RAIL COMMUTERS (EAST GRINST EAD AND UCKFIELD) (Hansard, 24 November 1978)

§ Mr. Geoffrey Johnson Smith (East Grinstead)

I am grateful for the opportunity of discussing the deteriorating conditions on the Uckfield to London and the East Grinstead to London lines. These commuter services, if not the worst, must be among the worst, in the country. They are rightly described, I think, as the Cinderella lines of Great Britain and part of what is rapidly becoming the transportation slum of Western Europe. We do not even have any decent motorways which connect my part of the South-East with Western Europe.

At any rate, leaving roads aside, I am grateful to the Minister for his presence this afternoon. I say straight away that I am not blaming him for this situation. He has not been in office long enough and this is not a party political issue anyway. I recognise that he is not responsible for the day-to-day administration of British Rail, which rests in the capable hands of its new chairman, Sir Peter Parker.

I am not asking for any increase in the total subsidy that the Government give to British Rail, although I think that there are grounds, as I shall argue later, for a fairer distribution, and I am not asking that British Rail should get into greater debt to meet the well-founded demands of my constituents and those of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Sir G. Howe).

I should mention that my right hon. and learned Friend would have been here had it not been for the fact that he had a long-standing engagement to attend an international conference on the European monetary system in Vienna. However, he has over a long period taken a very close interest in this matter and made most energetic representation to British Rail about the deplorable state of these services. He has also told me that, in addition to complaints from individual constituents, he has received representations from the Tandridge district council, the Surrey county council and the Oxted rail 1712 travellers' association. The latter has also written to me.

I have attended meetings in my constituency, received many complaints from constituents and had representations by the East Sussex travellers' association and representatives of the East Grinstead council. All in all, this is a formidable body of opinion and it has become more and more alarmed about the deplorable state of these services.

The prolonged correspondence which I have had with officials of British Rail, including the chairman, has led to one simple conclusion: that these lines face a hopeless, dismal future. For commuters who spend anything from £400 to £700 or more per annum for a season ticket there stretches before them the prospect of having to use an overcrowded, disgracefully unpunctual, unreliable and extremely slow, not to mention dirty, service if one can call it a service.

I make no complaint about the staff, who are extraordinarily loyal and at times have to be frankly apologetic for the deplorable conditions of the service that they have to operate. They bear a lot of the brunt of the criticism of the public. I do not want to censor the staff at all. They are as well aware as I am of the service that they have to offer to the public.

It takes one hour and thirty minutes to travel the 46 miles from Uckfield to London and over an hour from East Grinstead to London and for all this cost. We have wonderful statistics about intercity travel. We hear that people can travel over 100 miles averaging 86 miles per hour. It is a great record in some respects. But people cannot help contrasting British Rail's record on inter-city services with what they believe to be the neglected services which they have to suffer.

Of course, these commuters are, as we know, captive consumers. There are no alternatives for them. There is no motorway on which they can travel, as one can if one wants to go to Bristol or the North. They have no alternatives in buses or even good private motoring conditions. Such alternatives, as exist, as anyone who travels north from Sussex to South London knows, are not realistic or attractive. The road system into and out of London from the South is totally inadequate.

1713 The solitary motorway which has been built in Surrey and Sussex, north—south, stops far short of even the inner suburbs. We have been told that all plans to extend it into the capital have been cancelled. As far as I know, there is nothing in the inner suburbs which can possibly show any decent relief for the motorist. So these commuters have little option but to go on using this deplorable railway line at great expense and appalling inconvenience.

I have a wealth of detailed criticism, and I shall not weary the Minister with it today. There is a long catalogue of complaints and I am sure that he is aware of them. But I can assure him—and the long list of representative bodies that I have mentioned should convince him—that the long-suffering commuters who travel to work daily have plenty to grumble about, and it is not unreasonable of them to expect action which offers them hope. They have no hope. Nothing in the correspondence I have had, or in the conversations I or they have had, with any official of British Rail offers them any hope. On the contrary, the alternative is deterioration.

Perhaps we have had one change this year which offered the prospect of a better service. That was the new timetable. But all that has done is to help British Rail to set up new records for unpunctuality. It is shattering that people who have jobs to perform in London and then come back to wives and children should have to put up with a service over such a short distance where it is commonplace for trains to be 20 to 25 minutes late. I am not talking about strike conditions or bad weather. This situation is becoming the norm.

Every year the commuters have to fork out more and more for their fares. They understand inflation. To some extent, their own wages and salaries go up. Everything else goes up. To some extent, they understand why railway fares go up. But they are bound to ask themselves, as they pay more each year—shortly they will pay an increase of 10 per cent." For what?" It is for a service that gets worse and worse.

I do not want to exaggerate this aspect or to put fear into people's hearts, but, in addition, because of the slowing up of the service on some parts of the line, it 1714 may be that the trains go faster on other parts in order to catch up, and one wonders about the safety angle. A letter I received today talks about the deteriorating conditions, particularly about the ride on a downhill stretch from Hurst Green to Lingfield which, it says, "is frankly frightening." The letter says: Local rail staff have told me that passengers of a nervous disposition have arrived in a state of near collapse. I have personally timed trains at a speed of up to 80 mph on this section and the safety characteristics of this stock should be the subject of urgent technical investigation. I hope that the Minister will agree to that request.

Of course, one can argue that if it is as bad as that, why not close it? But it cannot be argued that the lines are scarcely used. They are very well used. They are not the sort of line that should be considered for the chop. The season tickets from Oxted North alone represent 60 per cent. of the total revenue, which compares more than favourably with the average for the commuter region of London, which is about 40 per cent. These are busy lines, and if they were to be closed the influx of passengers on to other lines would only add to the peak hour horrors that commuters experience even on those lines, such as Tunbridge Wells and Brighton.

So we are stuck with these lines. They are under-financed, under-staffed, and utilise obsolescent clapped-out diesel multiple units which should have been scrapped long ago. The carriages are suffering corrosion. Maintenance has to be carried out down on the coast.

The trains come up to my part of the country, and then work the service from Uckfield. Then they go down to the coast, where they are given attention. Then they come back on to the main line and work on the evening peaks. Frequently, the work on the coast at St. Leonard's cannot be completed in time, with the result that carriages are reduced in number or trains arrive too late to be put in service, or do not arrive at all. Hence the cancellations sometimes the argument is that there is no staff, but they have much more to do with maintenance.

To make matters worse, if one of these diesel multiple units is on a major maintenance programme, there is no spare capacity because no other line uses these 1715 terrible old machines, save the Hastings line. So there is nothing left with which to replace it. As a result, trains are cancelled.

It might be argued that British Rail should get something which is diesel on the otherwise electrified part of the line to pull the carriages. However, as the Minister knows, the existing construction of Victoria station makes it impossible for diesel-hauled trains to be used. That is what British Rail tells us.

The technical conclusion is that the only solution is the electrification of the railway line. Of course, that is the solution. But the Minister and I both know that that represents between £20 million and £25 million which, given the financial circumstances of British Rail, let alone of the nation, is not a practicable proposition. There is not the money available.

So we are told that we must put up or shut up. We reach an impasse—or do we?

In the last few minutes of my comments on these railway lines, I wish to make a few suggestions to the Minister about what can and should be done as a matter of equity and, I think, a degree of economic efficiency.

I should like the Minister to have a good look at British Rail's investment strategy. He has the power to do that. I should like him to consider it in the light of the Government's responsibility to help British Rail discharge its public service obligations—obligations which, were they based on strict commercial grounds, British Rail would not undertake.

The chairman of British Rail, rightly in my view, wants to make British Rail a much more successful commercial concern. I agree with that priority. He is right. He knows that no commuter services of the size that we have in the South-East can make a profit. Such services do not make a profit anywhere else in the world, and we are no exception. Vast capital resources, in terms of staff and stock, are tied up for intensive use for only a few hours of the day.

Inter-city is a much more attractive proposition, and a success has been made of it in recent years. The inter-city services make profits and the improvements to them have attracted much revenue and many more passengers. The improvements are very much appreciated, but they are looked upon by some of my commuters 1716 who have to use the railways every day with a somewhat jaundiced eye. They see millions of pounds spent on reducing the time of the journey from London to Bath by 20 or 25 minutes, and they wonder, bearing in mind that many of these other services have good motorway connections, why their part of the railway is so starved of much needed investment.

The chairman of British Rail points out proudly how much additional traffic intercity services have attracted. Why do not we also consider the beneficial effects of improving the lamentable services on the East Grinstead and Uckfield lines? Investment could relieve some of the appalling road congestion which applies on the already clogged road system into South London, with its inevitable costs in terms of time and petrol.

The Ministry is naturally very conscious of the wider aspects of energy conservation. It seems to me that there is a good cause to be served. It is just conceivable, if the experience of inter-city is any guide, that an improvement in these services would attract more passengers and substantial revenue. After all, despite the considerable inconvenience of travelling by car, a growing number of private motorists are pooling their resources in order to travel to London and avoid this railway service, and they find that it is cheaper and certainly more comfortable, even though the journey takes longer.

In my view, British Rail can and should rise to the challenge of the commuter, as it has to that of the long-distance traveller. With these considerations in mind, I should like to make a few suggestions.

First, why does not the Minister institute a thorough-going analysis of the subsidies paid to British Rail with a view to discovering how and where they are distributed? We need to have a closer and much more detailed understanding of British Rail's breakdown of costs. In general terms, we know that London's commuters are subsidised. However, the commuters on the lines that I am discussing are right to question both in a London and in a national context whether they are receiving a fair share of British Rail's investment and Government subsidies. They do not think that they are, and I agree with them. 1717 Electrification is not a practical proposition now. However, British Rail is experimenting with a new diesel unit type which could be used on these lines, and I understand that it will use a prototype on the Reading to Tonbridge line. The traffic carried on that line is peanuts compared with our line. Why not expect a bit of extra effort from British Rail to give us the opportunity of using improved diesel equipment? Why not more corridor type stock with electrical heating? British Rail says that there is a shortage of it, but there should be a little more effort there with a direction of priorities our way, because that would help on this very busy line. The St. Pancras to Bedford line has been electrified. It does not carry the number of passengers carried on our lines. We do not even say that we should have electrification tomorrow.

Will the Minister ask the Secretary of State to make strong representations to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Prime Minister about the development land tax? It has been a matter of party political controversy, but we all know that it severely restricts the ability of British Rail to develop its resources. In this part of England it has some of the most valuable real estate in the world, but if it wants to develop it, it has to pay an 80 per cent. tax. Before the introduction of the DLT British Rail was able to develop Blackfriars station with the co-operation of British enterprise, and make a handsome profit. That is impossible now. I believe that the removal of this inquitous tax would yield substantial profits in South London alone which would help to speed up the refurbishing and modernising of the rolling stock on these lines.

British Rail has admitted that the service is bad. Why, then, when it is so obviously inferior to what is being offered elsewhere, should the commuters who use these lines be expected to pay the full increase of 10 per cent. that has been demanded of them in January? It may be totally impractical to change the fare structure on that basis, but I hope that the Minister will recognise that as a matter of simple justice the commuters who use these lines have a case that demands redress. 1718 So far as I can judge, there is no consumer agency to which they can go. Some people might be pardoned for thinking that a prosecution against British Rail under the Trades Descriptions Act for its failure to carry out what is promised in the new timetable may well be worth considering. One of my constituents, writing in The Daily Telegraph—others have written to a national newspaper about this scandal—has talked about using the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 which protects the consumer from the big corporations. He points out: An individual rail traveller is reimbursed for taxi fares because of a train service failure and this seems to be an acknowledgement of liability by British Rail. He suggests a collective approach to see whether it is possible to take up a case against British Rail. He continues in his letter: If British Rail can show force maieure, or that they operate under terms which prevent anyone proceeding against them, no matter how unreliable their service, or for whatever reasons they advance (as they are now doing) there should be a public admission to this effect. If there is such a public admission, it is left to us in Parliament, in the Ministry and the chairman of British Rail to bring some fairness back into the system.

All I can do is to appeal to the Minister. I know that he takes these matters seriously. He has to balance one interest against another. But I hope that he will agree with me that I have made out a substantial case for justice, help and understanding.

§ The Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr. John Horam)

The hon. Member for East Grinstead (Mr. Johnson Smith) has raised a subject which, although it springs from his constituency, is of great interest to everyone who commutes into London by train from Kent and Sussex. I know from my postbag that hon. Members who represent constituencies in those counties receive a steady flow of criticism and complaints from their constituents.

I know, too, that the hon. Member for East Grinstead has been assiduous in drawing to the attention of British Rail and of my right hon. Friend and myself the problems of the lines of which he is speaking—the Uckfield and East Grinstead lines. I shall try to reply to his 1719 points as best I can, though, as he acknowledged, a number of them are matters of day-to-day management for British Rail, and it would not be right for me to intervene too far on those. I hope that he will understand if some of my remarks are somewhat qualified on that account.

The hon. Member raised the safety aspect of the line between Hurst Green and Lingfield. I shall draw the attention of British Rail to his remarks and ask the board to write to him to reassure him that everything is being done to keep the highest possible standard of safety.

I shall deal with the hon. Member's principal point—the investment programme of British Rail and particularly electrification and the needs of the commuter lines as opposed to the inter-city lines which are so much a part of the British Rail system.

The Government realise that the railways need a continuing flow of assistance for their investment programme. The present annual ceiling on investment is no less than £320 million, which is a very large sum. To that must be added £400 million for revenue support. Therefore, one is talking about very large sums indeed which flow annually from the taxpayers to British Rail.

In the transport White Paper we have made provision for a special passenger replacement allowance worth about £50 million. Those are all elements which show a substantial level of Government support for British Rail in its business.

At present the Government and the British Railways Board are jointly reviewing electrification schemes to see what progress can be made. I cannot anticipate the results of that, but we expect some conclusions at the beginning of next year. That shows that both we and British Railways are aware of the need to electrify where we can, and I recognise the particular problems of constituencies such as that of the hon. Member for East Grinstead, which have been left out of previous programmes. Obviously that is very unfortunate.

But the present balance of programme does not mean London commuter services being starved of investment. In fact there is a substantial programme, Great Northern suburban electrification was 1720 opened by the Secretary of State earlier in year. Other major projects now under way include the £45 million signalling and track modernisation scheme centred on Victoria; construction of new rolling stock for commuter services on both Southern and Eastern regions; electrification of St. Pancras—Bedford line and also a continual programme of track renewal.

The inclusion of a commuter line such as St. Pancras—Bedford means that British Rail is not neglecting the needs of commuters to London.

But having said that, the Government and the board recognise that the passenger service on Southern Region is not as good as it should be. Trains are delayed or cancelled too often for the board to be complacent. Indeed, it is its own fiercest critic. But on Southern Region it is faced by two difficult problems which will take time to overcome.

The first of these is a severe staff shortage, particularly of guards. As I think the hon. Member is aware, the Board is currently short of several hundred guards on Southern Region. The central division, which serves East Grinstead and Uckfield, is about 120 train guards and 60 signalmen below complement. The position is improving slowly and the board is making every effort to recruit the necessary staff. But the unsocial hours involved in this sort of work mean that these are not particularly attractive jobs; nor are they particularly well paid. Even when new staff are recruited there is unfortunately a high drop-out rate during training. So, although the rate of recruitment is getting better, the board cannot at present promise that shortly there will be a dramatic improvement in staffing levels.

The hon. Member for East Grinstead said that there was no hope. However, there is a possibility of hope in the sense that over a period of time—although not shortly—the problem will be of less importance that it is. It is a particularly bad problem at present. It was not so bad two or three years ago. We hope that in the reasonably foreseeable future it will not be so bad again.

The second major difficulty facing Southern Region is the condition of the rolling stock, which is now 20 years old. As the hon. Member will realise this 1721 means that much more maintenance is required and the need to remove asbestos further complicates the task. The board is, however, considering the complete refurbishment of the rolling stock, but its workshops are currently fully committed and it will be some time before this work can begin.

The hon. Member will therefore recognise that the problems of the East Grinstead and Uckfield services are not unique to these lines but derive from the more general problems of Southern Region. However, there is one particular constraint on these services, and that is that it is diesel-operated while the bulk of services in the adjoining areas are electric. The board's operational flexibility is therefore somewhat reduced since rolling stock cannot be switched from other lines on to these services to meet particular demands. As the hon. Member will know, the board has made some operational changes to try to ease the situation on these lines, but the scope for such changes is severely limited.

However, as a result of the hon. Member's intervention the board has reexamined the situation. It has decided that from January it can add two extra three-car units to the pool of vehicles which serve the Uckfield and East Grinstead lines. The board recognises that this is not a major improvement but it hopes that in response to the hon. Member's pointed and heartfelt criticisms this will indicate its concern and good will and help to ease the present unsatisfactory situation to some extent.

The hon. Member suggsted that one approach might be to undertake a number of minor improvements to signalling, track, and so on, which together would noticeably improve the service. He mentioned one specific project. It must, of course, be for the board to decide whether 1722 to undertake projects of this nature. But it is aware of the problems faced by commuters on this and other Southern Region lines. I know that it will examine the hon. Member's suggestions sympathetically to see if minor works of the type he has put forward really would be an effective way of improving the situation.

The hon. Member also referred to development land tax. I do not believe that it is in any way a major problem. The total amount paid by British Rail over its entire national system was less than £1 million. Earlier I referred to the £320 million ceiling on investment and to the more than £400 million of revenue support, in addition to the money from fares. The money involved in development land tax is a drop in the ocean. More important than that are the problems of the general balance of investment and the small improvements to which I have referred.