Asked by
To ask His Majesty’s Government what discussions they have held
with Avanti West Coast about
the (1) frequency, and (2) reliability, of train services on the
West Coast Main Line.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for
Transport () (Con)
My Lords, the department meets Avanti West
Coast regularly to discuss operational performance. This
includes monitoring the delivery of its plans to restore and
improve its services. From December, Avanti plans to operate 264
daily train services on weekdays, which is a significant step up
from the around 180 daily services at present.
(Lab)
My Lords, I first congratulate the Minister on surviving the
departmental cull. She is one of the few surviving stars in an
ever-changing galaxy, as far the Department for Transport is
concerned. Long may she continue to twinkle.
Noble Lords
Oh!
(Lab)
Will she accept that Avanti is incapable of running the skeleton
service that it is supposed to provide at present? Will she
accept that its prospects of increasing that service in the way
that she outlined are pretty slim, given its record so far? Is
there some ideological reason why those of us who are condemned
to use the west coast main line cannot enjoy the same facilities
as those who use the publicly run east coast main line? Could she
ask the Rail Minister —perhaps she could tell us who this
is—whether we can be provided with the same standard of service
as those who are lucky enough to live on the east coast?
(Con)
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his kind words, and I am
sorry only that I am not the Rail Minister, who is my honourable
friend in the other place. As noble Lords may know, he is
the former chair of the Transport Committee, so he knows his
onions. On Avanti, the noble Lord is right: as I have said many
times, we are not content with the service provided. We are
content that a plan is in place, and it is being scrutinised as
it is being implemented. Avanti remains on probation, and the
operator of last resort remains an option, of course.
(Non-Afl)
My Lords, the Minister will recall that I praised the LNER east
coast service last week, and I was supported by the noble Lord,
. The Minister agreed that the
quality of staff was important, but she also said that
nationalisation was not the solution to the problem on the west
coast, as described by the noble Lord, . Has the Minister made an
assessment of the management and provision of the services on
both sides of the divide in the country to determine why a
parallel service working on one side is managed far better by her
department than a similar operator in the private sector? Is this
due to poor investment, bad management or excessive dividend
payments?
(Con)
My Lords, the train network is extremely complicated, and it is
not a homogenous system. That is why the performance of the train
operating companies is subject to independent adjudication, which
is really important. The Government will take their performance
into consideration when they come to any future decisions.
Lord McLoughlin (Con)
My Lords, I draw attention to my registered interest as chairman
of Transport for the North. If Avanti’s commitment to 264
services is not met, what does my noble friend imagine the
department’s response will be, bearing in mind that it does not
have very long to do so?
(Con)
The Government are confident that those services will come on
stream, as agreed with Avanti. The services form part of its
recovery plan, which we are monitoring as times progress, as are
the ORR and Network Rail’s programme management office. I would
like Avanti to succeed, and we are giving it all the support to
do so. But, if it does not, action will of course have to be
taken.
(CB)
The Minister might wish to agree on the essential importance of
an effective rail system to transport freight. Would she care to
make a statement on that, with particular reference to the west
of the country and any challenges that are being faced there?
(Con)
Yes, I know that the noble Viscount is a great champion of
freight. The west coast main line is a key corridor for rail
freight, particularly between the deep seaports and the
distribution hubs both in the Midlands and across the country.
Indeed, the industry estimates that about 90% of all intermodal
trains use the west coast main line for part of their
journey—that is, 90,000 trains a year—so that is also great for
emissions reduction. We want to keep rail freight moving. We
understand that this can be challenging when there are
engineering works, and we take that into consideration. Where
there is strike action, we do our best to communicate with the
freight sector to ensure that it can plan accordingly.
(Lab)
My Lords—
(LD)
It is the turn of this side; noble Lords from other parties have
had three questions on the trot.
Can the Minister be brought back to the here and now? There
should have been a national strike tomorrow; it has been
transferred to next week, which is the run-up to Remembrance
Sunday. On Monday, there is rail strike and a Tube strike; on
Tuesday, there are no tickets for sale for the north on Avanti
trains; and on Wednesday, there is a national strike. I spoke to
the manager of the Union Jack Club this morning, who told me that
this is going to have devasting effects on bookings by people
trying to come down for Remembrance Sunday. So what can the
Government do to stop this indiscriminate guerrilla strike action
that is bringing misery to hundreds of thousands of people at the
very time of remembrance? This is a time when people want to
remember the freedoms we got from people who died in the First
and Second World Wars and other conflicts throughout the world:
freedom to move, freedom to associate with each other and freedom
to come to remembrances. These union barons must be held to
account for at a whim changing these strikes to make it more
difficult for people to travel at times when they need to
travel—it has to stop.
(Con)
Perhaps the noble Lord would like to cross the Floor.
The noble Lord is completely right: strikes are hugely disruptive
to people who want to come to Remembrance Sunday and related
events around that time, and to those who want to go to school or
work. We remain committed to trying to resolve these strikes; we
do not want them to continue. However, we must have an agile and
modern workforce so that we can deliver a modern seven-day
railway. If the unions stand in the way of that, we cannot the
deliver the passenger services that are required.
(Con)
My Lords, the performance of the operator on the west coast main
line cannot be excused, but is it not also the case that there
are severe capacity restraints on the west coast main line? It is
Europe’s busiest mixed-use line, which means that it is hard to
increase the number of passengers or freight in the long term.
Does that not remind us of the importance of increasing capacity,
which means continuing with the HS2 project that will not only
increase speed but capacity, thereby relieving that line and two
other main lines in the country?
(Con)
My noble friend is absolutely right: there are capacity
constraints on the west coast main line that impact both
passengers and freight. It is also the case that the west coast
main line is fairly old, and therefore engineering works are
necessary; that caused some disruption between 22 and 30 October.
So he is absolutely right that we must continue to invest in our
railways, and that is what the Government are doing.
(Lab)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that the promises made by Avanti
to run three trains an hour from London to Birmingham have not
been honoured, and, worse still, that it is now running only one
train an hour between two of the country’s largest cities? Could
she tell us why—despite making surely the understatement of the
year that the performance of Avanti trains was dreadful—its
contract was extended?
(Con)
I am not entirely sure where the noble Lord gets those figures
from, because my understanding is that on weekdays between 7 am
and 9 am—for example, between Birmingham and London—the services
are actually at pre-pandemic levels. Of course, there have been
changes to the timetable at some other points, but that is very
much down to changes in travel habits, such that the system needs
to have a demand-led timetable so that we can ensure that people
can travel when they need to.
(LD)
If I were a nurse and decided to work only half my contracted
hours and demanded to be paid my full salary, I would be rejected
out of hand. Yet Avanti has essentially done this: it has
provided less than half its service to some major cities, but it
is still paid the standard contract fee. I ask the Minister: why
are DfT contracts written so loosely that it is still entitled to
that?
(Con)
I think it is absolutely right, as I said earlier, that the
performance is subject to independent adjudication. If there is
any action to be taken by the DfT, we would follow the legal and
contractual processes. We are aware that there is an opportunity
to improve our contracting as we move forward and that is why we
hope to move to passenger service contracts in due course to
encourage competition and enable services to run as they should.
