Christmas Adjournment

I shall be brief, but I want to refer to two matters in connection with the railways that the hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle) touched on earlier. The first arises from the Ufton rail crash of just over a year ago, and I must declare an interest: my house is a few hundred yards from the site of the crash, and I was there about five minutes after it happened. Moreover, land surrounding the site is in my ownership. I want to talk about the needs of my constituent David Main, who lost his wife Anjanette and his daughter Louella in the tragedy. In a few months, an inquest into the crash will be held at Windsor’s Guildhall, and it will involve representatives of the Department of Transport, the rail operators, Network Rail and the Health and Safety Executive. All of them will be well represented by barristers, and they will have all the support that they need. In contrast, the victims are being denied the proper legal representation that they need. The Legal Services Commission recognised the problem when it gave Mr. Main leave to obtain the exceptional funding that is available in such cases. However, the Department for Constitutional Affairs has opposed the LSC award, and Mr. Main has been forced to take the matter to judicial review. The madness of it all is that winning the case will cost the Department more than giving Mr. Main the legal representation that he needs would. Two groups of civil servants are fighting over their different pots of money, and the Minister of State at the Department for Constitutional Affairs is unable to give leadership in the matter. At the bottom of the pile is my grieving constituent, who just wants to get on with his life, and who should be allowed the legal representation at the inquest that he needs. We saw the Minister of State’s irascible performance at Question Time earlier today. However, I hope that the new year will imbue in her a spirit of good will so that she will be able to say that the judicial review process is a ridiculous waste of public money and should be dropped. I turn now to a problem to do with rail services to and from west Berkshire that affects many more people. I am indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Vaizey) for tabling early-day motion 526, which has been signed by hon. Members of all parties. I urge others to continue to put their names to it, as it concerns the chaos following the introduction of First Great Western’s new timetable on 11 December. The new timetable is causing real unhappiness, and huge ill will towards both the company and the Government. A year ago, First Great Western bid for and won a franchise that included a very prescribed timetable that had been set by the Department of Transport. Its central purpose was to increase capacity from cities and large population hubs at the expense of smaller communities and commuter regions. Earlier this year, people in my part of Berkshire ran a huge campaign that involved a petition that was presented on the Floor of the House and letters and e-mails of protest to Ministers and senior people at First Great Western. I had a meeting with the then hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate, who was rail Minister at the time. I subsequently attended another meeting with the then Secretary of State for Transport, who is now the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. At that meeting, I was accompanied by my neighbour and right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram), who represents an area at the end of the branch line running through my constituency that was going to be extremely badly affected. Our experience at that second meeting was surreal. I sat on the Secretary of State’s right hand side, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes sat on his left. All three of us sat on the sofa, and the Secretary of State was using Bradshaw’s rail timetable to decide how many trains should stop at Kintbury, Hungerford and other similar towns. If the former Secretary of State had not had such a svelte physique, I would have said that he was the ultimate fat controller. What an absurd situation it was, with rail timetables being decided in that way. I am glad to say that I was able to write to the Secretary of State after the consultation period and thank him for listening because many of services to the smaller stations in my constituency that had been under threat were reinstated. However, the inconvenience that has arisen from many of the train times remains. Many people are having to spend longer commuting and changing trains, and it is taking them an awful long time to get home. We have still lost a great number of services, the most important of which is the late night train from Paddington to Newbury, which was much valued by local people. I have discovered that, as a result of the train changes, people have changed their work patterns enormously. Previously, they decided to stay longer at home in the morning, to have breakfast with their children, take them to school and then go to work, and come home on a late train. Now, they can no longer do that. People’s social lives have also been dramatically altered. Many young people used to go to Reading in the evening; they can no longer do it because we have lost the late train. When I raised the matter in questions to the new Minister with responsibility for the railways, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris), he replied that I had"““probably been misinformed about cuts to services.””—[Official Report, 17 October 2006; Vol. 450, c. 723.]" I was so incensed that I wrote to him because there self-evidently had been cuts to services in west Berkshire and the whole area. I received a wholly unsatisfactory reply. As a result of the new timetable that came in last week we have fewer trains, longer commuting times and massive inconvenience to the commuting public, who are having to change trains. Without much warning, First Great Western has changed the rolling stock on two key commuter trains from Hungerford through Newbury and Thatcham and beyond. Instead of two Turbo trains with approximately 550 seats, it is now using Adelante trains with 282 seats. This has caused chaos and severe overcrowding. Some of the 220-plus e-mails that I have received from the travelling public have given a graphic account of the sheer misery that has been visited on them in west Berkshire in recent days. I quote just a few of them. One says:"““The service is so overcrowded that the gangways are blocked. This is dangerous and breaks safety regulations. (from a member of FGW staff) … I have to leave work 20 minutes earlier to get a train that serves Thatcham.””" That does not sound a great inconvenience, but if it is added up over a week, a month or even a year, it is an enormous inconvenience. Another says:"““The new … service is taking significantly longer (10 minutes more in the morning and around half an hour in the afternoon””." Another says:"““Since moving to Newbury in September in part to be closer to train services into London and better train/bus connections to Heathrow I have found the local service to be overcrowded, uncomfortable and local rail staff rude and high-handed. As a consequence””—" I really hope that the Minister responsible gets this important point—"““I am now driving into London and the airport more often than travel by train””." Last week we heard that Newbury had one of the most congested school runs in the country. I have been struck by how many parents and children have contacted me to give me their experience. One mother says:"““My daughter attends St. Bart’s School in Newbury. She commutes every morning by train from Hungerford.""Since the changes to the morning train timetable, my daughter has to literally run to school,””—" a long way, I should add—"““to avoid being late.””" Another child writes to me:"““The changing of the trains has dramatically affected me getting to school every morning. I have to travel from Kintbury to Newbury every morning and have no other choice because of my parents being market traders. The train leaving Kintbury at 8.18 every morning, and me having to be in school by 8.40, causes great issues.””" I am sure that it does. I will not burden the House much longer because I want to allow other hon. Members to speak. I am indebted to the Vodafone intranet. Vodafone is for the moment the largest employer in my constituency. The Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston is fast catching it up, but 3,500 employees of Vodafone work in Newbury. It has done a trawl via its intranet to see the effect that the timetable changes are having on one company. I was struck by a debate that my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson) initiated recently on transport infrastructure in the Thames Valley. He pointed out that Hewlett Packard was moving out of Reading due to pressure from its employees about the amount of time that it takes for them to get to work. I quote a couple of Vodafone employees. One says:"““Needless to say, I went out and bought a car and now drive to London, which is cheaper and I can come home to Newbury at whatever time I like.””" Another describes his commuting experience over the last couple of weeks:"““I was sitting in a seat where three people face each other and we actually had people standing between myself and the passenger opposite … One woman got very distressed and claustrophobic and started screaming and shouting but there was nothing anyone could do, as you couldn’t move an inch.””" Finally, a great many people raised the issue of bicycles. As one said, if we are to have an integrated transport system, we need to make provision for bicycles. He thought that the sooner the Adelante trains are gone, the better, because there is not enough room for bicycles on them. There is a major social dimension to this matter. Research in the US—ground-breaking research by Professor Puttnam, culminating in his book ““Bowling Alone””—showed that for every 10 more minutes that people spend commuting, 10 per cent. less time is spent on community activities, social events, sports clubs, other voluntary work and even family gatherings. It is a major issue, not just one for rail users. It affects car users, who are stuck in greater congestion. We talk about general well-being and this is a real health issue. People are more stressed at work, it affects the economy and it affects communities. I finish with one more quote. Alec Mellor sent me an e-mail, in which he referred to his ““sum of displeasure today”” as"““2 hrs standing up on top of a 10hr working day. This cannot be the quality of my life for 5 days a week. I cannot do any work on the trains any more, cannot read and am seething for the entire durations.””"