Channel Tunnel Rail Link (Supplementary Provisions) Bill

I am very pleased to have an opportunity to speak about the Bill, and particularly to support the furthering of the Secretary of State's powers to fund the channel tunnel rail link and the trains that will run on it, post-construction. I must apologise, however, for not being able to be here at the beginning of the debate and for not having heard the speech of my hon. Friend the Minister, or that of the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond). I was, however, pleased to be here when the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) made her speech. I found it very interesting and I agreed with much of it. As I said in an intervention, if there is to be heavy subsidy, direct or indirect, for CTRL and the whole system, including the channel tunnel itself, there must be more Government involvement. It cannot simply be left in private hands, and in the longer run we might see the whole system integrated into a publicly owned railway system, but that is an argument for another day. I have taken a long-term interest in railways, and I am particularly pleased about the St. Pancras development for personal reasons because I have travelled on Thameslink from my Luton constituency for 37 years—not to this House for the whole time, of course—and it has been quite wonderful to see the regeneration of St. Pancras station. The hon. Member for Richmond Park said that she thought the case for the St. Pancras development had not been made. If the debate had taken place 15 years ago, there might have been an argument for developing a high-speed line from Waterloo rather than St. Pancras, but it has happened this way and my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), the Chair of the Transport Committee, has pointed out that many more people live on the north side than on the south side. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to do everything he can to bring forward the development of Thameslink so that all those in the south of London can travel to the magnificent new station about to be opened at St. Pancras International. I travel through that station every day and it is really exciting to see it developing. It will open within days, and the process has been very encouraging. I like to think that I played some role in that process myself, because of the concrete box built underneath St. Pancras. It was always going to be there; it had to be built in order that the station could be developed at some future date. However, many of us—I was one of those who lobbied most hard on this point—thought that it had to be developed and built at the same time as the opening of Eurostar services from St. Pancras. Otherwise, people would have had to walk from the appalling King's Cross Thameslink station, which was always temporary, at night, across one of the most depressing parts of London. I worked in the area for a long time, and we know that there is a degree of drug addiction and prostitution in that area that is very depressing. It was too much to expect travellers to go from King's Cross Thameslink to the Eurostar trains without new provision. The station had to be built to ensure that passengers had proper, decent access to St. Pancras station. I argued that passenger traffic on Eurostar from St. Pancras could have been seriously damaged if the new station had not been built underneath St. Pancras with access via travelators, escalators and so on. I am therefore pleased that the station was built. The hon. Member for Richmond Park mentioned freight. Hon. Members may recall that I proposed in an Adjournment debate in January the development of the EuroRail Freight Route, which would put an enormous amount of freight that now goes by road on to the railways, and use the channel tunnel. We have made a submission, which is currently under investigation, to the Select Committee. I shall not go into more detail, but I believe that pushing vast amounts of freight through the channel tunnel would transform its economics, which would improve those of CTRL and of Eurostar services. There will never be enough passengers to justify the channel tunnel or the CTRL link, so better use must be made of the tunnel for freight. All the forecasts at the beginning of the channel tunnel project were overblown: people argued that everyone would travel by train rather than plane in future. That was unrealistic. Many will travel by train—I shall use Eurostar as often as I can—but others will use aircraft and possibly still go by sea. However, there were never going to be enough passengers to justify building either the tunnel or CTRL. Freight had to be considered as a longer-term possibility. To realise the transportation of the sort of volume of freight that we are discussing, we must develop a delivery system on this side that is capable of taking full-sized containers and trailers on trains, and match the freight services and lines that have been developed on the continent. That is the future. I shall continue to pursue that and to support railway developments in general. I greatly look forward to travelling from my constituency in Luton to St. Pancras and then to Paris, Brussels and elsewhere. We are discussing a wonderful development, which has given a genuine boost to the idea of modern railway development. Not so long ago, the Department for Transport seriously talked about railways as the mode of transport of the past. I exempt my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris), from that charge. However, many civil servants were cited as saying that they were managing the decline of the railway system. That is not happening now. We know that rail is the transport mode of the future, not the past. Instead of the Department alone being enthusiastic, passengers have decided to use railways, and the demand is so great that the Government and the rail industry have to consider extra capacity. That is a wonderful development, which is good not only environmentally but socially and in every possible way. I look forward to further railway developments along those lines, especially that of a dedicated rail freight network linked to the channel tunnel and the continent of Europe.