is not just the people who live in it. All great metropolises depend on the networks they feed off, and there is none greater than ours and there is none that requires more investment.