First Great Western Franchise

Thank you, Mr. Chope; I shall be mercifully brief. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) on securing this debate. It might have been 20 years delayed, but it is extremely timely, because there is hardly a bigger issue in the far south-west than its train service. I commend the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Alison Seabeck), as she disappears. She has taken a leading role in securing a better train service from the Government and First Great Western, and I pay tribute to her for doing so. Her performance has been impressive and I appreciated what she said in this debate. I also thank the Government for their part in the change of mind about the three-hour service from London to Plymouth. I am unsure how it came about. I know that First Great Western had a major hand in it. It was of immense strategic importance to Plymouth that it secured that change of heart. The service is a vital lifeline for the city of Plymouth, which is the economic engine for the far south-west: Devon and Cornwall. It was critical that that three-hour journey, made four times a day, remained in place. I am grateful that that seems to have been the position, but I share the anxiety of the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport that it needs to be nailed down and secured to ensure that the three-hour train journey remains in place. As you well know, Mr. Chope, those of us in the far south-west, which is what I like to call Devon and Cornwall, live in a very peripheral part of the country. The solution to peripherality is first-class transport links. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes about the difficulties caused by everyone piling on to the roads at certain times of the day and year. Our roads system is clogged up and there seems to be no more scope in that regard. It is therefore crucial that our rail links are excellent, which brings me to my main point. I shall focus for a few minutes on one specific fallout from the new specification and new timetable: the impact on the commuter town of Ivybridge, just 10 miles east of Plymouth. As I hope the Minister knows, Ivybridge station has been in place since the early 1990s at a cost of £1.5 million of public money. We would all accept that it has been slow to become a viable train station, for various reasons. However, in the past two or three years, usage of Ivybridge station for commuter and student transport, both from Ivybridge to Plymouth and from Plymouth to Ivybridge college, particularly in the mornings, has been growing steadily. Studies suggest that in the past 12 months, usage of Ivybridge station has increased by 70 per cent., and that is probably an understatement for the simple reason that during the 10-minute journey from Ivybridge to Plymouth, the service provider has quite often not collected money or taken tickets, so certain lucky passengers have been able to travel free and their presence on the train has not been recorded. The 70 per cent. increase is probably an understatement of how, at last, the station is beginning to take off. More and more people are using it for park and ride. More and more people live in Ivybridge and commute to Plymouth on the 7.49 and 8.21 rail services and return on the 16.48 and the 17.50—how specific is this speech?—every day. That is a viable working service and it is growing. We are about to have a new town on the east of Plymouth, just south of the A38, at Sherford. Sadly, that will only make the transport issues more difficult and complex. There will be more congestion than there is today, so we want Ivybridge station to have a viable and flourishing future. Sadly, the new timetable suggested by the Government and First Great Western blows Ivybridge station out of the water. Yes, people can still commute from Ivybridge to Plymouth to work, but they cannot get back again. Yes, young people can still catch a train from Plymouth to Ivybridge to go to school, but they cannot get home again. What is the point of that? The new timetable cuts the number of trains calling at Ivybridge by a significant percentage. We have had a number of meetings about the issue, which is of great importance to the local community. We had one meeting just before Easter. The senior director for transport at the Government office for the south-west, Mr. Richard Bayly, attended and listened to representations at a packed Ivybridge town hall. He said that he would look into whether the Government and First—its representatives were there, too—could come up with a viable timetable for Ivybridge station and for Ivybridge commuters and students. The time scale is now very short, so I urge the Minister to deal with the matter. He may never have been to Ivybridge or even have heard of Ivybridge—I hope that he has—but I ask him to find a way in the next two or three weeks, before the timetable is settled, to put in place a viable train timetable for the commuters and students of Ivybridge. At the moment, the timetable is not viable and that will sound the death knell for the station, which was constructed using vast sums of public money. I assure him that the station is a facility that will be used increasingly in the future. We therefore have to find a solution to the problem. May I suggest one possible solution? A number of Virgin trains go through Ivybridge every day, but they do not stop because they are longer than the platform. In extremis, it is possible for a train that is too long for a platform to stop at the station and for the guard to announce that people who want to get off should not do so from the two end carriages or they will do themselves a nasty injury, and to say that they should get off from the designated coaches. That might be an interim solution. I understand that if the Government can satisfy Virgin on that point, it would be prepared to have some of its trains stop at Ivybridge. The estimated cost of extending the platform at Ivybridge by 10 metres is £100,000. Given the amount of subsidy being invested in the railways today and the amount of money that the Government spend year in, year out—I appreciate that there are different jam jars and that that money might be for Network Rail and so on—I ask the Minister to do some joined-up thinking and to ask for a discussion with the railway operators, with Network Rail and with his own officials. Is it not possible to increase the length of the platform at Ivybridge, so that Virgin inter-city trains can stop there as well? That would facilitate a proper commuter service, so that people could go from Ivybridge to Plymouth to work and back again and students could come from Plymouth to Ivybridge and get home again safely without having to hang around at the station for an hour and a half, which many parents are worried about. Is that not a simple practical solution? I do not expect the Minister to have all the detail relating to this matter at his fingertips when he winds up the debate, but will he please consider urgently the provision of a viable train timetable for Ivybridge?