Sustainable Railways

First, may I say that we welcome progress on Thameslink, Birmingham New Street, Reading and longer trains and platforms, but that I fear that the House should restrain its enthusiasm until we have seen contracts signed and the work actually under way? I have to press the Secretary of State on a number of important issues. When it comes to Thameslink, Birmingham and Reading, has the budget definitely been committed for the whole of those projects or are they dependent in any way on the outcome of the comprehensive spending review? Is the whole of Thameslink 2000 now fully funded or only the northern parts? Are the 300 new carriages trailed today part of the re-announced inter-city express programme or are they in addition to it? Does the Secretary of State intend to keep the cap on saver fares or not? Above all, what has happened to Crossrail? The Secretary of State told us that she does not believe in distant promises, but yet again it is another false dawn for Crossrail, which is getting more distant by the day. Apparently, it does not feature in the Government’s plan for the next 30 years of our rail system—despite announcement after announcement by Ministers, despite £254 million spent on preparation and despite a clear commitment from the previous Prime Minister. Today’s statement is a slap in the face for Londoners and for the City of London, for which no amount of warm words from the Prime Minister can possibly make up. The point is that we have heard all of this before. Today’s hefty slab of paper is the latest in a long line of ever denser and longer strategies, reports and initiatives on transport from this Government. If the travelling public could get around on paper promises, there would be no delays, no overcrowding and everyone’s journey into work would be blissfully smooth every day—but they cannot. In the last year alone, we have seen commuters go on strike, toilets ripped out of carriages to provide extra standing room and fares hiked by 20 per cent. on a main route into London. The reality is that the Government have announced and re-announced virtually all the initiatives that the Secretary of State has outlined today. We were promised Thameslink 2000 so long ago that the former Deputy Prime Minister was still in charge of transport—never mind Thameslink 2000; at this rate, it will be more aptly named Thameslink 3000. Even now, we are getting only part of the scheme that was promised. As for Birmingham New Street, the Government pledged to tackle bottlenecks in the west midlands seven years ago. Longer platforms and 1,000 of the 1,300 carriages mentioned today were actually promised last year. Not one of those projects has been delivered, so why should we believe the Secretary of State now? The Blair years have been a litany of broken promises, from which the current Prime Minister cannot distance himself. What about the three-and-a-half hour journey time from Edinburgh that we were promised, or the light rail schemes in Liverpool and Leeds, not to mention the north-south high speed line? What happened to the pledge on safe and secure travel when there has been a 43 per cent. increase in the number of victims of violence recorded by the British Transport police? And this is a good one: seven years ago, the Government promised ““improved commuter services””, ““less overcrowding”” and ““reduced delays””; today’s announcement is therefore an admission of their complete failure to fulfil that promise. Even after fiddling the timetables to meet limp public performance measure targets, more than one in 10 trains in this country run late. Thousands of commuters face standing for their entire journey every day of the working week. The overcrowding that blights lines into our major cities is reaching a crisis point that is seriously undermining our quality of life and competitiveness both north and south. The Secretary of State claims real achievements and successes today: well, tell that to the commuters packed so tight in the morning rush hour that if it were animals being transported, it would be a criminal offence to move them in those conditions. Tell that to the passengers on the 6.35 Bedwyn to Paddington service or on the 7.59 Durham to Newcastle service or indeed on any of the other lines that suffer from chronic overcrowding. We now come to the biggest let-down of all. Let us remember what the Government’s 10-year plan promised:"““We will seek real reductions in the cost of rail travel””." Each of the three latest franchises awarded by the Department for Transport will clobber customers with fare rises of nearly 30 per cent. by 2015. Many families are feeling the pinch because of stratospheric fare increases—racing ahead of inflation—inflicted by the Department. In the light of the increases that we have seen over recent years, today’s announcement of a fair deal for passengers is, frankly, laughable. The one thing we can guarantee from the Government’s plans for the railway is that there are more rail fare hikes to come. They try to point the finger of blame at the train operating companies, but the real culprit is the Secretary of State, who now has a more intrusive role in our railways than in the days of British Rail. Today does not usher in a new era on our transport system any more than the rest of the reports, strategies and studies that we have had from the Government in the past decade. The truth is that the Prime Minister cannot blame anyone but himself for the state of our transport system, because the extortionate fare increases for grossly overcrowded trains are his fare increases. The transport broken promises are his broken promises. The Metronet public-private partnership fiasco is definitely his personal fiasco, and the transport failures of the past decade are all his failures.