It felt a long way from the Downing Street rose garden to the train depot in Smethwick where David Cameron and Nick Clegg attempted another relaunch yesterday. It was telling that the only common ground this warring couple can find these days is the need for investment in Britain’s rail network. Yet even this, as with every recent utterance from the prime minister, turned out to be nothing more than a wish-list for after the next election.
Despite all the hyped claims of a £9bn funding boost, the reality was not a single penny of new investment before 2014. More than half of the spending announced, £5.2bn, was to complete projects announced by Labour in government and already under way, the Tories and Lib Dems apparently wanting to be given credit for not cancelling schemes halfway through their construction. Much of the rest amounted to reinstating schemes axed or delayed by ministers on taking office, such as electrification of the Great Western Main Line between Cardiff and Swansea and of the Midland Main Line – a plan for the railways announced by the last government that will have to be delivered by the next. Nothing in yesterday’s announcement will create jobs and growth now, and shunting vital rail investment beyond the next election won’t help kickstart the economy.
Since the election the government has cut more than a billion pounds from the bold and ambitious programme of rail investment set out by Andrew Adonis as Labour’s transport secretary in 2009. As a result we’ve seen the completion dates for Crossrail and Thameslink delayed, orders for a new generation of intercity trains halved from 1,400 to fewer than 600, and the planned programme of rolling stock replacement and station refurbishment scaled back. We’ve seen little progress on taking forward HS2 and a worryingly narrow focus on the route south of Birmingham instead of Labour’s plan to legislate in one go for the whole of the initial line linking London, Leeds and Manchester.
Meanwhile, as passengers wait longer for vital improvements to rail capacity, reliability and journey time, ministers have confirmed that they will be paying higher rail fares now. Not just increases of up to 11 per cent in both 2013 and 2014, but eight per cent each year from 2015 according to the tender documents for the new franchises. The government, of course, uses the planned investment to justify these rises, yet the National Audit Office has said that the Department for Transport cannot demonstrate that the income from fare rises doesn’t simply lead to higher profits for private train companies.
What we saw yesterday was confirmation that passengers are to pay more now for promises of investment to come. We heard a list of rail projects that has been announced by the last Labour government but will now have to be delivered by the next one.
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Maria Eagle MP is shadow secretary of state for transport
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Oh Yes, Details We May Have Missed From Yesterday’s Clegg & Cameron’s – Untied We Stand/Divided (By 91 Back Bench-Rebels) We Will Actually Fall’ – Self Congratulatory Relaunch Of 2009 Labour Transport Spending..
Disgraceful tactics from Maria Eagle, showing a very different face to Progress than she does to the unions. Why does she take us as fools. She’s dangling renationalisation of the railways to the unions to try and get the RMT reaffiliated – yet the Treasury team would never countenance such a spending commitment, nor should it. Labour kept a tight rein in train companies during its time in power, and passenger numbers almost doubled. Nationalising a growing industry makes no sense, Eagle knows it, but is willing to use it to get Bob Crow paying subs again. If Eagle and her particularly striving advisers weren’t so keen to do well in LabourList polls with whingy headlines, they could do a lot worse than learn from Labour’s last transport secretary, Lord Adonis, and set out credible plans for transport as a means of economic and social growth. This craven, short term opportunism is pathetic to watch. And what happens when Eagle snatches the potential of renationalisation away from Crow? She’s in for an almighty hammering. And rightly so.