HC Deb 11 March 1912 vol 35 cc890-902

Order for Second Reading read.

Motion made, and Question proposed, "That the Bill be now read a second time."

Mr. EDGAR JONES

I beg to move, as an Amendment, to leave out after the word "now," and, at the end of the Question, to add the words "upon this day six months."

When a railway company or private corporation applies to Parliament for extended powers, Parliament is afforded an opportunity of expressing its appreciation or otherwise of the policy which that particular railway company or corporation has been conducting the affairs it has received permission under a previous Act of Parliament to carry on. To-night we are dealing with a Bill which includes one provision to which I, at any rate, do not care to offer any opposition. It seems that the Pontypridd Urban District Council have been able to come to an arrangement with the Taff Vale Railway Company for building a bridge over a dangerous crossing where a fatal accident recently occurred. As far as that part of the Bill is concerned I do not desire to offer any opposition. I will only say that the Taff Vale Railway Company has too many crossings of the same kind of a very dangerous nature, and the sooner they put bridges over them the better. If the Taff Vale Railway Company were like some other railway companies, in an unfortunate position financially, at the present time one might have been prepared to overlook some of the grievances I shall have to enumerate presently. But the Taff Vale Railway Company is a company that has made a great deal of money out of the mineral traffic of the district it covers. It has ample funds; it gets a revenue per mile which very few railways of a similar character get anywhere in the country, and for years it has acted on the maxim "Let us get the coal, and be hanged for the passengers." It has carried out that policy very successfully. It was not until the tramways came that the company began to put passenger stations at all in the large centres of population, or that they began to run a fair number of trains, as is done in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

But these few improvements have not been accompanied by other necessary improvements, and I think the company ought to be forced for the sake of its own honour, and for the sake of its own reputation among other railway companies, to carry out these improvements. I have had occasion myself to travel over railways of all sorbs, and in little corners serving districts where there cannot be much turnover or possibility of yielding a profit, and I venture to say there is no railway anywhere in the country, however poor, that has carriages in such a filthy condition perpetually as the passenger coaches on the Taff Vale Railway; and no railway company puts up such a series of shanties, dirty and insanitary, and calls them railway stations, from one end of the Kingdom to the other. When a company of this kind wants its powers extended in other directions, we have a right to make our protest. I do not know how far that protest will go to-night; our resources are not at an end, but the promoters of this Bill can make up their minds that, whatever resources are open to us to prevent this Bill becoming law this Session, we intend to utilise them to the utmost of our power, unless we get some understanding that the company intend to use the powers given it by Parliament in a reasonable manner for the benefit of the public it is supposed to serve. We could have made many demands; we could have asked that a railway company serving such a huge population, with its trains always crowded, and even overcrowded, should heat their carriages during the winter months. Persons travelling as I have had to do during recent years in warm comfortable carriages, on arrival at Merthyr have to get into ramshackle, ricketty old carriages, with holes and cracks causing draughts. It is a public scandal and a danger to the health of the travelling public that this state of thing should be allowed to continue. There is a considerable amount of agitation amongst commercial travellers, whose organisations have asked us to make some kind of protest in their behalf in the hope that in the coming season this company may follow the example of other companies, which do not pay anything like so well, and provide reasonably comfortable carriages.

We might also ask that the company should provide a reasonable amount of soap and water, together with dusters; and brushes, for cleansing the carriages more often than they now do. No doubt there is a certain amount of coal dust floating in the air in this district, but instead of cleansing the carriages as often as is customary on other lines, the Taff Vale Company never clean them when it can possibly be avoided. The consequence is that when our workmen's wives take their children in the summer time to the seaside, they find it necessary, if they wear a white dress for the occasion, to provide themselves with a penny newspaper; other- wise they would find a huge blotch of black on the white dress as the result of having seated themselves in the carriage. I think it will be admitted that people travelling in this modest way ought not to be subjected to this enormous discomfort, and that the company should be warned against continuing a system productive of such results. We might also have asked the railway company to come to some sort of arrangement with the other companies in the district; for instance, there are two trains in the day on the Taff Vale, one arriving at Merthyr at five o'clock and the other at seven o'clock, and they arrive just in time to see the main line train steam out of the station. Chambers of commerce have protested over and over again against this. They have appealed in vain to the wealthy nabobs who are drawing their wealth from the hills and disregard entirely the convenience of those who contribute to that wealth. That is our excuse for troubling the House of Commons to-night. When the public are treated in such a cavalier fashion by a wealthy corporation, I do not think it is too much that we should take advantage of an occasion of this nature to enforce our claim. We are confining ourselves to one definite reasonable demand; it is a small demand, and we shall be quite willing, much as we regret the other grievances, to allow this Bill to go through if this demand is conceded.

I have referred before to the railway stations. If I were to start from Cardiff and work up country, the House would have a description of things that it would hardly realise could exist in a wealthy district. It is true that they have a fairly respectable station at Cardiff. That is our complaint up in the hills. They make their money up there and they take it away, and what is spent is always spent at Cardiff. What would it matter to us if they put up a wooden shanty at Cardiff. That would not matter very much, because the people clear out of the train and get quickly away. Up in the hills the traffic is congested, and it is increasing at a tremendous rate. After leaving Cardiff you get a series of wooden sheds, and you get huge towns with nothing but a few ricketty, wooden shantys. They get burnt down occasionally. I will take as an illustration a curious fact which occurred a few years ago. Some coal wagons at a colliery near where I used to live one night silently began to slide over the greasy rails. They went half a mile down the main line and then got shunted off, and they knocked the railway station completely off its perch. That was at a town having 9,000 or 10,000 inhabitants. A train of runaway trucks could knock the railway station completely away.

The House will realise that we have a serious grievance in this matter. What passes my comprehension is that these railway directors have not got a little bit of personal sentiment or something of that sort to put them to shame. If the Taff Railway Company were not a large monopoly we should have been able to deal with them, but this House and the other House have allowed the company to keep all the other railway companies away. The Great Western Railway had been kept on the mountain side, and cannot get near the traffic. We have gone over the list of stations in our own constituencies. We start at Penrhiwceiber, a most euphonious name and a most expressive one. We start there with nothing but a series of wooden sheds. There is not a station building attached to the place at all, and a respectable fire would do a great deal of good. They are insanitary places, and I should like to call the attention of the President of the Local Government Board to the filthy state of the railway stations in our constituencies. We go further up to Mountain Ash, where there is an urban district with a population of from 10,000 to 14,000. There they have provided one wooden place as booking office, waiting-room, and everything else. It is a draughty, cold place. You get out on to a narrow platform with a miserable, spluttering gas lamp. The Great Western Railway, which gets only a part of the traffic: of that district has, all credit to it, a clean, commodious stone building as a station that looks something respectable in a town of that size, although nothing to boast of Further up the valley we get to Aberaman, where, fortunately, a certain subsidence in the soil has compelled them to put up a building made of brick instead of the miserable things we find elsewhere.

Then we get to Aberdare, the terminus of that particular line and a town of 45,000 inhabitants. When a commercial traveller—and a good deal of the credit of tradesmen depends upon his impressions—gets into the town of Aberdare he finds himself plunged into sudden darkness and wondering where he has got to. He finds before him, within a space of six or seven feet, a straight wall. The platform is as narrow as that. Right behind the carriage is a bare wall whitewashed, unlit and filthy dirty always, with a great draught playing down. Then he has to squeeze out through a narrow door into a wooden place sunk down, always dirty, reeking in wet weather with the smell carried in by people's feet from the dirt outside. Any man arriving in that town and finding such a state of things begins to think that he is in the last place upon earth. After that the man is surprised to find that this town of Aberdare is one of the most salubrious towns in the whole country, and that the medical men are constantly sending people lip from the lower flat lands of Cardiff, where their health is so very indifferent to the pleasant heights of Aberdare, with its beautiful parks and admirably conducted district. The people are very much ashamed of this. The Aberdare Urban District Council and its chamber of commerce have appealed over and over again for something approaching a railway station in the place of the miserable platform which is so poorly lit. You can never read while waiting for a train, there is never any light in the waiting-room, and if you go on to the platform they only turn the light on three minutes before the train comes in, and when they do turn it up you wish they had not done so, because it only makes things worse than before. We have been very moderate, we have only asked for this one thing, that the company should hold out some promise that they will build a station at this particular place, or do something to the existing station to make it look a little more respectable than it is. We are willing to wait for the other things of which I have spoken. I think Parliament will agree that the request we make is very reasonable.

I observe that the promoters have circulated to the Members of this House a statement that there are some difficulties about this station and the river. That is hopelessly misleading, and if I were not inside this House I would apply a much more direct term to a statement of that kind. Anybody who has been to Aberdare knows that there is ample room where they could build a station if they pulled down the existing sheds and put up a stone building. There is plenty of room to build a clean, decent, respectable station, without bothering about the foundations or the river, or anything else of that sort. The statement made is bald in its untruth, and a falsehood put into this statement to mislead Members. Just across the way the Great Western Railway has a much better station. I think we have a right to go further, and say to the Great Western Company and to the Taff Railway Company that the public in an important town like Aberdare ought to have one station into which the trains of the two companies might run—but we are not asking for that. We only ask that, instead of the stinking, filthy shed that is there now, this town of 45,000 inhabitants should have a respectable place where they can wait for a train and draw a ticket. That is the simple statement that we are making and, because it is so simple, we are very determined and we shall give every opposition that we can to this and every other Taff Bill until we can get some sort of amendment of these conditions. I think Parliament ought to be very careful in a case like this where there is a monopoly. I observe that they make a statement that the traffic in this district is dwindling. Yes, but not the passenger traffic. What is beginning to dwindle is the mineral traffic, and that is because Aberdare is an old district and the dwindling mineral traffic is no excuse at all for not giving a respectable station to the people. They have been getting a golden harvest from the mineral traffic of Aberdare for pretty well forty years. They have been drawing their money from it without let or hindrance, and all that time they have kept the town and the passengers generally in the fashion I have described. For these reasons I beg to move that the Bill be read this day six months.

Mr. ALBERT SMITH

I beg to second the Amendment.

Mr. KEIR HARDIE

In supporting the Amendment, I desire to emphasise the fact that we are not objecting to anything that is in the Bill. We are objecting that it does not contain provisions which we think it ought to contain. This is not simply a Bill for one specific purpose, but a Bill dealing with certain small items in addition to asking powers for extending the time of carrying out Acts already passed by Parliament. In this statement which has been issued by the Taff Vale Railway Company, we are told that the station at Aberdare would cost between £40,000 and £50,000, and one reason given for not carrying out the improvement is that the passenger traffic from Aberdare is diminishing. The figures which the company give are these: In 1907, the passenger traffic from Aberdare was 216,440; in 1908, it was 233,234; in 1909, 225,354; in 1910, 187,762; and in 1911, 169,132 The statement says:— There was therefore a falling off of no less than 63,000 passengers between 1908 and 1911. That statement is issued in order to provide an argument against carrying through the improvement which we are demanding. The strongest possible evidence in support of our position is these very figures. The people are flying from the Taff Vale Railway. They will not travel by it until they are reduced to the very last resort. They would put themselves to any kind of inconvenience to travel by some other railway where at least they will have a chance of occupying a sanitary carriage. The carriages are worse than dirty, they are filthy, and the germs of disease are continually carried in them, thus constituting a menace and a danger to the public health. Therefore these figures of the diminished passenger returns, provided in support of this Bill, are really a strong argument against it. The population of Aberdare and the district generally served by the Taff Vale Railway is an increasing population. Certainly people do not travel less now than they did ten years ago. There are no extra facilities now compared with ten years ago, and if the passenger traffic of the Taff Vale Railway Company is showing a serious falling off, it can only be attributed to the one cause—the disregard shown, not only for the common decencies of cleanliness, but also for the comfort and convenience of the passengers. Then this statement goes on to refer to the non-heating of carriages. It appears that the Taff Vale Company have at length made a beginning with putting proper heating accommodation into the carriages, but surely this process might be accelerated. I have been travelling recently every weekend on the Taff Vale Railway, to my sorrow and regret, and I have seen no evidence yet of anything except the old, leaking tin-kettles which they stick on the floor of the carriages, and which usually add to the discomfort of passengers without giving any compensating advantage in the form of heat. If the Taff Vale Railway Company is in earnest, it would be an easy matter to send the carriages to the sheds in relays, and have them properly fitted with heating apparatus.

Then I am rather astonished at the reason given for the dirty condition of the carriages. One would think the Taff Vale Railway Company were carrying a special kind of passenger as compared with the Barry Railway Company, or even the Great Western serving the same district. That is not the case. There are workmen travelling in numbers, but they travel by workmen's trains, and there would be no objection in the world to having workmen's coaches for workmen going home in their working clothes. It is not only third-class coaches which are in this condition. Less than two months ago I travelled from Cardiff to Merthyr, one Sunday. Knowing the condition of the third-class coaches from actual experience, I invested in a second-class ticket. The condition of the second-class was such that actually—this is no figure of speech—it made me sick between Taff Vale and Pontypridd. At Pontypridd I changed into a first-class compartment and found that in it there had been, vomiting and nuisances of various kinds. I went through every first-class compartment without finding one in which a person could sit with anything like comfort, and without having his stomach turned. That is the condition of things in the first and second-class compartments, and colliers have not yet reached the height of riding in first-class carriages unfortunately.

What is the excuse put forward? It is that the people who travel in these carriages, first-class included, I assume, are in their working clothes, and then the company goes on to add that the Taff Vale Company is really spending more on carriage cleaning than its competitors in the same district. The figures they give are these: The Taff Vale Company spend on the upkeep of carriages which, I suppose, includes cleaning, £34.83 per carriage per annum, whereas the Barry Company spend £34.43, the Brecon and Merthyr, £23.29, the Cambrian, £18.73, the Rhymney, £33.91. If these figures be correct, and I have no reason to doubt them, they are only one further evidence of the bad management which seems to characterise every department of the Taff Vale Railway. If they are spending more and get worse conditions, surely there is a screw loose somewhere which the company should see is put right. A Clause with respect to cleaning cannot be put into this Bill, and we shall take other steps to try to enforce the law in regard to that matter. But there can be a Clause put in providing for new stations. At Pontypridd a most elaborate structure is being put up, but it promises to be rather cold and draughty. If that is being done at Pontypridd, there is much more need for similar work at Aberdare, and if the Taff Vale Railway Company want to get their Bill, they will take the hint in time and have a Clause inserted in the Committee stage giving the necessary powers, and if need be, providing the necessary capital for the erection of new stations. But I do not think new capital would be needed. Part of the defence of the company is that Aberdare is declining not only in passenger traffic, but also in its rateable value. That, again, is half the truth. The population of Aberdare is increasing rapidly, as is also that of all the villages round about. In every direction new property is going up, the rateable value of the parish, and of the urban district council area, so far as houses and shop property is concerned, is increasing every year. The reduction, if there has been a reduction, is due to certain appeals from railway and colliery companies by which the amount of their assessments has been considerably reduced. That is not to be taken as evidence that the population of Aberdare is declining. It went up between 10,000 and 20,000 in the period from the Census of 1901 to that of last year.

With regard to the ability of the company to provide stations, that is not in doubt. We are told that the dividends of the Taff Vale Railway Company have not been large, and certainly the published figures bear that statement out, but will those who are going to speak for the company tell us how much of the cost of the improvements at Pontypridd and elsewhere is being taken from earnings, adding to the capital value of the company and not being shown consequently in their dividends. This company at one time paid dividends varying from as high as 17 per cent, down to 12 per cent. About 1889–90 there was a conversion of stock and a consolidation of stock by which £3,750,000 was added, or appeared to be added, to the nominal stock of the company. How much of that, I would like to be informed, was watered stock? The dividends immediately fell from 17 per cent, and 15 per cent, in 1877–8 to 7½ per cent, and 5 per cent. There was no diminution in the earnings of the company, the only difference being that the dividend on the watered stock appeared to be reasonable as compared with what it had been before the stock was watered. This company therefore cannot plead poverty as an excuse if or allowing the present condition of things to continue. I can only conclude that the opinion as to the directors of this company expressed in a leading article in the "Times" newspaper on Friday, 1st March, applies to their policy all round. The "Times" said:— The Taff Vale directors were short-sighted, dogged and vindictive. That journal pointed out also that, as a consequence of the policy pursued towards their workmen, they had got the Trade Disputes Act, with all its consequences. I venture to say that if the Taff Vale directors continue to be dogged and obstinate in their present stupid policy then the consequences are bound to follow there also. I agree with my hon. Friend and colleague (Mr. Edgar Jones) that, this being a preliminary stage of the Bill, we are not in a position to speak our last word. We shall watch with interest what happens to the Bill going through the Committee stage, and if during that stage provision is not made to redress the evils we have endeavoured to lay before the House, then I should expect that the feeling of the House will be practically unanimous against granting further powers to a company which has proved itself unfit to exercise the powers it already possesses.

Mr. CLEMENT EDWARDS

While I have very great sympathy with the view expressed by the last two hon. Members, I wish to ask the House to take the view that they have not made out a sufficient case against sending this Bill to a Committee. What they have asked to be done in the case of Aberdare and other towns is, in fact, being attempted to be done in the case of Pontypridd and certain other places. Speaking as the representative of Pontypridd, I cannot blame the directors of the Taff Vale Railway Company for regarding that place as infinitely more important than, and as having the prior claims to, Merthyr Tydvil. But there is one element which the senior Member for Merthyr Tydvil very frankly admitted, and which I commend to the consideration of this House as showing the vital importance of this Bill being passed into law. There is close to Pontypridd a level crossing used by vast numbers of workers which has been regarded locally more or less as a shambles, where fatal accident after fatal accident has occurred. Within the last few months a fatal accident occurred in circumstances which so roused the district as to induce the local authority to enter into negotiations with the company and with neighbouring landowners for the construction of a bridge. Powers are necessary for that, and these powers which are sought to enable this bridge to be constructed are one of the essential portions of the Bill. I therefore ask the House, in the interests of humanity, to say that this Bill shall go to a Committee, so that at the earliest possible moment it may become law, and w can avoid these fatal accidents in future. If there were no other reason than that, I would think it sufficient, and I shall not do more than ask the House on those grounds to send the Bill to a Committee.

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the BOARD of TRADE (Mr. J. M. Robertson)

I shall not enter into the matters of detail referred to by the hon. Members for Merthyr Tydvil. I have no doubt that, so far as the foundation for some of the criticisms which they make are concerned, those criticisms will be weighed and some of them possibly acted upon. But it would not be quite fair to let all those criticisms pass without pointing out that a number of them, such as those directed against wooden stations and cold and draughty stations, might also be brought to bear against a good many English railways with possibly as much force. As regards the complaints made on the subject of dirty carriages, the junior Member for Merthyr Tydvil has admitted that the company claim to spend more per carriage than any of the four other local companies.

Mr. EDGAR JONES

But not per passenger.

Mr. ROBERTSON

That is another matter.

Mr. EDGAR JONES

It depends on the number of times they are used.

9.0 P.M.

Mr. ROBERTSON

There are obvious difficulties about cleaning railway carriages, especially in mining districts. I suppose they would only be cleaned morning and night, and that would not perhaps entirely get rid of those difficulties that the senior Member for Merthyr pointed out. But I do not pretend to say that improvements cannot be made in the cleaning of the carriages, but similar criticism may be passed from time to time on the carriages of other companies. The hon. Members, however, admit that they do not oppose the Bill on its merits. It is a Bill which they argue ought to have contained powers for one or two new stations. There is, in particular, the question of the Aberdare station, and while the senior Member for Merthyr Tydvil has pointed out that there is a piece of ground on which a station might be placed, I do not think that it meets the company's difficulty. To place the passenger station in that way they would need to remove the goods station and the locomotive shed. I have been looking at a map, showing that it is bounded on one side by the river and on the other side by the street, and in order to get to the station it would seem to be necessary to resort to the formidable step of crossing the river. However, on that the company have expressed a readiness to consider the whole question along with, the representative of the Board of Trade, and if that representative sees a feasible line for the provision of a proper station, and indicates as much to the company, there is a probability—I will not put it higher than that—that the matter may be usefully reconsidered. As regards the question of the heating of the trains, again I may remind the House that there are a good many English lines of which the same may be said. The whole point is that the Taff Vale Railway Company is scarcely to be criticised for such defects as if it were the sole offender on the British railway system. The company are gradually introducing heating arrangements and operating, say, on one train at a time, so that in a restricted period of years the whole system may be dealt with. Broadly speaking, I think there is evidence of considerable assiduity on the part of the company in facing difficulties and trying to meet the complaints brought against them. That being so, and as the hon. Members for Merthyr Tydvil admit that the Bill is necessary on some points, I hope after what I have said about the readiness of the company to discuss the question of the station at Aberdare with the representative of the Board of Trade, the hon. Members will not press their Amendment to a Division.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Main Question put, and agreed to.

Bill read a second time, and committed.