I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce this debate.
No debate on London can start without an assessment of where the capital city finds itself. Without doubt, London is the world’s greatest city. No other metropolis can claim to be so vibrant or so beautiful. London is a magnet for the world’s greatest talents, and it is the birthplace of some of the world’s most successful businesses and the adopted home of countless others. This city has been the inspiration to so many of our musicians, authors and artists.
There are thousands of reasons, including London’s great multi-culturalism, that make this a modern city that outfaces the world, but peel away the veneer of the capital’s dramatic skyline, scratch away at the patina of the city’s bustling shopping streets, and we will see one of them—the tube is the engine room that has propelled London’s success story for 150 years.
The Metropolitan line shooting off from Baker Street up towards Harrow and into Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire began to make commuting to London possible. The City and South London railway, to be rechristened the Northern line, first tunnelled deep under the Thames so that people in Clapham no longer had to ride the omnibus to get to Bank or Euston, and in the middle of the great depression it was the Piccadilly line extension north to Finsbury Park on the edge of my constituency that drove growth and jobs to places such as Finsbury Park, Wood Green and Enfield. Yet that history of infrastructure has slowly been squandered by inertia, chronic underinvestment and a cowardly lack of ambition.
There has been relatively little investment since the Victoria line opened in 1967. The opening of the Fleet line, or the Jubilee line as we now know it, was, for the most part, a rebranding of an existing branch of the Metropolitan line. Although the subsequent extension to Stratford was impressive, it was also horrifically over-budget and over-deadline.
Small extensions to the docklands light railway and the construction of the Croydon tramlink have made differences in some quarters, but it is still fair to say that the overall reach of London’s transport network has barely changed for almost 50 years. Sadly, the signs of decay are there for all to see.
Despite the illusion created by Harry Beck’s distorted London underground map that coverage is almost universal, huge pockets of London are actually islands of isolation. Even in 2013, my constituents in the Northumberland Park ward of Tottenham, which has among the highest unemployment rates in London, are served by just one train an hour on weekdays and no trains at all at weekends.
Dalston Junction is just 3½ miles from Tottenham Court Road, but the journey on public transport takes more than half an hour. Huge swathes of south London rely on consistently inconsistent suburban rail services that are plagued by delays, cancellations and overcrowding. [Interruption.] I see my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) nodding her head, because she has waited for those trains on many occasions.
That those areas have the highest rates of unemployment, the highest levels of child poverty and the lowest levels of attainment is no coincidence. Without vital transport links, they are starved of investment, bled of ambition and left marooned from the city’s throbbing economic heart. In areas where services are frequent and extensive, users find themselves on some of the most overcrowded and expensive journeys in Europe.