HC Deb 15 June 1959 vol 607 cc200-10

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Hughes-Young.]

11.44 p.m.

Mr. J. C. Jennings (Burton)

On 29th May this year, the Wales and Monmouth Transport Users' Consultative Committee met to consider a proposal from the British Transport Commission to discontinue the passenger service between Fishguard and Waterford. On that date, the committee ratified the request of the Transport Commission. That date of 29h May is an important one in my argument, because I want to examine how the decision was made.

Tonight, I am not concerned to discuss the economics of the position. Because of the time factor, I intend to concentrate on three aspects. I make three charges. The first is that while the letter of the law might have been observed, the whole question was prejudged and cut and dried before the consultative committee met on 29th May. I shall produce abundant evidence to prove this.

Following upon that argument, I should like to examine the transport users' consultative committee system as exemplified in this case and prove that such a committee is a useless body to protect the interests of the travelling public. In other words, I want to show that these committees are mere puppets of the Transport Commission and that the whole system of consultative committee work is suspect of hocus-pocus and jiggery-pokery. My third charge is that the service has been taken off at the height of the season, which is the height of lunacy.

Let me come to my first charge, that the issue is prejudged and cut and dried. I said that I would produce abundant evidence to prove this. All of the dates which I shall mention have to be related to 29th May. On 4th April, the S.S. "Great Western," affectionately known as "Aggie," was taken off service for overhaul. The dismantling of passenger accommodation began immediately. The ship returned to service on 30th May. It is significant to note that all the second-class passenger accommodation had been abolished. Accommodation for only 130 first-class passengers was left. The total accommodation of the ship was 450. Therefore, I charge the Transport Commission with having dismantled two-thirds or more of the passenger accommodation, almost two months before the date when the committee had to meet to make a decision whether the service should be discontinued.

My charge, then, is that the Transport Commission anticipated the decision and took action thereon. What fools the Commission would have looked if the consultative committee had refused their application. Did the committee know of this action of anticipating the decision? If it did, the committee was guilty of betraying its trust. If it did rot know, if it was not informed by the Commission, the B.T.C. was guilty of gross deception, both of the consultative committee and of the public. Will my hon. Friend the Joint Parliamentary Secretary find out whether the Commission informed the consultative committee of this dismantling? This may be called intelligent planning on the part of the Commission, but others would call it by far harsher names.

I took up the matter with the Minister by letter and sent him correspondence. He answered me on 26th May, when he said: The Commission in making the proposal must obviously make provisional arrangements so that if the proposal is endorsed by the committee, no time is lost in acting on it. That is the Commission's excuse. The Commission certainly lost no time. It did the dismantling nearly two months before the committee met. Would one call this "provisional arrangements," or would one call it prejudging the issue?

Let me give further proof. I have in my possession three letters. The first is from the Dublin headquarters of the Automobile Association, dated 28th April, a month before the committee met and nearly three weeks before the last date for filing objections, 15th May.

The letter states: We have been advised by British Railways that from 29th June next passengers will not be carried between Fishguard and Waterford. There is no equivocation about that statement.

Again anticipating the Committee's decision, a letter dated 28th May from the Station and Quay Superintendent, Fishguard Harbour, to another applicant said: I regret to inform you that after June 27th next no passengers will be conveyed on the direct Waterford steamer". Again no equivocation. There is no question of saying that certain proposals had been made. The letter simply says categorically that no passengers would be carried.

A letter from the British Transport Commission Passenger Department, Waterford, dated 21st May said: I wish to inform you that owing to the suspension of passenger facilities from 29th June, 1959, I have now transferred your application to Fishguard Harbour. There again, there is no equivocation but a definite statement. Here are three letters from transport authorities which state without any hesitation that the services will be discontinued and all three were sent before the Committee had even met on 29th May.

The next proof I have is that before 17th March the British Transport Commission had already come to an agreement with the Waterford Harbour authorities as to what should take place, and the agreement was almost signed, sealed and delivered between those two bodies that passenger services should be discontinued and a total freight service substituted. What chance had any passenger from the travelling public if he appeared before the consultative committee? The whole set-up smacks of jiggery-pokery. The whole thing was a fait accompli before the committee met.

On 14th June the consultative committee sent out a letter recalling its decision. I make one extract from it. The committee said it was … fully aware that the British Transport Commission ran the risk of their proposals being unsupported by the committee but sensibly, in our view, avoided passenger bookings for the Waterford route after 27th June. Here is a case of a consultative committee bending over backwards to support the Transport Commission's case and proving itself to be nothing but a subservient mouthpiece of the Commission. This raises the whole question of the work of transport users' consultative committees and the whole system. The Minister, in a letter to me on 26th May, said: These consultative committees are independent bodies appointed by the Minister under the Transport Act as watchdogs of user interests. This case illustrates the cancer that is attacking the consultative system throughout the country. The dice are loaded in favour of the Commission. The system is now suspect and is nothing but an elaborate façade to impress the Government. The figures prove it. This case is the classic example, but in 1954, of 118 closure proposals, 116 were ratified and only two were rejected. In 1957–58, of 246 proposals, 12 were rejected and 13 modified. Worked out as a percentage, it means that 93 per cent. of closure proposals brought before the committees were ratified and only 7 per cent. either rejected or modified.[An HON. MEMBER: "Shocking."] I submit that justice has not been seen to be done. Is that what will happen on the Stranrear-Larne route? Is that what will happen to the "Tutbury Jenny" on the Burton-Tutbury line? Is that what happened in my own Division to Marchington and Barton last year? It makes me wonder about the efficacy and the honesty of consultative committees. In the circumstances of this case, I submit that the Minister should reexamine the whole question of the machinery for the protection of the public.

The third charge which I make is that this service is being taken off at the height of the tourist season. I know what we shall be told; we had the answer from the committee. If the Commission is pleading a loss of £10,000 a year, however, this is an astonishing time to take off a boat, for it is the height of the tourist season.

I promised that I would speak for not more than a quarter of an hour, and that I would share the debate with the Minister. In view of the evidence which I have produced tonight—and I could produce more—I ask my hon. Friend to ask the Minister to use his directive powers to postpone the operative date until he himself has seen a deputation of users of this route. Hon. Members may wonder why I have become so interested in this route, because my constituency is in the middle of England. I have used the route and I had hoped to use it many more times. In addition, I have constituency interests because we export from Burton not only beer but practical brewers. Many of them live in the Waterford area and their families travel there from Burton. I have a constituency interest in the matter as well as fighting for the vital principle of the protection of the transport-using public. I ask my hon. Friend to impress on the Minister our request to meet him. Will he re-examine the circumstances in order to issue a directive?

My last point is a legal and procedural point. This service was brought into being by an Act of Parliament of 1898. It laid upon the company the duty to provide and order its service between Fishguard and Waterford as well as between Fishguard and Rossclare. If this Act has not been amended or repealed, can this passenger service be discontinued without the authority of the House or of some statutory body set up by the House? I know that in 1940 the Act was suspended by a revocation order, but I gathered that after the war this itself would be revoked. Has any Act been passed since which amends or repeals the original Act? If not, I submit, as a layman, not being legally qualified, that it would require some form of Parliamentary action, on the Floor of the House, to discontinue the service between Fishguard and Waterford.

I am so disturbed at what I have learned in the investigation of and research into this case and by my experience in other cases that I think that the whole system affecting our railways, and particularly the protection of travellers, with respect to the actions of the consultative committees, should be the subject of inquiry. I urge my hon. Friend to suggest to the Minister that there should be an independent inquiry on the lines of the Bowes Committee on inland waterways. There should be a similar committee on the railways and we should inquire whether the consultative procedure is working satisfactorily.

11.59 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation (Mr. John Hay)

The subject which my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Jennings) has raised is concerned, strictly speaking, with the uneconomic operation of the British Transport Commission passenger service between Fishguard and Waterford. My hon. Friend has hit out in somewhat vigorous style, attacking the Commission, the transport users consultative committee and one or two other people, but I hope he will forgive me if I do not try to answer his points in precisely the way he put them. One has to look at this whole subject from the point of view of what it is that the Commission is trying to do, and then consider whether it has acted properly.

This service is carried out by the "Great Western", a ship built in 1934, of some 1,750 tons, with a speed of 14 knots. It carried out three crossings a week in each direction, and it has accommodation for 450 passengers. The bald economic facts are that the average number of passengers carried in this steamer last year was only 33 in the winter and 150 in the summer. Throughout the whole of 1958 only 20,000 passengers were carried. Any impartial examination of these figures shows that here is a ship being greatly under-used. The Commission estimates, and its figures have not been challenged, that it loses about £10,000 a year on this one ship. When one looks at 1958, if the Commission is losing £10,000 and carried only 20,000 passengers, it means that each passenger carried cost the Commission 10s. I will not labour the point, because my hon. Friend wants to turn attention to the way this has been handled. Before passing to criticisms of the consultative committee, I will explain the situation of the Commission itself.

Mr. William Teeling (Brighton, Pavilion)

A lot of the people travelling on this steamer are presumably travelling with their own cars and will want to do so in future. They may also be coming from Ireland to England and, I understand from the British Travel Association, bringing a good deal of money into England. That 10s. may well be not lost.

Mr. Hay

My hon. Friend perhaps has not quite understood. The actual loss in the Commission's accounts on the operation of this vessel—with wages of crew, fuel, etc.—amounts to £10,000 a year. There are also other services between Ireland and this country, about which I will say something.

In the light of these facts, the Commission came to the conclusion that, as this passenger service had become so uneconomic and was, in its view, incapable of expansion to become a paying proposition, the service should be withdrawn and the ship converted to a cargo vessel including, incidentally, much more accommodation for cars.

There is an alternative service between Rosslare which is available now. It consists of two ships which operate in the summer and three in the winter. It is a much shorter journey, three and a quarter hours at sea instead of eight hours, and there are more sailings. During the summer months these are daily, excluding Mondays, instead of three times a week. The ships are faster, doing at least 20 knots, they are larger—of 3,000 tons—and there is much more accommodation. It is important to realise that only on 11 days last year was the combined traffic through Waterford and Rosslare in excess of the accommodation available on the Rosslare route alone—which is for 1,300 passengers. That is the background, briefly, to the decision of the Commission to withdraw this service.

I would remind the House that the Commission is operating under very great pressure from my right hon. Friend, Parliament and the public to reduce its operating losses and break even as soon as possible. That means that, whether it be railways or ships, the Commission must reduce and ultimately eliminate its uneconomic services while developing and improving those services for which there is a demand.

I now turn to what my hon. Friend said about the transport users' consultative committees. Despite my hon. Friend's strictures, I would emphasise that these committees do extremely useful work and have the complete confidence of my right hon. Friend. They are independent advisory bodies, set up under an Act of Parliament, and the consultative committee consists of 21 members. Its membership is drawn from a very representative cross-section of user interests and it is required by the Act to draw its membership from those interests. They include agriculture, commerce, industry, labour and local authority interests. The Commission itself must be represented and there must be three independent members appointed by the Minister, one of whom is the Chairman.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the function of these committees. They are not a kind of court of appeal; they are not licensing authorities, and they are certainly not arbitration tribunals. They form a piece of machinery set up by Parliament to act as a channel through which the Commission can consult user interests. They constitute an influential body of users who can make their views known to and felt by the Commission.

In this case the proposal of the Commission was put to the consultative committee for Wales and Monmouthshire on 17th April. Public notice was given in a large number of newspapers and by poster advertising at many railway stations in this country and in Ireland, and it was also circulated to 12 national organisations and interested bodies, including Waterford Corporation. No objections from organisations and bodies were received to the proposal to close the service. Only six letters of protest were received by the Commission or by the committee from people resident in the United Kingdom. Only six letters were received from Ireland, although it is fair to say that one of those included a petition against the closure which purported to contain 70 signatures, but all these were of residents—shopkeepers for the most part—of Waterford.

The committee considered the proposition on 29th May and recommended unanimously that the Commission's pro- posal should be accepted, and that it should operate from 29th June. In coming to that conclusion there was no question of the committee rubber-stamping the proposal of the Commission. I have looked carefully at the complete minutes of the committee. Its discussion occupied a considerable time. The representatives of the Commission were cross-questioned intensively by members of the committee, and no unbiased person reading that record could come to any conclusion other than that the Committee had given the matter the most careful consideration but had been persuaded by the merits of the case that this was a completely uneconomic service which must be withdrawn if the taxpayer was not indefinitely to go on bearing some part of the loss.

The final point is the question of notice given to objectors. There was no undue haste between the publication of the proposal and the hearing. The Committee made every attempt to give all those who had objections the greatest opportunity of making known their views, although it was not practicable in the time available to allow them all an opportunity to give evidence. The proceedings of these committees do not take a judicial form. People do not give evidence and cross-examine other witnesses. These committees conduct their procedure in the same way as any other committee. The committee had before it very full written reports by many people, and I am certain that it did its best to sift the matter, taking full account of the objections which were raised.

My hon. Friend asked whether, in the light of all his complaints about the conduct of the committee, my right hon. Friend would be prepared to issue a direction to the Commission to withdraw its proposal or, at least, to postpone it until a deputation had been received. I must tell the House and my hon. Friend that I have already discussed this matter exhaustively with my right hon. Friend, who is afraid that in the clear circumstances of the case and in view of the detailed examination carried out by the committee, he cannot see his way to comply with the request which has been made by my hon. Friend. My right hon. Friend feels that in the circumstances it would not be right for him to issue a direction of this kind.

Finally, I should like to say a word about the legal aspect. The situation is a little complicated, but I will try to make it as clear as I can in the two or three minutes remaining to me. Under the Act of 1898, an obligation was laid upon the old Great Western Railway to provide two daily services, one between Fishguard and Rosslare and the other between Fishguard and Waterford. The Great Western Railway was relieved of this obligation by an Order made under the Defence Regulations in 1940.

Mr. G. B. H. Currie (Down, North)

It has been repealed.

Mr. Hay

May I repeat the explanation before it is criticised? The position will then be clearer to the House.

The Great Western Railway was relieved of that obligation by an Order made under the Defence Regulations in 1940. This provides that the two sections in question should cease to have effect until such time as the Order is revoked. As the House knows, we tried in the Transport Charges, &c. (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1954, to keep certain Orders in force on a statutory footing. This was one of the Orders which is so continued.

The obligations under the 1898 Act, which would now fall upon the Transport Commission as successors to the Great Western Railway, cannot be lifted without United Kingdom legislation. In the meantime, they are kept in suspense. It is obviously desirable that before any legislation, promoted by the Commission or by anyone else, is introduced into the House to have the effect of lifting this obligation permanently, an attempt at least should be made to reach some kind of agreement with the Irish authorities who are affected. It might even be necessary to have legislation in the Dail—I do not know. In any event, the Commission is seeking agreement and has already obtained some degree of success in its attempts with the Waterford Corporation.

My right hon. Friend's position is that he would certainly take no action to revoke the Order and so bring these old statutory provisions back into full force before every attempt has been made to solve the problem by agreement, followed by agreed legislation. The position, therefore, is that I am advised that there is no current statutory liability upon the Commission to maintain this service. If my right hon. Friend made an order under the 1954 Act, that obligation would return, but in present circumstances he is not prepared to do that, as I have explained.

I realise that my hon. Friend may not be altogether satisfied with this. My main point, however is that this was and is a completely uneconomic service and it is something that we cannot allow to continue indefinitely. In my right hon. Friend's opinion the Commission needs support and understanding in the difficult task that it is trying to carry out.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at fourteen minutes past Twelve o'clock.