HC Deb 24 April 1961 vol 639 cc191-202

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. E. Wakefield.]

11.25 p.m.

Mr. George Darling (Sheffield, Hillsborough)

I want to raise a very important matter concerning the curtailing of train services and the closing of stations on the Great Central Railway line between Marylebone and Sheffield and Manchester. I want to show the Joint Parliamentary Secretary, if I can, that the area transport users' consultative committees and the Central Consultative Committee have been persuaded to agree to rather drastic reductions in train services by the use of very questionable figures supplied by British Railways officials. I want him to know that these measures to reduce services are causing considerable hardship and inconvenience to people living in towns on this line or near to it, and to people living in the country who want to use the services that this line used to provide. I hope to show that, far from being a "white elephant", this line, with suitable and well-timed train services, could be made to pay.

I am sure that the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will agree that I have given myself a rather tough assignment to deal with this in the space of fifteen minutes or so, and I hope, therefore, that I shall be forgiven if I stick closely to my rather full notes. I hope to persuade the Joint Parliamentary Secretary and his right hon. Friend that an independent inquiry should be held into the allegations and claims which I shall make, and that this inquiry should advise on the future organisation of this valuable and, as I believe, potentially profitable railway service. Although I shall have to make some rather serious charges, let me say at once that I have a great deal of sympathy for the railway officials concerned. I have been told that one of the officials at a meeting of the railway men got so exasperated that he said that the whole track ought to be torn up. I have some sympathy with that point of view.

The Great Central Line in the present organisation of British Railways is a complete administrative nuisance. It just does not fit into the regional system which has been set up. For geographical reasons it is placed in the London Midland Region, which appears to be the best place on the map. But the London Midland Region obviously does not want it. Therefore, it is administered by four different sections of British Railways, although it is only a relatively short railway service. The London Midland Region has, so to speak, overall control, but the south, or London, end of the line comes under London Transport—the Harrow stretch—and then it passes to the London Midland Region. I hope that the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will not question these facts, otherwise we shall have to raise the matter again, because they have been carefully considered, as I shall explain in a moment, by the railway men themselves. They ought to know how the railway service is operated. It passes into the London Midland Region and comes under the control of Crewe, and then into the control of Derby, and then passes back beyond Rugby to the Eastern Region and north of Nottingham it comes under the Great Northern traffic manager on the Eastern Region side.

It is this hopeless confusion of management which, in my view, is responsible for all the trouble. None of these regions wants the little bits and pieces of the line which each of them has to operate and control. So, between them, they are proposing to close down, if not all, most of the passenger services, and to restrict the freight services so far as possible, just to get rid of their administrative difficulties.

I appreciate that that is a pretty serious charge to make, but I will go further and say that, to assist them in trying to achieve this unfortunate end, they have presented to the consultative committees facts and figures of train services and passengers carried, and the losses which have been made, which are completely misleading.

I do not want to rely on my own very unfortunate experience on this line. I have plenty of proof without that, and I should like, in support of this, to quote some letters which I have received since I first raised the matter in the House.

The first letter is from a don at Magdalen College, Oxford. He says: It has been quite obvious during the last few years that the policy of those concerned with the management of this line has been to take away nearly all the trains and then to say the line isn't paying. Services have been drastically out, no one has bothered about the times of arrival and departure and the 'couldn't care less' attitude of those responsible for the running of the trains has been quite fantastic. I do not make these accusations lightly…The Great Central Line is far superior to the Midland St. Pancras one, and yet the service to London is now so bad that it is virtually impossible to travel on the former. The next letter comes from a person in Keighley in Yorkshire, who says: In the old Great Central line the British Railways had a great asset—the most recently constructed main line in England with an excellent record of fast and punctual trains—a line whose connections permitted the running of valuable cross-country trains which enabled awkward journeys to be made in comfort. I have watched with horror the destruction of services on this line—the policy can only be a deliberate one to drive passengers and freight away so that figures can be triumphantly produced to justify the complete closure of the line. The next letter comes from a person in Buckinghamshire. He says: About eighteen months ago I called on the official at Euston Station who is responsible for dealing with the complaints of passengers, and I told him in almost the same words as used by yourself"— that was when I spoke in a previous debate— that passengers had been driven off the line by making travel on it almost impossible. Trains had been taken off; connections had been altered so as to be completely inconvenient; services—particularly on Sundays—were changed at short notice with little or no notification, and frequently changed again. I add that it might appear that the railway authorities were determined to make the line unprofitable so that there could be a case for closing it! As I think the Joint Parliamentary Secretary will know, those letters are typical of scores which have appeared in the local newspapers in the towns and cities along the line. There are thousands of passengers and potential passengers who are completely convinced that the train services have been deliberately curtailed to present a picture of a declining line with not enough passengers to make the line pay, and that this picture presented by British Railways is quite wrong.

It is not only the passengers who take that view. The railwaymen take it. Recently the district councils of the National Union of Railwaymen, who are representative of the main areas along this line, sent representatives to their union headquarters in London to discuss the question of this curtailment of Great Central services. This meeting was reported in the Railway Review in the issue of 14th April, and I should like to quote briefly from it.

The report says: Timetables have been arranged…so that connections have been missed by only a few minutes. In the view of the representatives, this tended to put people off travelling by train and to be diverted to other services. It was, therefore, a vicious circle. The railways were not being run to attract passengers. Then, because they were put into the position of being uneconomical to operate, proposals were put forward to withdraw the services. Those are the views of the railway-men.

The report goes on to say: It was generally felt, at the end of the meeting, that a case should be made out to show the need for the continuance of the Great Central Line. I am convinced that such a case can be made out, if it is presented successfully before an inquiry, because there is from passengers and from railway men this unanimous view that, far from proving that the Great Central Line does not pay, the railway officials concerned have only succeeded in throwing doubts on their own case. The Joint Parliamentary Secretary will know—and in view of the time, I am not going to quote it—that these suspicions are voiced in the 1960 Report of the Central Transport Consultative Committee. If I had time I would question many of the statements which appear in the Committee's Report. Some of the statements in present circumstances are—I was going to say not true, but that is going too far; but they do not meet the facts.

I will quote this from paragraph 36 of the Report: There were comparatively few passengers on the services which were marked down for withdrawal, and those had the alternative of going via the former Midland route from St Pancras. Those two statements in one sentence are completely at variance with the facts, because few passengers appeared in the figures after the services had been curtailed. I am quite convinced that if the Central Transport Consultative Committee had been given the figure before the services were curtailed, there would have been a very good case for continuing the train services. As to the point that they had the alternative route, that is not correct. There are only a few sections of the St. Pancras Midland line which give an alternative route to the passengers most seriously affected by the curtailment of the services.

Therefore, I think that a case for a further inquiry—not before the Consultative Committee—can well be made out. I take the view of many railway men and railway officials about this business, and I have not met one anywhere from St. Marylebone to Sheffield who is not convinced that passenger services on this line would pay. They all believe from their own experience that diesel services properly organised and properly timed would pay.

Then, of course, there, is the great question of freight traffic. The Joint Parliamentary Secretary probably knows that about one-tenth of the rail freight traffic starts in south Yorkshire. If we are to increase our industrial production and exports and if we close down the Great Central Line, there will be far worse congestion than is the case now on the Midland and Great Northern lines. There will be transport chaos.

I can give the hon. Gentleman evidence now of coal trains standing for days inside marshalling yards on the Midland Railway and which cannot be moved because they will not use the Great Central alternative route to the South and Southwest. They have tried to kill that line. They want to hold the services on the Great Northern and the London Midland lines from Euston to Manchester and beyond. Because of that they are getting serious congestion on those alternative lines.

Therefore, I would plead with the hon. Gentleman to respond, not so much to the case I have put, but to the thousands of people who have written to the Press, who have sent protests to their Members of Parliament, who have got their local councils to join in this protest in order to keep the Great Central Line open. I am convinced that, if there are services properly timed and properly provided with diesel trains and so on, inter-city services and local services can be made to pay, and if is about time a proper administra- tion of the line was set up. It can pay only under one management, so to speak, with a proper administrative unit set up to make the line the working and profitable proposition it ought to be.

11.39 p.m.

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

The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mr. Darling) has raised once more the subject of the transformation of the rôle which the Great Central Line plays in British Railways' affairs. At the very outset, I must point out that what is proposed for the Great Central line by the British Transport Commission is not its closure but its use for a type of traffic different, by and large, from the present type. I think that I can best help the hon. Member and the House if I first give, briefly, the historical background and then say something about the Government's attitude, but I should preface my remarks by once again saying that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Transport has no Ministerial responsibility for the closure of railway lines or the withdrawal of services from railway lines. Still less has he any responsibility for adjustment of the timing of trains, and so on.

The Great Central Line was originally constructed round the turn of the century as an extension to London of the old Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway. It provided a third route to London from the area including Manchester, the West Riding, Sheffield and Nottingham. Under the Railways Act, 1921, which set up the four main line companies, the Great Central Line was absorbed in the London and North Eastern Railway and, until nationalisation in 1948, it remained inside that group.

It was then a competitor with three other lines. It was a competitor with the Great Northern route out of King's Cross, and this was a route also in the London and North Eastern Railway group. It was a competitor with the L.M.S. main line out of St. Pancras. Thirdly, it was a competitor with the L.M.S. main line out of Euston to Rugby and Manchester. I mention this because these three lines are still in existence, and it is an important aspect of the situation that the hon. Member has brought before the House tonight.

Subsequent to nationalisation, the Great Central Line fell, broadly speaking—I will not argue with the hon. Gentleman about the details—into two railway regions. Broadly speaking, the stretch from Marylebone to a point south of Sheffield is in the London Midland Region, and the Sheffield district is in the Eastern Region of British Railways. Both these regions, of course, are part of the unified system of British Railways, and the Great Central Line is integrated in the whole system.

When the Commission decided to rationalise its services, the Great Central Line became an obvious candidate for that type of treatment because as I think that the House will see, the existence of two more or less parallel main routes over 160 miles gave the Commission an opportunity for better planning. The hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but he was in the House at the time and will remember that better planning and greater rationalisation of the railway resources was one of the predominant arguments put forward by the Government he supported for carrying out nationalisation—

Mr. Darling

One does not rationalise by murdering something.

Mr. Hay

I will deal with that in a moment, but I will now give the reasons given by the Commission, not for closing the line—it is not doing that—but for transforming its rôle.

The B.T.C. aims at three objectives. The first is to concentrate freight on the Great Central Line and thereby give greater freedom of movement and better timing to the passenger services on the London Midland main line. The second objective is the withdrawal of the bulk of the passenger facilities on the Great Central Line. I say "the bulk of," not all the facilities, because some passenger facilities will remain. This is estimated by the Commission to save about £140,000 a year—

Mr. Darling

That is queried.

Mr. Hay

I know that it is queried, but this is the only figure of which we have official cognisance in the Ministry of Transport, and the only figure mentioned to us officially by the Transport Users' Consultative Committees.

The third objective of the Commission is to have scope for giving better facili- ties for parcels traffic. There is in the London-Midland Region a steadily growing parcels traffic. A high proportion of this originates in London, Leicester, Nottingham or Manchester, and all these towns lie on the Great Central route.

Mr. John Farr (Harborough)

Is it not a fact that the most efficient services have been shown to be obtained in the past by intermingling passenger traffic and freight traffic rather than by concentrating on two different types on two different lines?

Mr. Hay

This is a matter of theory for the cognoscenti of railways among whom I do not profess to be included. But the Commission is satisfied that what it is trying to do now will provide a more efficient service for freight, parcels and passengers. This growing parcels traffic in the London-Midland Region means that it can concentrate its parcels traffic on the Great Central Line and largely remove parcels traffic from the other Midland lines. In addition, the Commission is bringing forward better handling facilities for parcels to meet the improved service that can be provided. This is the Commission's case, and it is my job to put it to the House.

The Commission announced its plan concerning the Great Central Line in May, 1959. It consisted of two parts. The first was the withdrawal of day through-expresses from Marylebone to Sheffield, Bradford and Manchester, and their replacement by a reduced semi-fast service. The second was the withdrawal of local services north of Aylesbury.

The first part of the plan was put to no fewer than five transport users' consultative committees in the areas during 1959. The committees approved the proposals and, as is their duty under Statute, they passed their recommendations and minutes to the Central Transport Consultative Committee, which referred to the matter in the Annual Report from which the hon. Member for Hills-borough quoted. I should like to quote part of paragraph 37 on page 12 of that Report, because this is the view of the Central Consultative Committee and it should be before the House. It reads: The Area Committees concerned were satisfied, however, that the justification for this rationalisation of the old Great Central Line was overwhelming, and that though some users were considerably inconvenienced, there was no hardship of a degree which could possibly justify rejection of the change. I would remind the House that this finding of the Committee is in a report by users, not British Railways. The Committee is not some kind of independent body. It is a body of users who, if anybody, one would exject to object to the withdrawal of services.

Mr. Darling

The hon. Gentleman will realise that the transport users' consultative committees and the Central Committee cannot obtain independent information. They have to rely on information supplied to them by the British Transport Commission, and I query the information they have received.

Mr. Hay

I will come to that point. I have now had over two years' experience of these committees and what they do, and I assure the hon. Member that those who form the membership of these committees and serve on them are pretty astute. I am convinced that they know what they are about when they investigate these cases.

This first part of the plan was brought into operation on 4th January, 1960. On the second part—the withdrawal of local services north of Aylesbury—no announcement has yet been made but, as I told the hon. Member in answer to a Question on 22nd March, British Railways will be putting their proposals in due course to the consultative committees. Our general attitude to the whole of this sort of issue, as the House knows, is that we want to see a viable railway system. That does not necessarily mean that the whole of the present system can be made viable.

I will not quote the large number of statements that have been made by my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Minister of Transport or what was stated in the White Paper on the reorganisation of the railways on the necessity for the Government to look at the whole matter in the light of modern conditions and the need for the purposeful slimming of the system.

It is, in our view, for the British Transport Commission to work out and to put forward specific proposals. They are losing £100 million a year at the moment and that amount is being borne by the taxpayers. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer might have found his task somewhat easier last week if he did not have to bear this £100 million a year loss by the Commission. It works out at 4d. on the Income Tax. That deficit must be reduced, and it is for the transport users consultative committees to investigate methods of reducing the deficit.

In the context of the reorganisation of the Commission's affairs, we are examining the extent to which the existing machinery, including the transport users consultative committees, remains appropriate for the execution of the policy of restoring economic health to the railways.

It is no part of my duty to defend the Commission or to defend the transport users consultative committees, nor is it the Ministry's duty to do so, because my right hon. Friend has no direct responsibility in this case. My job is to give what information I can. Concerning the allegations made by the hon. Member for Hillsborough that there has been a deliberate effort on the part of the Commission to drive traffic off the line, thus making the picture look even more black, I hope, in the light of the explanation I have given to the House as to the way in which the Commission envisages this proposition, he will reconsider the objections he has put forward.

I cannot see how anyone could have an objection of that kind—of traffic being deliberately driven off the railways—because the railways have an obligation to pay their way, and if there is a prospect of their services paying their way, they would wish to extend and develop traffic.

There is often reported, particularly in the local Press, correspondence suggesting that there is a conflict between the managers of the London Midland Region and the former managers of the old Great Central Railway, and that a long deferred act of vengeance is in progress.

Mr. Darling

I did not say that.

Mr. Hay

I know the hon. Gentleman did not say that, but it is stated in correspondence, particularly in the local Press. I cannot believe that suggestion to be true, because both regions are part of the Commission's undertaking and, of course, the proposals for rationalisation of these lines are those of the Commission itself.

So far as the most important of the charges made by the hon. Member for Hillsborough is concerned—that the figures have been rigged in some way—this is a very serious matter, and I am not persuaded by what the hon. Gentleman said. I do not agree that some form of public inquiry would be the right course to adopt. If the hon. Gentleman will let me have chapter and verse of his allegation and will give the evidence he has quoted tonight, I can assure him that I will ask Sir Brian Robertson, the Chairman of the British Transport Commission, to have a meeting with me about it. If the hon. Gentleman will give me all the facts, I will ask Sir Brian to consider this matter in the light of that information and the report of the debate in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Mr. Darling

I thank the Parliamentary Secretary for his offer—

Mr. Speaker

Order. The hon. Gentleman did not say the magic words, "Before the Joint Parliamentary Secretary sits down…".

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at six minutes to Twelve o'clock.