First Great Western Franchise

: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that important point. We have heard a number of comments from other hon. Members about lines being cut. We have not said much about Hampshire, but clearly the timetable has implications for Hampshire. I shall not continue to detail the cuts because I want to leave time for the Minister to reply, as do most hon. Members. While I was in Plymouth I had a good indication from FirstGroup about how the bidding process worked. It is important to understand that First is trying to work with local people and to lobby the Government to revise the current timetable, but following the Railways Act 2005 and the demise of the Strategic Rail Authority, the Secretary of State for Transport is effectively running the railways. He is doing that not only strategically, but by intervening in the minutiae of the railways. Under the franchise process for the route in question all bidders were asked to supply three bids, one for a minimum service level which was specified in detail by the Government—the detailed specification option—one on the original timetable and one on an optimum timetable for the route. It is no surprise that the timetable that has been granted and for which First is paying £1 billion over 10 years for the privilege to operate is the detailed specification option. On 20 March, I asked the Minister to tell me how many rail routes would be cut as a result of that detailed specification and how many stations would be closed. His answer was none. I suspect that that revolved around the word ““cut””. If I had asked how many service reductions there would be as a result of that detailed specification option, I suspect that I would have received a different answer. One matter that will be clear to all hon. Members from the debate is that the current timetable, which started on 1 April, is not fit for purpose. FirstGroup has impressed on me and, I am sure, other hon. Members who had discussions with it, that it is negotiating with the Government to revise the timetable so that when the final version is published in the first week of December a number of the issues that we have heard about today may be resolved. I hope that the Minister will today give us some guarantees about the three-hour London-Plymouth service and local commuter services in Ivybridge and respond to the comments made by my hon. Friends and the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) about the Bristol-Waterloo service and a number of the other implications for west Wiltshire. We look forward to the Minister giving us those guarantees.