First Great Western Franchise

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) on initiating the debate. My constituents are feeling pretty sore at the moment. Not only is the Secretary of State for Health pursuing a scorched-earth policy as far as our local community hospitals are concerned, but it appears that we face the prospect of many of our rail links disappearing, so we are pretty unhappy. I hope that the Minister will be able to cheer us up a little. I am grateful to him for meeting me last month with members of the west Wiltshire rail users group and representatives of the town councils. We appreciated that meeting and we hope very much that, as a costed option, the service that runs from Bristol to London Waterloo will be back on track. I shall principally address two elements of the rail transport network that runs through my constituency. The Minister will know that Westbury is a railway town. People in Westbury and the surrounding areas feel strongly about trains. They are very much part of the local scene, as I hope he understands. Several lines—several little bits of the rail network—run through Westbury. I want to mention in particular the Westbury-Swindon link. On Friday, I had the pleasure of meeting members of the south-west public transport users forum in Trowbridge. They put a number of points to me about the Great Western franchise, and the Westbury-Swindon link featured large in the discussion. There is concern about the high level of cancellations for that service, dirty dilapidated rolling stock, poor connections at Westbury and poor timetabling. That all leads to a general disinclination on the part of the travelling public to use the service.