Sustainable Railways

The statement has been a disappointment. There has been a failure to recognise that there is huge pent-up demand for rail. Those of us who truly believe in the green agenda and saw the statement as providing a chance to divert passengers from air and road to rail consider it to be a missed opportunity. I therefore wish to ask the Secretary of State a number of questions. What is new in the statement—what has not been announced before in the 10-year Transport Plan 2000, the Strategic Rail Authority plan 2002 or the Network Rail business plan 2007? What new funds have been committed over and above what has previously been announced? The director general of the Association of Train Operating Companies, George Muir, has said that funding for longer trains can be expected to come from ““growing passenger revenues””. What proportion of that will come from increases in passenger numbers and what from increases in passenger fares? Some commuters have experienced 20 per cent. fare increases. What are the statement’s implications for unregulated fares, and for increases in them? The Secretary of State said that no seats would be taken out to provide additional capacity. Will she pass that information on to South West Trains, which seems hellbent on removing seats from stock on the lines that pass through my constituency? An answer to a question I tabled earlier this month contained the admission that the cost of driving had decreased by 10 per cent. in real terms over the past 30 years while the cost of using buses and the railways has increased by more than 50 per cent. Given the importance of climate change, as highlighted in the Stern report, what level of diversion will what has been announced achieve from internal flights and roads to rail? What shift of freight from road to rail will there be under the strategy? Is the £200 million new money, and what will it buy us? Which of the bottlenecks identified in the Network Rail business plan 2007 are not addressed or funded in this strategy? Thinking of my own constituency, I would be grateful if the Secretary of State could tell us what is to happen to Waterloo and Eurostar. It is extraordinary that we did not have more detail on Crossrail, especially when the opportunity presented itself to confirm the Government’s commitment to adequate funding to take the project forward. Given that the 2005 Labour manifesto promised us high-speed rail, why are the Government ignoring the Atkins report on high-speed rail that has already shown that north-south capacity around Birmingham will reach capacity by 2014? That presents only a tentative possibility of looking at that line seriously. I note that the Secretary of State promises better and safer stations from Wolverhampton to Dartmouth. She might be interested to know, from Wikipedia, that no railway has ever run to Dartmouth. The town does have a railway station, but it is now a restaurant. There is a steam railway that runs Thomas the Tank Engine. I make those remarks simply to try to illustrate that there is so much in this report that is clever phrasing: will the Secretary of State be kind enough to tell us what it will actually deliver?