First Great Western Franchise

: Indeed it is. If the proposals go ahead, we shall see a massive reduction in the service: it will be down to about 20 per cent. of its current level. Basically, it will become a vestigial service. We are now several years into the 10-year transport plan, but goodness me, where are we going if we are seeing such a situation in an area whose population is growing all the time? We know from the regional spatial strategy for the south-east and south-west that we expect an increase of upwards of 200,000 dwellings. My constituency and those of my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) will be heavily involved in that growth. In all our areas, the road network is creaking and is going to get worse, and corridors such as the one that I have described will be increasingly important. As I said in the debate on rail transport in the south-east in January—the Minister may recall it—to get people to travel by train, we have to make travelling by train attractive. It simply is not possible to set up a train service and say, ““Here you are, here's your train. Get on with it.”” My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes said that the Chinese would simply set up a railway. They may very well do that, but in our country the difference is that we have to make it attractive to people to travel by train. We do not have that kind of command economy. We have to make using the train attractive to the travelling public and unfortunately that is not happening.