It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner, and I am sorry that the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) did not adhere to the four-minute rule. I appreciate that she raised a lot of points, many of which I may not be able to answer, but I will write to everyone whose questions I do not cover today.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on securing the debate. Many people in the Chamber have either been, or have replaced, Members of Parliament who are absolutely assiduous and dogged in their pursuit of a better transport system. It really shows—I extend this point to the shadow Minister as well—the importance that we now place on our national, local and regional transport infrastructure not only as an absolute agent of economic growth, but as an agent of human happiness. I was struck by the point made by the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), and I entirely agree. The worst thing about the whole situation would be to be that mother or father trying to get home to pick up their children from childcare, and month after month, week after week, day after day, being unable to say what time you will get home. That is an unacceptable burden on working families.
Sorting out the route will deliver potentially the biggest productivity gain in the UK. The Southern route carries the second highest number of passengers. It is the biggest franchise: it will, as my hon. Friends pointed out, be merging into the GTR franchise at the end of the month. It has some of the oldest and most complicated track layout in the country—there is a reason why the upgrade works have not been done by successive Governments. Some of the track is 176 years old. Doing this work is like doing open-heart surgery on a marathon runner. It creates delay, and misery when that delay becomes too great. There are serious lessons for the railway industry to learn about how works are done. Is it right to keep stations open and running, or is it better to use a blockade and have all the pain at once? Those are very important questions and challenges for the industry.
The work on the route is one of the largest investment programmes in the UK, and it is contributing to the problem—it is not the sole cause. It is not just about London Bridge station. There is the new station at
Blackfriars, which has a wonderful layout and has added new capacity into the system. There is the introduction of new trains, which has started to happen on the route that my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs mentioned. I know that he has seen the 387s already introduced, but equally the class 700s that come in will double the number of people who can be brought into London during peak commuting hours. So much is going on, but it is true that performance is often unacceptable and sometimes inexcusable.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) made the point that the majority of the time—I have the latest right-time performance figures—the trains are on time. It is not all doom and gloom, but we have got to a situation in which passengers have lost their trust in the operator and front-line staff have been left to deal with some unacceptable delay incidents themselves. It is not fun to work at London Bridge and not have the tools and information; to want to help deliver better performance for customers but be unable to do so; and to be spat at and abused. We should recognise that behind all these problems are often good people trying to do their best but lacking the tools to do so. I wanted to say a bit about that.
I have heard consistent themes in the debate, which I will try to address today. I am referring to reliability of service, communication and compensation. The reason why it is so important to get this right is that the Government have an unprecedented investment plan for transport infrastructure over the next five years. It is not jam tomorrow; the new stations and new trains will be delivered. I say to the hon. Member for Nottingham South that it is churlish to suggest that Network Rail’s £38 billion investment programme is in jeopardy. The only part of the programme that has been paused is the electrification programme. All the rest of the works are proceeding as scheduled, and quite right too.
Demand has increased by more than 60% in this part of the country, and of course passengers have expectations of a better service now. People do not want to be shuffled around and not given information. I think that one of my hon. Friends said that the guard had less information than he did, because he was able to dial into social media applications.
There have already been some improvements on this line. I know that hon. Members mentioned this. We have started to see a slow uptick in the various performance measures, whether public performance measures or right-time performance measures. We have seen driver recruitment increase. One big challenge for Southern was that it did not take on enough drivers when it took on the franchise. Its driver recruitment plans are now running ahead of where it wanted to be. It is losing drivers as other parts of the network grow, but it is recruiting. It is 50% ahead of plan, and training is proceeding apace. That is incredibly important.