I must inform the House that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister. I also remind the House that there is a 10-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches.

I beg to move,

That this House
notes that 2006 marks the beginning of the second half of the decade covered by the Government's Ten Year Plan for Transport;
further notes that a substantial proportion of the commitments and specific projects outlined in the document Transport 2010: The Ten Year Plan have subsequently been abandoned;
further notes that overcrowding on roads and railways is getting worse;
and expresses its concern that, at a time when record amounts of money are being spent on transport, so many of the schemes which could ease overcrowding have been dropped or delayed indefinitely by the Government.

It is eight years and eight months since the Government came to power, and the Secretary of State for Transport has been in office for just under half that time. This year also marks the start of the second half of the Government's much-vaunted 10-year plan for transport. It is, therefore, an appropriate moment for the House to review progress to date towards the Government's declared goal of creating what the Deputy Prime Minister described as

"the integrated transport system this country needs and deserves. A system fit for the new millennium and of which we can be justly proud."

There is no doubt that in those eight years we have seen frenetic activity in the Department for Transport. We had the much-vaunted 10-year plan. We saw a series of White Papers and debated a series of transport Acts. We have had numerous strategic plans from Government agencies. We have seen the creation of new bodies to give direction to our transport system, such as the Strategic Rail Authority, set up in a blaze of publicity and commended by the Secretary of State, who said when he took office that it had already brought coherence to long-term planning as well as a commitment to getting results. The new management was making a real difference, he said. Then, he went and scrapped it, two years later.

We have had expensive multimodal studies setting out transport priorities all round the country. We have had a drive from the Department to improve the quality of local transport plans. We have had blue skies thinking from Lord Birt who wanted to build vast toll motorways across the country. Last week, it was the turn of the Government's science think-tank, Foresight, which set out its vision of transport for the future. Next, it will be the turn of Rod Eddington to set out how he thinks transport should look.

We cannot knock the Government for all the activity, thinking and debating that has taken place in the Department in the past few years. But there is one small problem. Out there, in the real world, things have been getting worse for the travelling public and there is precious little on the way to make their lives better. The trains are getting more crowded and are still running late. Traffic jams are getting longer every year. In much of the country, buses are no longer a viable transport alternative. Nothing seems to be happening to sort the problems out.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the drive for further development in the south-east, especially the 124,000 more houses in the Thames gateway area, will exacerbate the overcrowding of the roads and rail services in the area? Residents of Canvey Island need a new road and a new rail station much more than they need the thousands of new houses that will be forced on them by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

I agree. One cannot build hundreds of thousands of new houses without the infrastructure to support them. However, in those areas where development is planned by the ODPM, with a distinct lack of joined-up government, the Department for Transport does not have plans to support the developments with infrastructure improvements.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned new organisations and bodies that have been set up over the past few years. Will he join me in congratulating Transport for London and the Mayor, who have been responsible for a 70,000 reduction in the number of vehicle journeys into London, thanks to the congestion charge, and a massive increase of 54 per cent. in bus usage in the past few years?

There is no doubt that some good work has been done on transport in London by the devolved administration, but the hon. Gentleman has to bear it in mind that it is easy to do good work when one has £1 billion extra to spend on it. Many parts of the country do not enjoy the financial support that London does; the level of service is rather less satisfactory than it is in many parts of London.

The picture in London may be rosy, as Mr. Khan points out, but has my hon. Friend noted that the south-west public transport users forum is far less upbeat about train services in particular? It is a funny way to start a 10-year transport plan by considering shutting the London Waterloo to Bristol service, which stops in the towns in my constituency.

That is right. As my hon. Friend knows, in many parts of the country the reality for many people is that transport alternatives do not exist. It is true that London is reasonably well served by bus services, but those who take suburban rail services into central London suffer from increasingly overcrowded trains. The forecasts are for even more passengers on those trains in future, but no more trains are planned.

The hon. Gentleman mentions overcrowding on trains. Does he agree that given a 36 per cent. increase in rail passenger journeys since 1997—in 2001, there were more than 1 billion passengers for the first time since 1961—the Government are perhaps victims of their own success? That success story is a result of the sound investment policies of this Government, as opposed to the botched privatisation policies of the previous Conservative Government.

The Secretary of State tends to say that that is a consequence of economic growth rather than transport policies. I shall come back to the increase in rail usage, but if trains are overcrowded and likely to become more so, one naturally looks to Government for some ideas on how to ease the congestion and increase capacity. That is distinctly lacking.

The hon. Gentleman is right: the number of people travelling by train has rocketed in the past few years. More passengers are carried on the railways than were carried on a much bigger network before the Beeching cuts. That is a matter of record. The Government's own figures show that the frequency of what, in the technical jargon, are called trains with passengers in excess of capacity—or, to the layman, really, really full trains—has gone up and up. The problem is that the Government forecast a further increase in passengers on the railways over the next few years. The future finances of the railways—the detailed financing in the franchise documents—require a growth in passenger numbers over the next few years to meet the passenger targets.

There are two problems, however. First, the official figures also show that there are no plans to increase the number of trains on our railways over the next seven to 10 years. The rail regulator says that between 2007 and 2014 there will be no growth at all. The maths is simple: if there are no extra trains but 30 to 40 per cent. more passengers, the trains will be more overcrowded.

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. The sum of £49 billion was allocated to the railways in the 10-year plan. Much of that has already been spent, much of it wasted. Will my hon. Friend confirm that, with the single exception of finishing off the Conservative scheme for the cross-channel rail link, the Government are not adding to the capacity of the network by building new railway lines? The money is just disappearing.

Even more astonishing is the fact that not only are the Government not adding to capacity, as they promised, setting out scheme after scheme for improvement, but all schemes have been shelved, postponed or kicked into the long grass. That is happening throughout our transport system.

The second problem is that passengers will pay more and more to travel on overcrowded trains. The same franchise agreements—the same small print—requires an increased contribution from passengers. That is what happened with the fare increases at the start of January. Let nobody think that is simply the work of private sector rail companies: the finances of the rail industry are dictated closely by the Government in the franchise agreements they set up. Those agreements are predicated on higher and higher fares in the years ahead—a higher price for more crowded trains. Passengers will believe that that is not good enough.

Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that his simple argument about passenger numbers and capacity works only if all those passengers travel at peak time? Off-peak, there is enormous capacity in existing trains, so we need to look at policies that encourage people to work flexitime. It is not the simple equation that he suggested.

Yes, it is true that the busiest trains are at peak times, but if the hon. Lady has travelled on a long-distance train recently she will know that passengers frequently have to stand from Birmingham to Manchester, or from London to Birmingham. It is not simply a question of peak or off-peak; there are congestion problems across the network. It may be desirable that the commuters of Milton Keynes work more flexibly, but I am sure that the hon. Lady would not tell them that she did not want them to travel to work in the mornings. Most people have no option; they have to travel to work within a certain window of time. Simply pricing them out of peak times is not good enough.

There are similar problems on the roads. Motorists could be forgiven if they were confused about the Government's roads strategy over the past few years. When Labour took office they scrapped all the road schemes. The Deputy Prime Minister said that he would have failed if he had not cut road usage over the next five years. National schemes were cut. Smaller local schemes were cut. The money to fund small schemes throughout the country evaporated.

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful case indeed—[Interruption.] He certainly is. Is he aware that a number of villages in my constituency on the A47 between King's Lynn and Norwich are crying out for bypasses? The schemes were cut by the Deputy Prime Minister in 1997; now all we get are multi-modal studies. All studies and no action. Many of my constituents are crying out for action from the Government, but they are not getting it.

My hon. Friend's comments speak for themselves—[Laughter.] There may be mirth on the Labour Benches, but Labour Members should find out about their constituents' experience of travelling in this country. The issue will become bigger and bigger, and Labour Members will be held to account for the Government's failings on transport.

Average road speeds are dropping and average travel times on the roads are increasing. The amount of traffic is increasing yet all the schemes that could make a difference are, as my hon. Friend said, on hold or delayed, or no decision has been taken.

The hon. Gentleman said that traffic and travel times on the roads are increasing. Does he accept, however, that London offers a classic example and that when the Mayor introduced congestion charges it led not just to fewer cars being used, and thus less time spent in traffic, but lower emission rates? Will he join me not just in congratulating the Mayor of London but in welcoming the introduction of the congestion charge?

The hon. Gentleman, as a London Member, should be aware that such matters are devolved. I am interested in holding the Secretary of State for Transport to account. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Mayor of London is responsible for the congestion charge, not the Secretary of State.

The truth is that things were not meant to be like this. The Deputy Prime Minister presented a 10-year plan that, he said, would ease all the congestion in the transport system. We were promised wholesale change by 2010.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I want to make a bit more progress.

The Deputy Prime Minister said:

"Now we have a 10 Year Plan that will deliver the scale of resources required to put integrated transport into practice. It will also deliver radical improvements for passengers, motorists, business"—[Interruption.]

Order. We do not want any more sedentary interventions, particularly not from those on the Parliamentary Private Secretary Bench.

Labour Members are trying to divert attention from the Government's transport failures.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it permissible for a member of the Opposition Front-Bench team to pretend to be a Back Bencher by moving between the Front Bench and the Back Benches in the middle of debate? Are the Opposition so short of Back Benchers?

It is not a matter for the occupant of the Chair if hon. Members choose to move around the Chamber to make their comments from different places.

All Opposition Members are determined to represent the interests of our constituents on this important issue.

The Government have set out promise after promise to hon. Members and people in the country. They promised us that, by 2010, they would modernise our main rail arteries—the west and east coast main lines and the great western route—and upgrade our suburban railways in London, Birmingham and Manchester. They promised less congestion and more rail freight, with upgrades to the routes to ports. They promised that Thameslink 2000 would be opened to improve north-south traffic in London and that Crossrail would be complete and easing east-west congestion in London.

The Government also promised us a huge jump forward in light rapid transit systems in our cities, with 25 new light rail routes; a big jump in work on our road network and major new road schemes around the country; and a widening of 5 per cent. of the road network and low-noise surfaces on 60 per cent. of our road network. They are all great promises, but I have always suspected that the Secretary of State for Transport was a little embarrassed to inherit so many of them. However, he seemed enthusiastic enough about them when he took over. He said:

"The Ten Year Plan represents our key reform in the delivery of the government's transport objectives."

It is time for a half term report on the plan. How much visible progress has been made in the past five years? How much of the plan has come to fruition? How much of it is on the way to coming to fruition? There is no doubt that some things have been done. The west coast main line is being modernised. The channel tunnel rail link is approaching completion. The M25 has been widened in places, although a mischievous journalist told me that the Secretary of State's sole transport legacy to Britain would be that he added an extra lane to the M25. There have been some other new road schemes, and a couple of new tram routes, but the truth is that most of the plan has disappeared without trace.

On the railways, most of the promises have disappeared into thin air, or at least into the long grass. The east coast main line modernisation has disappeared to the point where a battle is going on. A company wants to run trains from Sunderland, and GNER wants to run extra trains from Leeds. There is not, however, enough room for both of them to do so. The great western main line improvement has been completely forgotten. The rather inaptly named Thameslink 2000 service has no chance of opening this decade and—would hon. Members believe it?—the Government are planning to preside over a ghost station under St. Pancras because they cannot afford the final part of the interchange between Thameslink trains and the new channel tunnel rail terminus. Let us imagine what will happen: for the next 10 years, passengers will travel non-stop through an empty station before getting off at the next station and walking back to link up with channel tunnel trains. Is that not a damning indictment of the Government's failings on transport?

If the hon. Gentleman is concerned about transport schemes not going ahead, he should visit Gloucestershire, where the new Conservative administration in the county council has just cut £10 million from the integrated transport budget, which has been described by the non-party Cheltenham strategic partnership as representing

"a fundamental shift away from the implementation of sustainable, socially inclusive transport policies", thus putting at risk Government funding that may come to Gloucestershire. We are hearing Tory words, but is it not clear that the Tories act very differently in our constituencies?

The Liberal Democrats are the last people who should accuse others of saying one thing in one place and another thing in Westminster. The hon. Gentleman will realise that the lack of joined-up government means that although the Department for Transport might aspire to improve transport facilities throughout the country, the Deputy Prime Minister is cutting funding to local authorities in county areas, which is making it impossible for authorities to do what they want to do.

The hon. Gentleman's speech is premised on the idea that we are not spending enough on transport. That would be fine if the Leader of the Opposition wanted to spend more, but he criticises us for spending too much across the board. How does the hon. Gentleman square those two positions?

If the hon. Gentleman is patient, he will find that my thesis is not that the Government are spending inadequate sums. I am asking the Government how it is possible to spend so much extra money on the transport system—the motion refers specifically to the amounts that are being spent—yet fail to deliver so many of the things that were promised.

There are many examples of that. We know about Crossrail. Targets for rail freight have been abandoned and the upgraded links to ports such as Felixstowe have been downgraded. The subsidy for rail freight has been cut in half. There were plans to allow suburban rail lines to take more passengers by adding extra coaches and lengthening platforms, but the Government paid South West Trains to take out a carriage from planned new trains because they abandoned plans to lengthen platforms. That was doubly ironic because one of the explicit promises in the 10-year plan was to cut congestion and ensure that no passenger stood for more than 20 minutes. You will know from travelling in from East Anglia, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as do many of us from travelling on trains around London and the experiences of our constituents, that that aspiration is a million miles from reality in far too many places. Worryingly, as I said to Dr. Starkey, passengers are standing on inter-city services, too.

There was a much vaunted promise to open 25 new light rail lines. I understand that the Secretary of State has taken a hard look at the economics of trams and has reached the view that guided busways are better light rapid transit systems than trams. However, if we accept that he has taken that decision, where are all the guided busway schemes? I asked him in a written question last week how many of the 25 rapid transit schemes were on the way. A couple have opened so far and there are about six more in development, although it is by no means certain that they will be open by 2010—another promise broken.

The Secretary of State made a whole string of promises on roads to put flesh on the bones of the general announcements in the 10-year plan, but many are back on hold again. The Stonehenge tunnel was given the go-ahead in 2002, but put on hold again last week. Improvements to the M6 were announced in 2002, but there is no sign of them happening. Improvements to the M1 are on hold. The link between the M6 toll road and the M54 that was announced in 2003 was still a matter of debate during Transport questions last week. Improvements to the A14 were announced in 2003, but we have seen nothing yet. Smaller projects, such as the Kiln lane link in my constituency, were announced three or four years ago, but are now back on hold again. There have been lots of promises and press releases, but the bulldozers remain firmly in their garages. The Government pledged to treble the number of cycling trips in the 10-year plan, but the number of trips is falling, not rising.

The hon. Gentleman refers to the failure to complete guided busways and widen the M1. Is he aware that my constituency will have the new Translink guided busway by 2008 due to an investment of some £84 million? The M1 will be widened between junctions 6a and 10 due to investment of £240 million. Those projects represent part of the investment of around £218 million in my area that proves that our 10-year transport plan is working, contrary to what the hon. Gentleman says.

The hon. Lady clearly demonstrates a good reason why we should be worried about the Government's numeracy strategy. Even if she is right that one busway will be approved and constructed in her constituency, rather than losing Government support, as many others have, there will still be 24 more to go. Believe me, the Government are nowhere near meeting their commitment on 25 new rapid transit systems by 2010. However, as I said to Edward Miliband, we recognise in the motion the fact that more money is being spent.

The hon. Gentleman has been generous in giving way, but will he clarify his attitude towards investment? In my constituency, we have seen the benefits of the investment. In 1996, the Conservative Government cancelled, arbitrarily and suddenly, the Blunsdon bypass, which was to bring much-needed relief to that community. This Government have invested the money to put that bypass back, for which the whole of Blunsdon is very grateful. This Government have trebled the amount of funding going to Wiltshire county council for its local transport plans. As a result, we are seeing much needed traffic-mitigation measures in the village of Cricklade in my constituency. The Government have quintupled the amount of funding going to Swindon borough council—

Order. The hon. Gentleman has given us enough to work on for the time being.

As I was about to say, I fully accept that the Government have increased their budgets. Indeed, the Secretary of State has boosted spending beyond the original 10-year plan forecast. He said in 2004 that the spending review

"raises planned spending over the next three years from £10.4 billion this year to more than £12.8 billion by 2007. That is 60 per cent. more in real terms than in 1997. Spending will be higher than the investment plans we set out four years ago. By 2010, we will be spending £1.2 billion more per year than the 10-year plan envisaged."—[Hansard, 20 July 2004; Vol. 424, c. 158.]

He frequently boasts that he is spending £87 million a week on the railways, and he is right. It is not quite as much as that in this financial year, but it certainly will be in the next. Five years ago the Government were spending £1 billion; in the coming financial year it will be £5 billion. Over the same period the Highways Agency budget has gone up from £3 billion to around £5.4 billion. The Government have provided an extra £1 billion a year for transport in London.

So if all this extra money has been provided and all these extra sums are being found, why, five years after the publication of the 10-year plan, which was lauded by the Secretary of State, have so many of its projects designed to ease congestion by 2010 disappeared? That is the conundrum; that is what the Secretary of State needs to ask himself. If the Government are spending so much money, where is it going?

The Secretary of State will undoubtedly tell us later that he is trying to catch up with decades of under-investment on the transport network. If that is the case, why did the Government make all those promises, produce a 10-year plan, set out all the different things that they were going to do by 2010 and walk away from those commitments less than five years later? That is what this House has a right to know. Without the expansion in capacity that those projects represented, the travelling public face years and years of additional congestion.

All around the network projects are being cancelled and promises are being broken. Last week I received a written answer from the Secretary of State showing that of the 112 road schemes that had made it into the Government's targeted programme of improvements, only 32 have been completed. We know from hon. Members around the House that in very many parts of the country—obviously not in the constituency of Mr. Wills, but in the constituencies of hon. Members throughout the House—projects that were planned and promised are not happening.

I think of projects such as the improvements to road surfacing. Anyone who has been down to see the A30 in the west country knows that the noisy road surface there is causing real distress to residents who live close to it. The Government promised—the Prime Minister promised—that they would deal with that and that they would renew those road surfaces by 2007. I discovered recently that last summer Ministers sent a memo around the Highways Agency saying, "We're going to drop the commitment to replace noisy road surfaces. We're not going to make a public statement or one to the House, but here's a line to take in case anybody asks a difficult question." That is another promise broken.

What happened to the rail schemes? What did happen to the east coast modernisation, to longer platforms for suburban trains, to plans for Crossrail by 2010 and to Thameslink 2000? What happened to the new transit systems? What happened to the push to increase cycling? I cannot understand why the Government made so many promises, set out so many new schemes, spent so much extra money, and yet all those schemes have been abandoned. I await with interest to hear the Secretary of State explain specifically why.

We were told in the 10-year plan document that there was more than enough money to deliver all the Government's promises, which in turn has proved to be another worthless promise. May I ask the Secretary of State how it is possible to promise so much and deliver so little? I listen carefully to his speeches, but he seems to have only one idea left to tackle Britain's transport problems, and that is his plan to introduce a nationwide system of road pricing. His grand road pricing scheme may play a part in future public policy on transport. We need to look at that and discuss it with him, but first he must answer important questions about how it will work, how it will be paid for, and how it will be enforced. Another question, however, is top of the list. It is self-evident that we cannot use road pricing to encourage people to leave their cars at home if we do not give them any alternative transport. Where are those alternatives? They are not provided by rush-hour trains, which increasingly suffer from overcrowding that far exceeds health and safety guidelines. They are not provided by buses, because in most of the country outside London services are all too infrequent. They are not provided by tram routes, which the Government promised but which they will no longer provide. What is the alternative that the Government are providing for the travellers whom they said they want to encourage off Britain's roads? At the moment, the answer to that question is virtually nothing at all.

The Government have been in power for nearly nine years. Today's Ministers have no more idea about how to make transport in this country better than they did 10 years ago, even after endless studies, White Papers and blue-skies thinking. We need a proper transport strategy. We need quick improvements to ease congestion and increase capacity. We need value for money from vastly increased Government spending. We need a long-term plan, both to support economic growth and to ensure that our transport system does not destroy our environment. We will not obtain that plan from a Government who have run out of ideas. Things are not going to get better under Labour. It will be the job of the next Conservative Government to start getting British transport back on track.

I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and add instead thereof:

"acknowledges the importance of providing a clear strategy of sustained long-term investment and forward planning to address decades of under-investment in the transport system;
welcomes the further investment and new strategic framework provided by the subsequent Future of Transport White Paper;
recognises the achievements since the 10 Year Plan was published, including the highest number of people using the railways since the 1960s and the delivery of major strategic road schemes, with further schemes either under way or due to start before April 2008; acknowledges that one of the main reasons for the continuing pressure on transport networks is that the United Kingdom is enjoying the longest period of sustained economic growth for more than 200 years;
and supports the Government's determination to take the decisions which will be required to meet these pressures and put UK transport on a sustainable footing, including tackling the environmental impacts of transport, trialling road-pricing and building on the improvements in rail performance, as well as planning for long-term transport needs."

I am grateful to Chris Grayling for giving us another opportunity to debate transport, thus enabling me to point out the differences in approach between the Conservatives and ourselves. I hoped that he would devote rather more than the final page of his speech to what the Conservatives would do differently, but one never knows from one day to the next what Conservative policy is, so he is bound to be cautious. In the four years that I have served as Secretary of State, I have lost count of the number of shadow Secretaries of State who have been and gone. I live in hope that we will hear just one idea from one of them about what we ought to do in future.

Will the Secretary of State give way?

I am not going to speak for ages as I usually do, and I should like to deal with the case that has been made. As the Liberal Democrats are doing so well, however, I shall give way to Dr. Pugh.

I should like to make a specific point. A question that was dodged throughout by Chris Grayling concerned the Conservative attitude to congestion charging in London, given that the party now has a leader who is a prominent London cyclist.

The right hon. Gentleman is on some days, I am sure.

May I start with the railways? I do not want to spend much time revisiting the history of Britain's transport system. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is entitled to ask questions about the Government's policy, but it is worth reminding him where we started. In 1997, we inherited a botched privatisation, and Railtrack, which was the Tories' poll tax on wheels, had lost control of its expenditure. Hatfield showed that it did not have any idea about the state of the network for which it was responsible, and eventually it became bankrupt. When we last debated these matters, the House will recall the damning indictments in the court judgment of the poor state of the track and the incompetence of the people whom the Conservatives had allowed to run our railways. In addition, we faced a period of falling expenditure. In the year before the general election in 1997 not a single new railway train was delivered—the orders had just dried up. Against that background, it is not surprising that we needed to ensure that we did a number of things to improve our network.

The hon. Gentleman rightly drew attention to the fact that we have doubled spending on the railways and asked where the money had gone. May I give him some examples? In 2004–05, 626 miles of railway were replaced. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the west coast main line. Seven and a half billion pounds were invested in that. New state-of-the-art trains are running on that line, which have cut the journey time to Glasgow by 30 minutes and to Birmingham by 20 minutes, with greater frequency available. The southern region power supply had to be upgraded because Railtrack did not appreciate that new trains could not run off a power supply system that was basically installed in the 1930s. Phase 1 of the channel tunnel rail link was opened, cutting the journey time to Paris by 20 minutes.

That was a Conservative Government scheme.

I am sorry to tell the right hon. Gentleman that this Government had to rescue the scheme because the financial arrangements set up by the previous Government had collapsed by 1998. It was therefore necessary for us to put the scheme back on the rails, so to speak, and it was delivered on time and on budget. Phase 2 starts next year. Anyone going to St. Pancras now will see the results of huge sums of money being spent on the railways, which will bring real benefit.

We have had the biggest rolling stock replacement ever. Almost 40 per cent. of railway carriages have been replaced over the past few years, many of them on the very London commuter services that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell uses and which he mentioned.

Several hon. Members:

rose—

I will give way in a moment.

All that has been done at a time when more people are travelling on the railways than at almost any time since the second world war. There are more than 2,000 additional weekday services than there were in 1996–97. That is another example of how we can reduce overcrowding. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is right—that is the big challenge now. Having brought up reliability from an unacceptably low level of performance in the past, we now need to make sure that we can cater for the additional passengers that we want to carry. Also, we have introduced the train protection warning system across the network.

In London, £1 billion a year is being spent on the tube. The hon. Gentleman should pay tribute to the Labour Mayor who is doing that. The Jubilee line extension and the docklands light railway opened just before Christmas. He mentioned trams. Yes, there have been difficulties with three schemes, but it is worth noting that Nottingham tram, which I opened about 18 months ago, is doing extremely well.

More people are travelling by train, more money is being put in after years of underinvestment and there are more railway carriages—all that seems to me to compare favourably with what we inherited from the Conservatives when they lost office in 1997. Of course, there is more to do. I am about to come to roads, and a similar point must be made in that context, but in the interests of equity I shall give way to the Conservatives before the Liberals.

I am sorry to ambush the right hon. Gentleman, but we have some capacity problems on the Broxbourne to Cheshunt line, which we share with the Stansted Express. Would it be possible for me to write to the Secretary of State and perhaps have a meeting with him or one of his Ministers to discuss ways of getting extra capacity on that line without any additional cost to the public purse—perhaps by getting BAA to make a slightly largely contribution, and possibly letting us share some of its Stansted Express trains?

If the hon. Gentleman wrote, I am sure that the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend Derek Twigg, would be happy to meet him. If the hon. Gentleman can persuade BAA to pay for increased capacity as far south as Cheshunt into Liverpool street, I will happily join him, although I am not sure that BAA will accept that proposition—at least, not without some persuasion. However, the hon. Gentleman is right. That is a case of a railway line on which there has been a huge increase in the number of passengers. With the additional housing that we know about, never mind the housing that is coming, plus the developments at Stansted airport, capacity is one of the big issues that need to be addressed. I shall return to how we do that.

My right hon. Friend briefly mentioned trams. In Greater Manchester progress has been made, hopefully, in respect of Metrolink, not least through the authority's acceptance of the risk. Did he glean from the shadow Minister's opening speech that a future Conservative Government would write a blank cheque to capital schemes with costs spiralling out of control?

I have yet to be persuaded that the Conservatives would spend the same amount as we are spending, let alone more. I shall deal with that shortly. Although I have said time and again that money is not everything in transport, if we do not spend the money, we cannot be surprised if the infrastructure is not there or if it begins to crumble.

The hon. Gentleman began his new position with a flurry of activity on 1 January—I come from north of the border, where 1 January is not the obvious day on which to start such things—including a press release condemning the Government on their lack of progress. That press release, which included the complaint that we had junked a number of road schemes, was re-released on 26 January, which at least shows that it was durable. I was surprised that the press release said that we had junked the A120 Stansted to Braintree road, because that road opened in July 2004. He also drew attention to the A46 Newark to Lincoln road, with which I am not familiar, although I understand that it opened in July 2003.

Order. Will the Secretary of State address the Chair, not only for my sake, but for the sake of the microphones?

With pleasure, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

The hon. Gentleman also complained about the A1(M) Ferrybridge to Hook Moor road, from which he said the Government had walked away. That is surprising, because it is being built at the moment, and anyone who visits the area can see construction taking place. I therefore take the hon. Gentleman's complaints with a pinch of salt. There are undoubtedly areas in which we could do better and there are roads that remain to be built, but he and I could travel together down the A120 or the A46 and appreciate the investment by the Labour Government.

I am sorry for misleading people in that press release. I always try to rely on impeccable sources for my information, and in that case my source was the Highways Agency website, so something is clearly going wrong in the Secretary of State's Department. Perhaps he should tell the Highways Agency to provide more accurate information on which Opposition Members can rely.

I do not know where the hon. Gentleman got his information. However, if he travels down two of those roads, he will find that they have been open for some time, while the third is under construction.

In 1989, the then Conservative Government announced some 500 road construction schemes worth £12 billion, but the programme had fallen to 150 schemes worth £7 billion by 1997. That Conservative Government axed 237 road schemes in almost every county in the country. Why did that happen? It was not because the Conservative party suddenly acquired environmental credentials. The House will recall that the early 1990s saw one of the deepest recessions of the past century. [Interruption.] Mr. Redwood has mentioned the exchange rate mechanism, which I can see is a fond memory. He will also remember who was special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer at that time. [Hon. Members: "Who?"] The current leader of the Conservative party. That Conservative Government got into difficulties because when their economic policy failed, their transport policy collapsed with it.

I am interested to know the Conservative policy on roads. On 8 November last year, the leader of the Tory party said:

"Britain now needs a concerted programme of road building".

That was before his election as leader of the Conservative party. At the beginning of January, however, Mr. Gummer, who heads the commission advising the Conservatives on transport policy, said:

"There is no doubt about it—there must be an assumption against road building".

In the space of a month, the leader said that we need a road-building programme, and the adviser said that there should be a presumption against road building. I am willing to be flexible, but I cannot see how a major road-building programme can be reconciled with a presumption against road building. That beggars belief and perhaps illustrates some of the problems that the Tories are getting themselves into. We look forward to the day when they nail their colours to the mast, because many of the nods and the winks will not be borne out.

Does the Secretary of State agree that one of the best ways of summarising the case that he is making very effectively is that long-term average investment in transport infrastructure in Europe is about 1 per cent. of GDP, yet in this country over the past 25 years, for two thirds of which we had Conservative Governments, it has been a full one third less than that? It takes a substantial period, does it not, to redress underinvestment over such a lengthy period, and are we not relatively happy with the progress that has been made so far?

I think that all of us would prefer to make progress as fast as we possibly can. My hon. Friend is right to say that one of the problems with transport is that it sometimes takes a frustratingly long time to see the results.

Let me respond to the point made by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell. Since 2001, 35 major trunk road and motorway schemes have been completed. Fifteen are under construction and a further 21 will start in the next three years. I think that the House will recognise that, yes, there will be changes in the road programme from time to time, but we have been able to put money into the road programme, as we have into the railways, to ensure that we improve transport.

I should like to clarify something for the right hon. Gentleman. Conservative policy will be expressed and defined by the leader of the party and the relevant shadow spokesmen, so he should listen to what the leader says. My right hon. Friend Mr. Gummer has his own views, which he will express through the policy group on the environment. As chairman of the economic competitiveness group, I will also be thinking about transport issues and will doubtless draw attention to the need for more capacity of all kinds for the sake of a growing economy. Our advice will go into the pot in 18 months' time, out of which will come a revised and even better Conservative policy than the one that we currently have. I think that that is very clear.

I certainly hope that it is better than the current policy, because there is no current policy at all. It does not matter whose policy it is—I look forward to it in any case.

My right hon. Friend talked about the legacy of the decades of underinvestment. Was he as surprised as me to hear no mention from the Opposition of the fact that more than half of our stations are inaccessible to disabled people—for example, Earlsfield in my constituency? Can he confirm that there are plans to invest more than £370 million over the next 10 years on making those stations accessible to disabled people and, for example, to young mothers with buggies?

We are very aware of that. The problem is that many of our stations were designed by the Victorians before access was considered a problem. We hope to make an announcement on that shortly.

The other night, I had the dubious pleasure of working through the official Opposition's manifesto, largely to try to get an idea of their views on transport. Does my right hon. Friend agree that any party that devotes seven lines of text in its manifesto to this very important subject does not deserve to have an Opposition day debate on it?

I am more generous; I enjoy the opportunity to explore exactly what the Conservatives' thinking is on transport. Sadly, today is no exception.

rose—

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment. In fairness to him, I was about to say one or two things about the Liberals. Their amendment was not selected, but I can anticipate what Tom Brake is going to say because I read his press release. He circulated it for three days, but has yet to have it picked up by any of the newspapers, so I will help him out. He complains about an apparent increase in the cost of the roads programme. I draw his attention to the fact that since 2003—I make no bones about this—we have built in a so-called optimism bias, because some of the costs were not realistic.

There has also been an increase in construction costs. The comment by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell about bulldozers in garages is simply not true—would that it were, in some ways. The problem is that so much construction is going on that there has been some inflation in construction costs. That is why these projects are costing more. Often when the optimism bias is built in, it reduces as the costs bottom out. I wonder whether the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington agrees with his acting leader, who said in The Scotsman today that he thought that public expenditure was high enough and that the Liberals would no longer campaign for an increase in it. The Liberals' normal position is that we ought to spend more, not less, on transport.

I am happy with the position that the acting leader has adopted.

Will the Secretary of State confirm that the parliamentary answer that I received from him states that, taking VAT, inflation and optimism bias into account, there is an overrun of £1 billion on road-building projects from before 2003?

No.

That is what the answer states.

Of course I know what the answer said but, as I explained briefly, we are taking a far more realistic view of what projects are likely to cost. Under successive Governments, people have presented projects, said that they would cost x but they ultimately cost x plus 20 per cent.

Will the Secretary of State give way?

I shall shortly. I promised the hon. Gentleman that I would and I keep my promises.

We need to be more realistic. There is no doubt that, in several cases, costs have been higher than we thought they would be. That is a general problem that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell could have cited. I do not believe that anyone realised the true state of the railways in the late 1990s. It was not until Railtrack went bust and we could open the books that we realised how much money had to be spent on putting the railways back on a proper footing.

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for finally giving way. Why is he not prepared to accept the same cost overruns for light rail schemes as he accepts for road building? Indeed, he has cited cost overruns as a reason for scrapping several light rail schemes. Is not that a case of one rule for road building and another for light rail?

No, it is not. Earlier, the hon. Gentleman complained that we refused to sanction the big cost increase in the tunnel at Stonehenge. I wanted the tunnel go ahead because it would have been great to move the traffic away from a national monument. However, the ground conditions are far worse than people thought and the cost would have increased dramatically. When the cost of a tunnel is £500 million, one has to think about it. Even the Liberal Democrats, when they are in office in local government, tend to take a slightly—only slightly—more realistic view of cost increases. Simply ignoring cost increases is fiscally incontinent.

The Stonehenge tunnel is a good example and I understand the Secretary of State's predicament. However, why did he announce the scheme before he knew how much it would cost? Why did not he do the work beforehand? Why does he announce new schemes only to work out subsequently that he cannot afford them?

The hon. Gentleman is right that I announced the Stonehenge scheme in 2002. An inquiry subsequently took place because of objections by the National Trust and others. In the meantime, the Highways Agency did more exploratory drilling in the normal course of working up the scheme and discovered that the chalk, far from being firm, was moist. That meant an increase in cost. When faced with that, one has a choice. One could take the Liberal Democrat view of, "It's somebody else's money, let's just do it", or decide, "This is half a billion quid, we've got to be realistic." If we could get the road away from Stonehenge, most people would agree that that was a huge improvement. However, we cannot simply sign away projects regardless of the cost.

The debate should be about what we do in the future. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is right that there is general agreement that we can blame successive Governments—Labour and Tory, and probably Liberal when they were in power—[Interruption.] Gladstone had his weaknesses.

For fallen women.

Yes. In those days, the tabloid press was not as bad as it is now.

We can all sign up to the proposition that successive Governments did not spend as much as they should have done. That is why we have increased investment. Let us not forget that the Opposition have voted against every singly penny of that increase since 1997. The reason I sought to draw the hon. Gentleman earlier on his spending proposals was that the shadow Chancellor said about future spending:

"It is called sharing the proceeds of growth".

The long and the short of it is that the Conservatives would not spend as much as we are spending, and we are entitled at some stage to find out where they would spend less, how much less it would be, and what the implications would be.

As we have had no clarification from the Conservatives on this matter, may I tell the House that when they took over in Gloucestershire, they cut bus priority schemes, park-and-ride schemes and the planned purchase of new buses? Perhaps that is an indication of their direction of travel.

We have learned a lot about Gloucestershire this afternoon. I do not think that I can add to what the hon. Gentleman has said.

When the 10-year plan was launched in 2000, it was the first time that any Government had been prepared to set out transport planning for 10 years. Conservative Members who have been Ministers will know that the old days of annual spending rounds and stop-go spending were ruinous for transport. The reason for things going wrong with many road and rail schemes is that people thought that they had the money for them, only to discover that they did not.

The 10-year plan was a big achievement. However, I make no bones about the fact that there have been changes to it since it was published. The day I was appointed to this job I said that I was going to review it, see whether it was right and make any changes that were appropriate. And I did. I announced them in 2004, so in some ways the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is about two years behind on these matters.

Our policy is quite clear: we need sustained investment and, in addition—this is important, because I agree that money is not everything—we need better management. I have already talked about Network Rail, but on the roads we now have traffic officers who clear up after incidents. Instead of a road being shut for five or six hours after a lorry crash, for example, it can now reopen much more quickly. Following the explosion at Buncefield just before Christmas, we thought that the motorway might have to be shut for several hours, but because of the action taken by the traffic officers, it was able to be reopened much more quickly. The Traffic Management Act 2004 will make it more difficult for people repeatedly to dig up roads, sometimes for weeks on end and with no obvious signs of activity taking place.

The third strand to our policy, in addition to investment and management, is our ability to plan ahead for the long term. That strikes me as the subject that the public really want to hear about, rather than past glories and failures.

Chris Grayling spoke on behalf of the Conservatives for almost 30 minutes, yet he made no mention of rural bus services. My suspicion is that the failed deregulation of the bus services in the 1980s was the reason for his not mentioning that subject. Will the Secretary of State explain in detail what has now been done for bus service provision in rural localities?

I will. I want to say something about bus services in the context of road pricing, so I will deal with that matter shortly.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is disappointing that the Conservatives made no mention in their manifesto of matching the Government's commitment of £350 million to ensure free bus travel for disabled and elderly people?

It is disappointing, but not surprising. I imagine that we shall deliver the same verdict on their next manifesto as well.

In regard to planning for the long term, I want to concentrate on several issues. The House will recall that I published an aviation White Paper in 2003 which set out the long-term strategy for aviation over the next 20 to 30 years. I mention that because that is the kind of time scale that we need to think about in transport planning. The White Paper was widely welcomed as a good example of the Government being prepared to take a long-term view of these issues. I notice that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell said in the Evening Standard on 28 January:

"We are going to take a long hard look at government plans on aviation".

Well, it is three years since we published the White Paper. I would have thought that we might have seen just a glimmer of the Conservatives' thinking on the matter by now.

We reorganised the railways in a much more satisfactory way last year. Next year, we will publish our longer-term strategy on spending to 2015. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is right that capacity is the key issue, not just on the railways but on the roads. We will address that then, when we will also have the benefit of the Eddington review and the longer-term strategy.

We keep returning to the central issue of road congestion. I have said that we need additional capacity, especially at some of the big pinch points. We also need to manage the system better, which we are doing. I firmly believe, however, that we need to consider how road pricing can reduce congestion. We are all familiar with the problem—traffic is growing, the number of cars has increased by something like 60 per cent. in the past 25 years, people are travelling longer distances and more people have access to cars, partly because of economic prosperity. We can no longer say that the issue is 10 years away—it always will be unless we do something about it, and we are doing that.

I am not quite sure where the Conservatives stand on this issue, because the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell sometimes gives the impression of being hostile. In November last year, as I said, he was critical of the satellite tracking of cars. I notice, however, that the Leader of the Opposition, in setting out his transport policy—which he appears to have lifted from my last speech—talks about investment management and then says that we should examine

"new solutions for road charging based on usage and time of day".

He seems to be going one way. I am not sure how far the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell is going with him.

We need to make progress in this area. In the next year or so, as I have told the House previously, I hope to decide in which part of the country we will trial road pricing. It will be a fairly large area, as it cannot be done on a small scale. I have made it clear that road pricing can work only if it is accompanied by a major improvement in public transport, and about £10 billion will be available through the transport innovation fund during the spending period to 2015. The congestion charge in London has worked partly because London has always had a better transport system. Ninety per cent. of people coming into central London do so by public transport. If it is to work outside London, we need to improve public transport, and we will do that.

As part of that—this brings me to the bus point—the House might have noticed that I made it clear in a written statement last Thursday that we will change the current regime to ensure that in the areas where road pricing is to be trialled there will be greater control over bus services. If we are going to say to somebody, "Don't take your car", we must be able to say that there is a train, tram or bus, and we must be satisfied as to the adequacy and reliability of the service. We have been talking to the Office of Fair Trading about that over the past few weeks, and because I am determined to press ahead I assure the House that we will make changes.

In addition to that, as my hon. Friend Mr. Brown was right to say, we will continue to improve rural bus services, and we will examine how bus usage can be improved outside London because there are areas where bus companies and local authorities could co-operate a bit more. If there is any impediment to that, we will do our best to remove it.

Will the Secretary of State give way?

I will do so in a moment, because the hon. Gentleman has been patient listening to my insults and criticisms.

I hope that, at some point, the House will have a good opportunity to discuss road pricing, and perhaps we should arrange that. When I look ahead 20 years, I cannot see how we will deal with the congestion that we will face in this country unless we all agree on that approach. At some point in the future, Governments will change, and if we want such a long-term change to take place, we need a common approach. That is not to say that there are not difficult choices to be made and questions to be answered, but that is why we cannot leap into this tomorrow morning. It is probably one of the biggest transport issues that we face, however, and we need to make progress now.

I look forward with interest to hearing more about the Secretary of State's proposals and plans for a pilot scheme. We will examine that pilot scheme carefully, and he will find that we do so with a sceptical eye, as he would expect, as that is our job. He has talked about rural buses. Is he prepared to put on the record a commitment to rural railways, too, given the statement and the changed guidelines published last week? Is he prepared to commit to retaining intact the current rail network for the foreseeable future?

I welcome the hon. Gentleman's first point. I hope that he will engage with us constructively. I am happy for that to happen, formally or informally. As for the railways, what we published last Thursday were revised guidelines that were necessary following the abolition of the Strategic Rail Authority. In the introduction, I explained that while an increasing number of people were using the railways and I wanted that to continue, clearer guidelines were needed.

I have said time and again that I am happy to support rural railway lines. The community development partnerships that we announced a couple of years ago are designed to give lines that are in the last chance saloon a chance to continue, and they have been quite successful. It beggars belief that we should reach a point at which no one is using a train or a station, and say that nothing can ever be done about it.

The story in The Independent—I looked no further than the author's name before returning the newspaper to the shelf—was a complete exaggeration, but that is what he does, and we just have to live with it. I am pretty confident about the prospects for the railways, but to say that no network or service can ever change cannot be the right approach.

The hon. Gentleman did not mention the fact that road pricing is a big challenge for us. Congestion is a challenge, but so is the environment, given the pollution caused by any form of transport. The European Union emissions trading scheme is advancing, mainly because of pressure from us and from other countries. We need to consider additional trading schemes. I announced a renewable transport fuel obligation of 5 per cent. last November, and we have made changes to vehicle taxation to encourage more environmentally friendly cars. The Mayor of London was able to announce a low emission zone yesterday, thanks to legislation introduced by us.

Those are all important developments and we should not forget about them, but many other things could be done at the same time. I understand from his press release that the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington intends to refer to that as well, and I am with him to that extent. We and the Liberal Democrats may agree on the ends; the difference between us relates to the means. The Liberal Democrats are rather slow in coming forward in that regard.

I welcome the debate. I am sorry that we do not yet know what the Conservative party policy is, but we do know, thanks to the right hon. Member for Wokingham, what the process is, and at least three people are contributing to it. There could be three policies at the end of that, but so much the better. We in the Labour party believe in choice.

I commend the amendment to the House.

Members can imagine how the suspense has built up in the last few months over the Conservative transport policy. We have been given tantalising glimpses of elusive education policies, veils have been lifted and swiftly dropped on law-and-order proposals, and health policies have been dangled before us and then whipped away.

As the Secretary of State said, today's debate should have provided an opportunity for the Conservative spokesman to parade, in all its splendour, his party's position on transport, and to reconcile the views of his party's leader with those of Mr. Gummer. I shall not repeat the quotations that the Secretary of State has already put on record, but he could also have quoted the Chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee, Mr. Ainsworth. When the Highways Agency invited tenders for the widening to four lanes the remaining three sections of the M25, he said:

"When the Heathrow section of the M25 was widened, I warned that the work would cause massive short-term disruption with no long-term benefit, since traffic volume would simply increase to fill the new capacity. Regrettably, this has turned out to be true.

I fear the same will be the case for this new contract; all the evidence is that when you increase road capacity, traffic simply grows to fill it."

The Secretary of State could have quoted those words from the hon. Member for East Surrey—who is not here today—and encouraged Chris Grayling to try to reconcile those views. In fact, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell could have tried to reconcile the views of the leader of his party with those of the then hon. Member for Witney.

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would stop spreading odd comments about Conservative policy that are not true, and tell us about the Liberal Democrats' policies. Is he one of those who believe that they should clobber the car in urban areas and then say that they would not do it in rural areas, and explain how the two can be kept separate? Can he also tell us what are the differences between the three contenders for the leadership of his own little party on transport matters? I believe that they disagree wildly.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention and leave it to him to highlight odd policies. I will come to Liberal Democrat policies at the end of my speech.

The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell could have tried to reconcile the views of the leader of his party with those that the latter held when he was just an ordinary Member of Parliament. The Secretary of State quoted the right hon. Member for Witney as stating on 8 November that Britain now needs a concerted programme of road building. In a speech to the Renewable Energy Association on 1 December, the right hon. Member for Witney said that

"climate change is one of the three greatest challenges facing mankind today . . . Our carbon emissions have increased in five of the seven years from 1997 to 2004 . . . We're now on a track which, without a significant change of course, will lead to an increase, not a reduction, in carbon emissions in this country."

It is clear that he wants both to build new roads and to reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions, but the Department for Transport's own figures show that that is not possible. Unfortunately, new roads equal more traffic, which equals more emissions. The figures also show that just under 25 per cent. more traffic is going to be generated by road-building schemes—and that is just by those schemes for which the Department can actually provide figures. Of course, we cannot be absolutely certain about the projected traffic increase, because figures exist for only 36 per cent. of the Department for Transport's schemes. Moreover, data on the increase in carbon dioxide emissions resulting from road-building schemes exist for fewer than half such schemes.

It is also hard to reconcile the leader of the Conservative party's enthusiasm for confronting climate change, to which he referred in today's Prime Minister's questions, with the practice of Tory councils. I have some good examples. Barnet is well known for removing cycle lanes. In Bath, the Tory council tried to scrap a bus gate that allows buses easier access to the city centre. In Hampshire, the council voted last year to scrap funding for 18 bus routes and reduced funding for a further eight. [Interruption.] I hear cries of, "Excellent!" from the Conservative Front Bench—perhaps it was from the Back Benches; I am not sure which—but the official Opposition adopt many such transport policies.

In West Berkshire, the Tory council slashed the highways capital budget, which meant less funding for cycle lanes. West Berkshire previously won an award for the most improved highway authority in England in respect of implementing measures to increase cycling. In Oxfordshire, plans have been shelved indefinitely to link a number of outlying villages to Abingdon. That is the record and I am afraid that it does not sit comfortably with the Conservative leader's recent pronouncements.

I should not dwell for too long on Tory policies, but I should point out that their quality of life commission is right to seek to reconcile the irreconcilable.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I happily give way to the right hon. Gentleman a further time.

In the light of the hon. Gentleman's argument that we should not build roads because people might use them, does he therefore think that we should not build hospitals because ill people might fill them? Does he further think that ill people might sometimes need roads to get to hospital?

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his further intervention. We are clearly in very odd territory, which I shall leave to him.

Reviewing the targets in the 10-year transport plan is an interesting intellectual exercise, but given that the Government have conceded that it is dead in the water, has jumped the rails and the wheels have fallen off, it is much more relevant to look at the targets issued in July 2004 and the Department for Transport's autumn performance report, which was published last December. In looking at those targets, we need to take particular account of what the Prime Minister said in the foreword to the report, "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change". He said that:

"it is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases . . . is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable."

The Department's current target is to provide transport that works for everyone, and I am sure that we can all agree with that. Other objectives include supporting the economy through the provision of

"efficient and reliable inter-regional transport systems".

Part of that will involve the development of ways to measure congestion. Regrettably, we cannot assess the Department's performance in that respect, as details of progress are to be published at a later date.

The Department's second target is to improve the punctuality and reliability of rail services. Good progress is reportedly being made, and I do not necessarily disagree, but what about overcrowding, to which the Secretary of State referred earlier? I know that he likes to consult my press releases, so he may be interested in one that was published late last year. It pointed out that, each day, 25,000 passengers on trains in and out of London travel in conditions that the Department's statistics officially designate as overcrowded. They are the lucky ones, of course. The unlucky ones are those who cannot get on the train in the first place, but their numbers are not taken into account.

The increase in overcrowding on some services since 1997 has been phenomenal. On WAGN trains, overcrowding has increased by no less than 485 per cent., while on c2c's morning services it has risen by 263 per cent. The increase in overcrowding on various other services has also been very large, and the crush can only get worse in the poor weather that we can expect over the next couple of months.

The Government cannot expect people to get off the roads and on to public transport when our trains are over capacity and there is no room to accommodate passengers. They must bring forward some concrete proposals and the Secretary of State has waxed lyrical about double-decker trains. I had hoped that he would have used his speech to say more about the progress being made in that regard, and perhaps the Minister of State will do so when he winds up. We would welcome some information about that, although I suspect that the plan has not gone much beyond speech making.

Interestingly, the Department has no target for fares. That may be just as well, as there have been above inflation increases at a time when the network is severely overcrowded. Those rises have sent exactly the wrong signal, given that the Government are trying to get people out of cars and on to trains. Moreover, they entrench the UK's position as the country with the most expensive rail fares in Europe.

I share the hon. Gentleman's concern about fares. People in my Kettering constituency are paying more for their midland mainline services to London, but increasingly have to stand for an hour. Does he agree that, when the Government review rail franchises, they should include a clause that means that passengers who buy a ticket for a journey that lasts longer than, say, 15 or 20 minutes are entitled to a seat?

The hon. Gentleman raised a similar possibility in Transport questions. It is a valid point and I hope that the Minister of State will be able to give us both some comfort about overcrowding and what passengers can look forward to in years to come.

I am grateful to the Thomas Cook agency for producing a helpful report that confirms that, for £10, people can travel 300 miles in Slovakia and 200 in Italy, but only 38 in Britain. They can go three times further than that in France. For £10, people in Britain can get to the next county if they are lucky, whereas in most European nations they can get to the next country.

The Government's second transport objective was to improve the accessibility, punctuality and reliability of local and regional transport systems, and to look at buses. The Secretary of State was asked about rural bus services today and the second target on bus services related to growth in patronage in every region. According to the Department's autumn performance report, that target remains "challenging", which I think is code for, "We will miss it by a mile". According to a parliamentary written answer, the number of passengers is down 13 per cent. in the north-east, 10 per cent. in the west midlands, 9 per cent. in the east of England, and 9 per cent. in Yorkshire and the Humber.

The only comfort for the Government is performance in London, which is very good. Hon. Members have congratulated the Mayor on his congestion charging policy, which, incidentally, the Liberal Democrats were almost alone in supporting before its introduction. It was only once the Government had the comfort of knowing that that had been a success that they were willing to go on the record to congratulate the Mayor.

Why were the Liberal Democrats against the Edinburgh congestion charge?

I expected that intervention. It is up to local parties to decide whether to support a scheme. We supported the Mayor's proposals for the London scheme, when there was almost a total absence of support on the Government Benches. Perhaps the Secretary of State can confirm that, in Edinburgh, the Liberal Democrats and almost all the Opposition parties were against the proposal, as, I understand, were all the Labour councils in the surrounding area. Clearly, there were failings in that scheme, which Labour councils identified just as the Liberal Democrats did.

If the hon. Gentleman and his party believe philosophically in allowing local authorities and local party groups to take their own decisions, why does he stand up in this place to criticise other parties for decisions taken locally?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but it would be helpful if he illustrated the point he is making. If he expects any political party, including his own, to apply a policy uniformly across the whole country, I should welcome it. It is not the position that the Liberal Democrats adopt.

The targets also cover light rail and we all know what the Government's performance has been on that over the last year or so. We had the Leeds supertram, when funding was provided for the scheme at almost the same time as the Government were negotiating an alternative bus solution. They gave people the impression that the tram would proceed while negotiating behind closed doors with an alternative provider, and £39 million of public funding spent on that has been lost.

There was the Manchester tram, too, and now we have the situation in relation to Merseytram. That matter is being discussed in the High Court today, and I received a letter from the chief executive of Merseytravel—I understand it is a matter of public record, or so widely in the public domain that I can discuss it—stating that on 29 November the Government gave a not accurate summary of recent events, which was subsequently repeated by the Prime Minister at Question Time the next day. In fact, a none-too-accurate summary of the Government's own position was given. Whether it is buses or trams—

It might help the House to learn that about an hour ago the Merseytram application for judicial review was dismissed.

I thank the Secretary of State for clarifying that. If he has not received a copy of this letter, I would be happy to send him one so that he can respond specifically to the allegation that the information that was provided to Members, by Ministers and by the Prime Minister, was inaccurate.

The hon. Gentleman reminded us that his party strongly opposed the Edinburgh congestion charge. I am sure that he is aware that, as a result of that defeat, inspired by the Liberal Democrats and others, the city council now faces a shortfall in its budget for its light rail schemes. Given what the hon. Gentleman is saying, I would have thought that the Liberal Democrats would want to see that shortfall met. Unfortunately, the Minister for Transport and Telecommunications on the Scottish Executive, who is a Liberal Democrat, has turned down the request for extra funding. Will the hon. Gentleman urge his colleague to supply that extra funding?

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that there is a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition Government in Scotland, so it is unfair to heap responsibility solely on a Liberal Democrat Minister. The hon. Gentleman implies that Liberal Democrats should be in favour of congestion charge schemes wherever they are and whatever form they take. That would be an irresponsible position. We need to look at each individual congestion charging scheme and see whether it is appropriate for that city. In London, we felt that it was appropriate; in Edinburgh, we did not.

The Secretary of State answered his own question. He said that in order to have a good congestion charge that works well, one needs an enviable transport structure, including an underground and other services that London has and Edinburgh has not.

I thank my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention. One of the necessities for the introduction of a congestion charge is a public transport network that provides people with an alternative when the scheme is introduced.

Given the hon. Gentleman's obvious hostility to new road building, will he confirm that he opposes the proposal to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a new road bridge across the Forth?

The point that I have made about road building is that the Secretary of State has allowed the Department for Transport road-building programme to swell by an extra £1 billion and has not been successful in keeping those costs under control. We favour keeping the costs under control.

Objective three is balancing the need to travel with the need to improve quality of life by improving safety and respect for the environment. Some solid progress has been made on the number of people killed or seriously injured in road accidents. There are, however, some areas in which further attention is needed. Those include child deaths on the road. The number of serious injuries has fallen significantly, but the number of deaths is not falling at the same rate. We are also seeing an increase in the numbers killed or seriously injured while riding two-wheeled motor vehicles.

I do have time to address the issue of air quality in detail. However, the Government's own performance report acknowledges that only four out of seven of the targets in that area will be met. I hope that the Government will not seek to achieve the remaining targets by revising the methodology to make it easier to achieve them. I understand that the Government intend to issue a revised methodology at some point—I thought it would be last month, but perhaps it will be this month—for measuring the air quality around Heathrow. It will be interesting to see whether the outcome will be to make it easier to meet the air quality standards for the area around Heathrow and so enable the third runway to go ahead.

I hope that the Government will demonstrate more joined-up government on greenhouse gas emissions. The public squabble between the Departments for Trade and Industry and for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about how to achieve the target and how challenging it should be is not helpful in dealing with what the Prime Minister described as one of our most significant problems.

The hon. Gentleman acknowledged the problem of congestion, but although I have listened carefully to his speech I have not heard a Lib Dem solution. Will he clarify whether he supports the Government in their move towards a national road pricing scheme at an estimated cost of between £14 billion and £60 billion on a revenue-neutral basis? The lesson from London is that to change motorists' behaviour requires a strong price signal. Does not the evidence undermine the logic of a revenue-neutral approach and throw into question the wisdom of spending several billion pounds on it?

I am happy to clarify our position. We are on record as supporting road-user pricing and saying that, for it to work, to be acceptable or palatable to the public, it must be revenue-neutral. That would mean getting rid of petrol duty and vehicle excise duty, otherwise the policy would be unsaleable to the public. If we want people to buy into a scheme of such size and complexity, we shall have to offer them that carrot.

The Secretary of State challenged figures supplied by his Department that stated that, taking into account inflation, VAT and optimism bias, there has been an underestimate for road-building schemes before 2003 of about £1 billion. He should have got that situation under control but he has failed to do so. We have asked the National Audit Office to investigate why there has been such a failure to address those underestimates and the significant cost increases for road-building schemes.

Several Members asked about Liberal Democrat transport policies. Our first priority will be to ensure that transport is fairer. A significant number of people still do not have access to cars, including the young, many senior citizens and people on low incomes. They are thus denied access to services or find it difficult to reach them. Unfortunately, many other Government policies demonstrate a lack of joined-up government. For example, post office closures mean that people with no access to a car find it much harder to use those valuable services.

Is the hon. Gentleman aware of the Government's support for concessionary travel? For example, in my constituency, Swindon borough council has benefited from nearly £1 million to make it available for precisely the groups that he wants to help.

I am very aware of the Government's concessionary fares scheme and I welcome it. My only concern is that local authorities consider that it is severely underfunded and that the £350 million allocated will not cover the costs. Some local authorities are having to make adjustments to fares for existing passengers to try to accommodate the extra costs that will arise due to concessionary fares.

Is my hon. Friend aware that Tyne and Wear passenger transport authority faces a shortfall of £7.4 million as a result of the introduction of concessionary fares? The PTA will be forced to cut the very bus services that the scheme was supposed to encourage people to use.

I thank my hon. Friend for that useful intervention. I hope that the Secretary of State is listening carefully and will respond positively to Tyne and Wear's approaches on that front.

May I throw some light on that point? Yesterday, the Government announced additional and substantial support for Tyne and Wear, which means that free travel will be extended to the Tyne and Wear metro system. The director general of the passenger transport executive described the figures that Paul Rowen has just cited as "crude", so will Tom Brake advise his Liberal Democrat friends in Tyne and Wear not to support premature cuts in the bus services while we are working through the issue?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. If he is right that additional funds have been provided to allow the metro service to be incorporated, that is a positive development.

We must help people who do not have access to cars. Fairness in transport must be a priority, and that involves enhancing passenger safety. I understand that a report will be published tomorrow that highlights the fact that the state of many of our stations is so poor that that, in itself, pushes people away from rail services, thus exacerbating the lack of accessibility to many train services. We need to grow the bus network. A number of hon. Members alluded to the fact that bus deregulation is an issue outside London, because bus companies can stop and start their services and threaten to withdraw bus services if they do not receive subsidy for a service that had been run previously by the private company. Light rail systems should be promoted, as they have a key role to play in many parts of the country in providing accessible transport, particularly for people with disabilities.

The hon. Gentleman briefly mentions the need to improve bus services. Is he aware that, in my part of Greater Manchester, the Government have made available to Stockport and Tameside councils very great amounts of public money for the south-east Manchester multi-modal study, which is having a major impact, not least with the implementation of quality bus corridors?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am here not to say that everything that the Government have done is negative, but to congratulate them where appropriate—I have done so two or three times, as I am sure Hansard will confirm—and to highlight some failings in Government policy.

The second issue that the Government need to address is ensuring that transport policy is greener. The Government's lack of action on aviation policy is certainly regrettable. They have simply pushed all responsibility for tackling the environmental problems associated with aviation to a future EU emissions trading scheme, which may never happen. The Government could have taken action now and supported our calls to halt any growth in airports and runways in the south-east until the environmental issues—whether the climate change, pollution or congestion implications—associated with aviation are addressed.

Will the hon. Gentleman at least give the Secretary of State for Transport credit for his announcement on the requirement to have stringent noise controls at airports? Does the hon. Gentleman welcome the fact that East Midlands airport, which is in my constituency, will publish its airport master plan—a further Government initiative—very soon indeed? The community can use those documents to try to work their way through the problems that exist.

I do indeed welcome the measures that the Government have taken. No doubt, East Midlands airport's representatives will mention those issues to me when I visit them tomorrow to listen to the noise. As the airport is in the hon. Gentleman's constituency, may I warn him that I will be visiting for legitimate purposes tomorrow evening?

Our final priority is to make spending on transport projects more accountable. Very large sums of money are now being distributed and priorities are being identified regionally, where democratic control is not great. As other hon. Members have said, we are concerned about the ability of local communities to influence the bus services provided in their areas. All that needs to be underpinned by paying attention to value for money, which is why my Liberal Democrat colleagues in the London assembly are putting forward a proposal to replace the tram scheme for London with a trolleybus scheme that could do the same job for about a third of the price.

We need to ensure that the Government invest for the long term, so we need to make more use of bonds. Several hon. Members referred positively to what the Mayor has achieved in London. He thought that bonds were the appropriate way to address investment in the London underground. Unfortunately, the Government did not allow him to go down that route, but we would have supported it.

The Government quietly torpedoed the 10-year transport plan years ago.

The Government might have torpedoed the national 10-year plan, but they have quietly introduced regional 10-year plans that commit the regions to significant expenditure with little democratic accountability. We thus have a new set of plans that are diverse and unrepresentative.

That is why we would ensure that people responsible for taking decisions on transport priorities are democratically accountable, which they are not at present.

After torpedoing the 10-year plan, the Government produced a revised plan in July 2004 called "The Future of Transport", but that is already taking on water. Bus use outside London has declined by 7 per cent., although it is an objective that bus use will increase in every region by 2010. The Government claim that their efficiency target has been met, yet road building projects overrun by more than £1.5 billion. While they might hit their targets on punctuality and reliability for rail, the law of unintended consequences means that train overcrowding has rocketed since 1997 with 25,000 passengers travelling to and from London each day on officially overcrowded trains. An objective analysis shows that the Government's progress on their self-imposed targets has been patchy. Delivery has been poor and targets have been discarded, downgraded, or have simply disappeared. Delivery lags behind rhetoric and anyone who travels on our roads, railways or buses knows it.

Liberal Democrats think that the Secretary of State is tired. He longs for a higher-profile post. It is time to put him out of his misery and appoint a Secretary of State who will really get to grips with the tragedy that is our transport system.

Several hon. Members:

rose—

Order. May I remind right hon. and hon. Members that Mr. Speaker has imposed a time limit of 10 minutes on Back-Bench speeches? However, they will see that we are under time pressure, so I am sure that they are capable of doing the arithmetic for themselves.

I will come to the aid of the Secretary of State because I wish to thank him warmly for the funding that we have received in Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes council, which is, of course, unfortunately controlled by the Liberal Democrats, has received more than £3 million from the Government for its local transport capital expenditure every single year since 2001. For the most part, it has been spent reasonably well. The money that has been spent on supporting public transport, bus priority measures and improving the quality of bus networks is starting to improve the lamentable bus transport system in Milton Keynes.

I should mention that a key aspect of continuing to improve bus transport in Milton Keynes, as in other places, is not in the gift of the Department for Transport because it is related to the planning of future housing. We are all grappling with the way in which we can plan future housing growth in Milton Keynes so that we can try to make the expanded city more public transport-friendly than it is at present.

Primarily, I want to talk about the rail system in Milton Keynes. We are on the west coast main line. My constituency contains four rail stations, three of which are on the west coast main line; Wolverton, Milton Keynes Central and Bletchley. Milton Keynes as a whole has suffered from the incredibly lengthy delays to the modernisation of the west coast main line. I am old enough to recall that that was first planned before the privatisation of the railways. The Tory Government did not undertake the modernisation because they thought that as the railways were going to be privatised, the private rail companies could do it, which, of course, they did not. This Government finally delivered the modernisation, although because such a huge amount of time had passed, they had to examine the plans again, redo the costings and rescale the work. For my constituents and everybody else up and down the west coast main line, they have delivered a rail service that is considerably more reliable and has a vastly increased capacity.

However, although the capacity of the west coast main line has increased, passenger and freight usage has also increased. The key issue for my constituents, of which all members of the Front-Bench team will be well aware, because I have raised it endlessly in the House, is the conflict between long-distance rail passengers and commuter rail passengers. This is to a certain extent a zero-sum game; whatever the capacity of the rail system, it is finite at any one time.

There is an understandable desire among passengers from the north of England and Scotland for trains travelling down the west coast main line through Milton Keynes not to stop terribly often, because every time they do so it increases the journey time. In addition, if a train from the north which is already about 90 per cent. full stops at Milton Keynes during a peak time, it is likely that more people than the few remaining available places will try to get on.

Therefore, a balance must be struck between the needs of long-distance travellers and those of the very large number of commuters—about 20,000 a day—whose journeys are packed into a very small time and who want to be able to travel reliably, reasonably comfortably and in a short time into London and out again. There are also commuters who come into Milton Keynes from London and the north, and some people from Milton Keynes who commute northwards, although in much smaller numbers.

There was a problem; my constituents would have liked every Virgin Pendolino train to London to have stopped in Milton Keynes and, preferably, all the people on it to have got off to make space, so that they could have enjoyed a fast journey in peak time. The Pendolinos are about 10 to 15 minutes faster than the Silverlink trains, which are the main commuter trains.

I assure the hon. Lady that trains from the north are never 90 per cent. full because half the train is first class. The standard class section is often 120 or 130 per cent. full, but the train as a whole is never 90 per cent. full.

I accept that I might have exaggerated slightly, but the general point remains.

As soon as it became evident to my constituents that there would be a problem with the timetable that was due to be introduced in 2004, that they would no longer be able to get on quite so many fast Pendolino trains and that they would have to rely on Silverlink trains instead, I raised the issue repeatedly with the Secretary of State, and I am incredibly pleased that he responded very positively. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, Derek Twigg, was able to join me on Milton Keynes Central station a couple of months ago to celebrate the fact that the scheme for providing an extra platform is being funded by this Government to the tune of £24 million from the community infrastructure fund; a very large slice of a national fund of only about £200 million, for which I am immensely grateful.

Network Rail is providing another £85 million and it has been agreed with Milton Keynes council that a further £6 million would come from section 106 contributions. The platform is timetabled to be built for 2008; as Members will be aware, such a major scheme has to be fitted in with all the other things planned on the railway. It will provide a turn-back facility at Milton Keynes, enormously increase capacity at Milton Keynes Central and improve the service for my constituents.

At this point I want to get on the record, so that the Secretary of State can give this due attention, the fact that the excellent Milton Keynes and Bletchley Rail Users Group, which I was instrumental in starting, has set out what it is hoping will be delivered in the 2008 timetable, which is even now being discussed, so that users can benefit from this Government's munificence in planning such extra works.

The group would like at least three non-stop trains an hour in the evening peak between London and Milton Keynes; two fast trains an hour to Birmingham in the morning and evening peaks; a half-hourly fast service between Bletchley and London in the morning and evening peaks; and a northbound hourly service to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow with connections to intermediate stations to allow effective business travel to and from Milton Keynes. The group has written directly to the Department for Transport, whose Ministers have heard my speech, so I am sure that they will give those requests due consideration.

The people of Milton Keynes are extremely grateful for the funding that they have received. They are grateful, too, for the funding that will be used to upgrade Wolverton station as part of the regeneration of Wolverton. They are grateful for the additional investment from the private sector in Bletchley station to improve the service. Every hon. Member would want even more to be spent on transport, particularly transport schemes in their own constituency. We all know perfectly well, however, that public spending is always a balance of priorities; the more that is spent on one service the less that is spent on another, or the more that has to be raised from general taxation.

I am grateful for the funding that my constituents have received from the Government transport strategy. The Government have delivered a great deal more than the last Government or, frankly, any Tory Government ever would.

The Secretary of State made a sensible change to the Government's approach to transport when he began his difficult job. His predecessor thought that it was possible to shift a large number of people off the road on to the train to solve environmental and capacity problems. The Secretary of State quickly realised that we are short of capacity of all kinds. He realised that the fundamental transport problem facing the country is insufficient capacity on the roads and railways to deal with the current level of economic activity. That problem will become much more acute in the years ahead, assuming reasonable growth in the economy.

To give some figures, if we grow at European levels of only 2 per cent. per annum—it is feared that we will go down to such levels—we must make capacity available for a two-thirds increase in the journey miles travelled in the next 20 years. If we return to Anglosphere levels of achievement and secure 3 per cent. growth, or if we return to our old trend rate of 2.5 per cent., there will be an increase of between 75 per cent. and 100 per cent. in the number of miles travelled by people as all those extra goods are taken to market and extra services are provided, and as more people travel to work and go about their business spending their extra leisure pounds. They will want access to facilities, so they will need more transport.

The Secretary of State will agree that we want to live in a vibrant and growing economy, which naturally means more transport. I therefore find the Liberal Democrats' attitude absurd. They presumably want to live in a prosperous country, but they say that we cannot make more capacity available in transport alone. They rightly argue that we have to make more hospitals available for the ill, and that we have to make more schools available for children. They believe that we cannot make more transport capacity available, but that would mean that we would not have a growing vibrant economy and people would not be able to travel to school, hospital or work. How on earth do they think that we can manage if we do not tackle the underlying capacity problem?

The Secretary of State inherited a grand scheme, with a total spend of £180 billion consisting of a mixture of public and private funds. I remember criticising the scheme when it was announced for two main reasons. First, the modal shift could obviously not be achieved on the scale that Mr. Byers, the then Secretary of State, imagined. The new Secretary of State has recognised that. Secondly, I did not think that £180 billion was nearly enough expenditure over a 10-year period to tackle our serious capacity problems. I want much more to be spent, but we can fund that increase by raising private capital. We do not need to increase the public component.

By way of contrast to the £180 billion so-called transport strategy, outside that document was all the spending that individuals and companies are undertaking on motor vehicles. People are buying cars, vans, lorries by the thousands every month and that, I compute, probably adds up to more than £180 billion over the 10-year period that people will spend on new vehicles, leaving aside the trade in second-hand vehicles. So we know that there is plenty of money available for transport. People must spend that money. It is often their only way of getting around, of getting goods to market or of getting to work on time, particularly for those who work unsocial hours, so people make that money available.

I want the Government to provide more opportunities for private money to be made available to solve the capacity problem. I am a great fan of a recent scheme which was begun under the Conservatives and was finished under the Labour Government; a bi-partisan effort. I refer to the toll motorway to the north of Birmingham. It is a very good scheme. It provides flexible tolls so that motorists pay more if they travel at a popular time of the day or night, and less if they travel at a less popular time. Perhaps the tolls need to be made more flexible to get maximum capacity use. I am sure that will happen, as there is an economic incentive for it. I would like to see the Government come up with opportunities for the private sector to start tackling the big capacity problems on our road network through that kind of private finance for new facilities on our roads.

I see from the document that the Secretary of State has made a number of changes, compared with the original 10-year plan. Some of his changes have been sensible. He is right that some of the tram and mass transit systems that were proposed do not offer good value for money, and some of them could be dangerous. If people wish to introduce a tramway system into a busy and congested city or town centre on existing roads, it can be extremely dangerous. That, after all, is why the original trams and trolleybuses were taken out some years ago, because there were conflicts between pedestrians and cyclists and other road users, and there were some very bad accidents.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that for people such as my constituents, who must endure travelling on overcrowded underground trains, the fact that they are penalised if they wish to pay with a strange old commodity called cash is not an encouragement to get them out of their cars and on to trains? There is a double whammy. If they use their cars, they are penalised by congestion charging; if they do not, they are penalised by not being able to travel comfortably to their destination.

I agree with my hon. Friend. His constituents often suffer from an inadequate underground system. It is another example of infrastructure in this country that is stretched to breaking, not nearly big enough and not modern enough for current uses. The entire underground should be air conditioned. We need two or three new underground lines, as a minimum. We need to improve the reliability of the existing lines. That all takes money.

I remember proposing some years ago in the House a privatisation scheme for the underground, the people's tube, which would have given everybody shares in the tube free and would have raised a lot of money from outside to build the two new lines that I thought then were the minimum that we needed, so that we could have a more modern underground. The Government decided on a different system, not one that I think was very felicitous, but we are where we are.

I hope the Secretary of State can work with his advisers and with those involved in the underground to see how we can get at least a couple of new lines on the underground to start providing that extra capacity, and how we can start to have full air conditioning and more modern trains so that when we have hot periods in the summer—the Government seem to think we will have more hot periods in the summer—people will be able to cope.

I accept that we will always want improvements in infrastructure and rolling stock, but as the right hon. Gentleman is speaking critically about the problems of transport in London, may I draw his attention to the annual London survey, which shows that 80 per cent. of London's transport users are satisfied with London's transport system, compared with previous surveys, which showed a much lower number of people who were satisfied? That shows a trend among people in London towards appreciating the improvement that have been made in our transport system, to the point where it has overtaken London's nightlife—

Order. Interventions must be brief. That is a very lengthy intervention.

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for conserving my time, which is precious to me, if not to the hon. Gentleman. As a part-time Londoner, I do not live in such a happy world as that that he thinks 80 per cent. of the public inhabit; perhaps I belong to the other 20 per cent., but other, more accurate surveys agree with my view.

There is room for enormous improvement. We need increased capacity on the tube, better tube trains and a Secretary of State who, now that he has partially privatised the tube system, raises as much money as possible from the private sector and ensures that it is spent as efficiently as possible to allow us better to husband our resources.

People are prepared to spend a lot of money on transport, but they want something good for their money. They must spend enormous sums of money if they rely on railway transport, and we have heard many stories of people paying a lot of money for tickets and not even getting a seat, which is not only uncomfortable, but unsafe. Trains are intrinsically unsafe, because if they decelerate sharply, stop sharply or come off the tracks, people can be badly injured by being thrown around; a person who has a seat is much less likely to be injured than someone who does not.

One does not have the opportunity to wear a seat belt on a train, which would make trains much safer, whereas seat belts are mandatory in cars, where the risk is lower, because cars have fewer hard surfaces and dangerous interior features than trains. We must examine safety on trains. On fast trains, it is wrong that people do not get a guaranteed seat and do not have the option of wearing a seat belt in order to travel more safely.

The position on private investment could be much stronger. In Wokingham, there is a perfectly good scheme that would allow us to have a new station at no cost to the taxpayer, because if the underused station property were redeveloped, the developer gain would pay for the new station. Many of my constituents, the local council and I want to see that scheme happen, but it has sat in the pending tray for four or five years as the railway industry has experienced an enormous series of reorganisations under this Government.

The industry should get its act together on property and realise that there is an enormous resource in under-utilised or badly used property in the railway estate. Councils would be happy to work with local railway management to provide suitable planning permission for such sites to release money for the improvement and redevelopment of public facilities. Why is it that so many stations do not have the most obvious facilities these days? Why has space not been rented out so that people can buy food when they return home late in the evening and need something to eat? Why is there nowhere to get a coffee and a newspaper in the morning? A surprising number of stations lack the most obvious commercial facilities, which represents a money-making opportunity for the railway. If only the railway had commercial flair and spent less time arguing about 10-year strategic plans and dealing with Government bureaucrats and more time thinking about what its customers need and how it can raise the money commercially to provide it.

When the Government extend their plan to 2015, they should not only tell us that we need more capacity of all kinds, but come up with the policies to deliver increased capacity of more kinds. They should give the go ahead for new road routes, because the private capital will be there, if people are allowed to charge a toll. If they go over to comprehensive road pricing, the whole network could be expanded and maintained at private expense, because the toll money could be recycled. Knowing this Government, they would still make a profit out of the transaction, given the taxes that they would be likely to impose.

Will the Government examine rail capacity in London and elsewhere and consider how one or two big schemes could be privately financed and add to the capacity of the railway network? Will they examine how the railway industry can start to develop and redevelop its surplus property outside London to provide a stream of income into the railway to provide more modern facilities? And will they examine how the railway industry can join the modern world when it comes to safety standards and additional facilities at our stations?

We can only view with astonishment the brass neck of the Conservatives in tabling this motion. They did irreparable damage to public transport. They are a bit like arsonists who, having started a major conflagration, sit on the sidelines and complain that the fire service is not putting it out quickly enough. I do, however, have some reservations about how quickly the Government's fire service is putting out the conflagration. I regret that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend Derek Twigg, are no longer present, and apologise to my other Front-Bench colleagues, who may have heard these comments before.

Since the Conservatives deregulated bus services, quality and standards have fallen dramatically, fares have risen by almost 50 per cent. in real terms, and the number of passengers has fallen by more than a third in my area, West Yorkshire. That represents about 100 million passenger journeys. Fares have gone through the roof. In the period from April 2004 to June 2005, Firstbus in Leeds increased off-peak fares by 27 per cent. and peak fares by 19 per cent. Bus operators' own figures illustrate that operating costs during that period rose by only about 9 per cent. In January, fares went up yet again.

Under deregulation, bus operators can make profits while providing very poor services. They can pick and choose where they run services. Services are chopped and changed, missing or late. It is no wonder that passengers have deserted bus services in such numbers.

We heard earlier about the different story in London. There is also a different story in Edinburgh, where bus use has gone up and prices are still low. Is it perhaps no coincidence that in London we still have a degree of regulation of bus services and in Edinburgh we still have community ownership of the local bus service?

I am sure that there is no coincidence whatsoever. Obviously, quality contracts have operated in London because services were never deregulated. I understand that last year patronage in London went up by about 10 per cent., while in the rest of the country overall it went down by 3 per cent.

Passenger transport executives such as Metro in my area are able to influence directly only 20 per cent. of the network that they provide through tendered services. In effect, there is little competition for tenders, so it is difficult to test whether best value is being obtained. That is diametrically opposed to the result that was intended by opening up the market.

Quality bus partnerships are the Government's preferred way forward in tackling the dreadful legacy inherited from the previous Government.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I am tempted not to, because the hon. Gentleman has not been sitting in the Chamber for quite as long as many of us. I apologise for that.

Partnership works where there are ready profits to be made by the private sector, but it does not meet the challenge of the social needs in many of the communities that we represent. I have no problem with partnership where it works, especially with operators who are prepared to take a long-term view instead of a profit-making view. But sometimes—I say this with all due respect to my Front-Bench colleagues—we have to put power in the hands of passengers and communities, not in the hands of the profit-maker. That is why I support quality bus contracts.

I was mildly heartened by what the Secretary of State said last week, and again here today, about the fact that he may be considering using quality contracts. However, I am disappointed that they come with strings attached and that they are regarded as the sweet coating on the bitter pill of introducing road charging. We ought to go the extra mile and say that quality contracts are a useful tool in promoting bus use.

I want to say a few words about my constituency. I am worried that the A65 Kirkstall road quality bus initiative seems to have gone into the ether, because that measure would have served my constituents very well.

Rail users in my constituency, like many others throughout the country, have been ill served by privatisation. However, under the Government, three stations in my constituency have been refurbished. A £250 million refurbishment has taken place at Leeds city station, enabling it to develop greater capacity for local routes.

A rail passenger partnership grant has allowed most of the rolling stock on the Airedale and Wharfedale line to be replaced with brand new, air conditioned, class 333 trains. They replaced the antediluvian, 40-year-old, slam-door cast-offs from the south-east commuter belt that we inherited under the previous Government. We cannot take lessons from the Conservative party about investment in rail.

Between 1994 and now, rail use in West Yorkshire increased from 11.5 million to 21 million passengers. There is a price to pay for that. The Select Committee on Transport identified overcrowding in West Yorkshire as being worse than in the south-east, which may surprise some London-centric Members. The Harrogate line, which goes through Horsforth in my constituency, and the Calder Vale line through New Pudsey are two of the most overcrowded routes in West Yorkshire at peak times.

Despite the recent renewal of rolling stock, capacity on the Wharfedale line, too, approaches saturation point at peak times. It is under pressure from new development, especially housing development. The Department for Transport is currently funding eight carriages up to 2007 on the Wharfedale line. It is essential that the rolling stock is retained and that we do not move backwards by having less capacity through the removal of that rolling stock.

The Northern Rail franchise is under review. I submit to our Front-Bench colleagues that that must reflect not only current demand and pressure on services but the potential for carrying tens of thousands more passengers if we increase capacity and perhaps accompany that with park-and-ride schemes. I contend that, in West Yorkshire, we would get more passengers per pound of investment than almost anywhere else in the country.

West Yorkshire Metro has a blueprint for increasing patronage by more than 50 per cent. in the next 10 years with what I regard—I hope that Ministers agree—as a relatively modest investment of between £5 million and £6 million a year.

Although we should not take lessons from Conservative Members about public transport, I hope that my hon. Friends accept that genuine concerns need to be tackled if we are to emerge from the mire that we inherited from the Conservative party.

I am grateful to Chris Grayling for initiating the debate and for some of his comments, although, like other hon. Members, I await the Conservative policy with bated breath.

My hon. Friend Tom Brake covered several points on Conservative and Labour transport policies as well as our Liberal Democrat alternatives. I want to concentrate on public transport, especially light rail, buses and the railways.

The 10-year plan was announced in 2000, although it was modified in 2002. It made several specific commitments. They included: 25 light rail schemes and 100 per cent. increase in passengers on light rail; a 10 per cent. increase in the number of passengers using buses, with newer and more reliable bus services; and more cities and towns with park and ride schemes. The White Paper combined figures to make a 12 per cent. increase overall. That has not happened.

We were told that the number of passengers using the railways would increase by 50 per cent., with more modern trains and improved commuter services in London and other cities, and that rail freight would increase by 80 per cent. Although improvements and investment have occurred—my party will not deny that—they have been too slow, too late and do not fulfil the commitments in the 10-year plan.

Only two new light rail schemes have been completed and one more has been agreed. Passenger numbers have not increased by the projected 50 per cent. but by only 28 per cent. The Government have scrapped light rail schemes in Leeds, Hampshire and Merseyside. Earlier, the Secretary of State claimed that that was due to increasing cost, yet he failed to answer my point that it is okay for road schemes to overspend—indeed, he is prepared to accommodate that—but not for light rail to do so. Only the Manchester Metrolink extension is still on the shelf. That project has sat on the Secretary of State's desk since July 2004, when public pressure forced him to reinstate the scheme. Meanwhile, services on the Rochdale-Oldham loop line continue to decline, with 30-year-old Pacer trains and track that cannot cope when a few leaves fall. We are entitled to hear from the Minister today when the Manchester Metrolink extension is to go forward.

Does my hon. Friend agree that, until the Government fulfil their promise on the Metrolink big bang expansion in Greater Manchester, his constituents and mine—and those of many other Members in the region—will continue to struggle with enormous congestion problems? Only that investment in the Metrolink expansion will help to persuade car users seriously to consider public transport as an alternative.

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. The Secretary of State said that our area would receive that investment, but unless or until it is delivered he will not get any support for traffic congestion charging. The Government said in their 10-year plan that other countries had more light rail schemes than the UK, but recent Government decisions have served only to make our position even worse, compared with other cities and towns in Europe.

The Government also made a pledge to increase bus use by 10 per cent. It is true that, if we include services in London, the 10 per cent. target has been achieved. However, outside London there has been a 7 per cent. fall in bus use. At the same time, bus fares have increased by 24 per cent., compared with a retail prices index increase of only 11 per cent. During the same period, the number of vehicle kilometres has fallen by 13 per cent. in metropolitan areas and by 4 per cent. in other areas of England. People are paying exorbitantly high fares for a much poorer service under this Government. I note that the Secretary of State did not cover buses in any great detail in his speech.

Is the hon. Gentleman against the people in his constituency getting a bit richer and buying cars? He does not seem to understand that a lot of people have been buying cars and want to use them.

I understand the right hon. Gentleman's point of view, but for many people buses are the only the service available, and, in many areas, that service is exorbitant in cost and declining in frequency.

A recent report produced by the National Audit Office and the Audit Commission entitled "Delivery chain analysis for bus services in England" makes a telling observation that supports a point made earlier by Mr. Truswell. It states:

"Regulation is both tightly managed and effective inside London but there is scope to make the unregulated market outside London work better."

Is my hon. Friend aware that Mr. Redwood avoided altogether using the word "environment" in his intervention? Our preference for public transport is based on the fact that it does not cause the same environmental damage as private transport.

Yes, and it was the right hon. Gentleman's Government who deregulated the buses. It is a simple fact that bus services outside London are controlled by five major bus companies, which together control two thirds of the bus market in this country. Local authorities and passenger transport executives have control of only 20 per cent. of the total bus market. In Rochdale and neighbouring Oldham, the bus operator, First, has a virtual monopoly, controlling 70 per cent. and 80 per cent. of all bus services respectively. The result of that monopoly is cancelled services, late-running services, high bus fares and a high degree of passenger dissatisfaction.

I mentioned the position in Edinburgh, which I would like the hon. Gentleman to visit some time to see what can be done with a different form of local bus company ownership. Does he agree that there is a strong case for the competition authorities conducting a serious investigation into the way in which the bus market in this country has developed and is operated?

I shall visit Edinburgh tomorrow on my way to the Dunfermline by-election. My next point was going to be that, at the very least, the Minister needs to refer the monopolies that exist at local authority level to the Office of Fair Trading. It is obvious that those bus monopolies are making disproportionate profits compared with the profits made on bus services in London. For example, in the metropolitan areas, an 18 per cent. return is being made on bus services, compared with only 8 per cent. inside London. The way forward must be targeted regulation, which, as the Minister responsible informed me in a written answer, the Government have no intention of introducing. Without it, however, I fear that bus usage will continue to decline and roads will become even more congested.

Substantial investment has been made in railways, although, again, because of the complex structure of the rail industry, it has not led to the planned improvements. The reality is that we were supposed to get a 50 per cent. increase in passenger journeys. The figure is now 20-odd per cent., but the report said that without further increases in capacity, that 50 per cent. increase would not be achieved. I look forward to hearing what proposals the Minister will make to deal with the Manchester or Birmingham bottlenecks. Without such action, commuter services cannot be improved further.

We also need to consider the age of the rolling stock. I was informed in a written answer last week that, outside London and the south-east, there are no plans to upgrade and improve rail network services. For example, Northern Rail's rolling stock, which covers a vast area from the Scottish borders down to the midlands, has an average age of 17.1 years. No allowance has been made in the 10-year plan to improve and upgrade that rolling stock. That can only result in more unreliable, more uncomfortable and more crowded services for rail commuters.

Funding for the railways needs to be examined properly, particularly the question of why so much money is being paid to rolling stock leasing companies, and why franchises have been set at limits below 10 years, contrary to the original plan, which envisaged a 10 to 20-year lead-in, which would have allowed more investment in new rolling stock.

I welcome the opportunity to take part in this debate. Transport is important for all of us. The wealth and future development of the country depend on it. Halfway through the 10-year plan, we have a mixed picture. There has been some improvement, but not enough has been done. The Government can and must do better.

In his closing remarks, the Secretary of State urged us to look to the future in terms of what can be done to improve further the transport system. In the time available, I want to highlight one specific area to which I hope the Government will look for the future. I want to urge the Government to give an early commitment to the development of high-speed rail in the UK.

In his attack on the Government, the Opposition's transport spokesman at least referred grudgingly to the fact that the west coast main line had been upgraded. That upgrading is already showing benefits in terms of attracting passengers to rail and away from road and air travel. That shows what more could be achieved if we moved forward with the development of proper high-speed rail links in the UK. The Government's own advisory bodies have reported on a number of occasions that:

"High-speed lines are essential if we are to deal with capacity constraints that are building up on our intercity network"— and—

"The case for construction of a high-speed line is now much greater than it was 20 years ago, when there was more . . . capacity on the conventional network."

I was delighted when, a few weeks ago, the Institution of Civil Engineers published a report on the possibility of a dedicated high-speed line for the United Kingdom. That reflects the growing realisation that an idea that would have been regarded as bonkers a few years ago is gaining acceptability among policy makers, who recognise that it has now reached its time. The Government's adviser, Lord Eddington, has indicated that he will adopt that approach when he produces his report at the end of the year. I do not have time to describe all the advantages of high-speed rail, but it can offer shorter travel times for passengers, strengthen the move away from dependence on the road network and, in particular, from short-haul air travel, and ensure that the north of England, the midlands and Scotland can enjoy the economic prosperity that will result from more and better links to the continent of Europe through full development of the high-speed channel tunnel rail link.

I do not expect the Government to commit themselves to a high-speed rail line today, but I stress that there is strong support for it in the House. I hope that if Lord Eddington recommends it, the Secretary of State will choose to be bold, for we are at our best when we are at our boldest. I hope that he will ensure that we in the United Kingdom—not just in the south-east, and not just for the purposes of our links with the continent of Europe, but throughout the country—can begin to enjoy the type of high-speed rail network that our European friends and neighbours regard as the norm. It is time that we joined the 21st century in that regard, as well as in the context of the other initiatives and projects that the Government have introduced at both local and national level.

This has been a strategically important debate, featuring interesting contributions from a number of Members.

Opening the debate, my hon. Friend Chris Grayling got to the heart of what we were asking—if the Government are spending so much money, where is it going and why are they not delivering on their 10-year plan? The fundamental failure of the plan lies in the fact that it announced much and promised much, but had no short-term or long-term context in relation to our country's economic needs or, indeed, its need for a sustainable environment. The Secretary of State clearly disagrees with me because he described it as a piece of strategic thinking. It was not his piece of strategic thinking, though; it was that of the Deputy Prime Minister, and given that relatively inauspicious start it was probably destined to fail.

In his foreword to the document dealing with the 10-year plan, the Deputy Prime Minister wrote that he was

"developing an integrated transport policy to tackle the problems of congestion and pollution".

On congestion, the facts are that the number of motor vehicles registered has risen from 27 million to 32 million. The number of passenger kilometres travelled has risen from 730 billion to 797 billion, which is almost entirely due to extra car miles, as nationally bus usage is down by 7 per cent. Investment in road infrastructure is now £4.2 billion, but under the Conservatives it reached £6.2 billion. If I quote the Government's figures correctly, investment in our trunk road system—mentioned by several Members today—reached its 1993 level only this year. As we have all agreed, expenditure on the rail infrastructure is now three times higher in real terms, but the question that we have asked several times without receiving a proper answer is, "Where is all that investment going?"

The all-operators public performance measure, which was just under 90 per cent. in 1997–98, is now only about 85 per cent. The train operating companies expect capacity to grow by about 2 per cent. between now and 2014, but usage is expected to grow by 38 per cent.

Will my hon. Friend confirm that if the Government did hit their target of a 50 per cent. increase in railway passengers over the 10-year period, that would tackle only one year's worth of growth in the total demand for travel?

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that intervention. The paper that I read on this issue confirms what he says. The reality is that capacity seems not to be a word in this Government's lexicon. The capacity issues that the transport system needs to address are not being addressed.

Tom Brake, who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, gave a very long speech.

Too long.

Some might agree.

The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington regaled us with several of his supposedly spiked press releases, but in doing so he merely proved to the House why they have remained unused by the Press Gallery.

My right hon. Friend Mr. Redwood described the economic context in which we need to consider our country's infrastructure requirements and what we need to do to ensure a vibrant 21st-century economy. He rightly said that modal shift will not meet our needs and that we will need to achieve capacity increases in both rail and road. He also rightly said—the Secretary of State was out of the Chamber at the time—that we need to continue to use, and to expand the use of, private-sector finance to ensure that our economy's capacity requirements are met. He raised several interesting points relating to safety, and he finished by urging that maximum commercial use be made of railway property. Every Member of this House will surely agree with that.

The Deputy Prime Minister said in the introduction to "Transport 2010" that the plan will deliver the scale of resources required to put integrated transport into practice. Everybody in the House agrees that more is being spent. The Secretary of State recited in his opening contribution what my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell had already mentioned: a list of schemes that have been completed. What the Secretary of State failed to do, and which we asked him to do, was to explain why, if so much money is being spent, so many schemes have been stopped or scrapped, and why so much of "Transport 2010" is not going to be delivered. If Members care to do so, they can hear about the detail of one such scheme in today's forthcoming Adjournment debate. The Deputy Prime Minister also said that he will put in place an "integrated . . . transport system". It is certainly true that at the moment trains and cycles, trains and buses, and freight movement from ports by rail and road are not integrated. The short answer is that "Transport 2010" has not delivered an integrated transport policy.

As everyone has said today, moving freight by rail is a good idea. However, I wonder whether, when we recite that slogan, we consider all the economic, environmental and sustainable community issues that it raises. If he has not already done so, the Minister might care to acquaint himself with the Green N8 scheme, which I believe the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is pushing. It involves moving aggregates by rail freight, but the only trouble is that concrete output is moved by road through our communities and the crowded and congested roads of north London. So in reciting these slogans, we should also be clear about what they mean for local communities.

There is no integrated transport policy. We have heard today a number of promises, and we have heard about a number of broken promises. The short answer is that the trains are getting more crowded and are still running late, and everybody is paying more for them. Traffic is still jammed and it is taking longer and longer to reach its destination. More cars are registered and everybody is paying more. When the Secretary of State was first in post, he said that he

"had no intention of tearing up the 10 year plan."

Well, it is not delivering and it will not deliver, so perhaps that is exactly what he should do. "Transport 2010" is not addressing the needs of Britain in the 21st century—it is a failure.

I commend this motion to the House.

The Conservatives' thesis today seems to be that the Government have managed the economy so brilliantly well that we are all getting back to work and getting richer, and so we all want to travel more. I do not disagree with them for a second.

The Opposition also believe that the Government are investing heavily in transport but claim that we are not seeing the benefits. Opposition Members should think about their personal experience for a moment. Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, was constructive enough to admit that there have been significant improvements—including new rolling stock and increased reliability—and that people are aware of them.

I have been a Minister for nearly three years. Not one week has gone by in that time when I have not used inter-city trains to fulfil some ministerial engagement. I have seen for myself that train services are better and more comfortable. An article in the press just this week talked about the improvements on the west coast main line and said that airlines flying to Manchester are starting to think that they are under threat.

I had to fulfil an engagement today in Newport in Wales. I was able to rely on the trains to get me there and back again, even though I knew that I had to be here for this debate. In 1997, no one would have considered taking the train to Newport without taking the week off work and being accompanied by a team of sherpas. The improvements are there for all to see. For example, slam-door trains have been replaced. Mr. Brazier is one of the shadow transport spokesmen, and he will know—

Will the Minister give way on that point?

No, although I will if there is time later. The hon. Gentleman will have experienced those slam-door trains. I used to work for a private company in east Kent. It used to tell people that it chose Kent for a base in the 1950s because of the train service available then. Unfortunately, exactly the same trains were being used by the mid-1990s as were deployed in the 1950s. All those trains are now gone: people can see the improvements and they are aware of the channel tunnel rail links that are starting to be completed—

Will the Minister give way?

I am sorry, but I need to make progress. My hon. Friend Dr. Starkey talked about the improvements that she and her constituents have seen in west coast main line services.

If the Opposition's comments about rail were stunning and inaccurate, their remarks about the Government's approach to road schemes were breathtaking. The press release by Chris Grayling contained incorrect statements about roads that have, in fact, been completed.

The Highways Agency website was inaccurate.

The hon. Gentleman says that the Highways Agency website was inaccurate, but we checked that during the debate and found it to be entirely accurate. He needs to have a long talk with his researchers about which old documents they used for his speech.

I shall give a few examples of why I think that the Opposition's view of our road programme is breathtaking. Between 1990 and 1994, the then Conservative Government announced that a number of road schemes would be scrapped. They included the Greater Manchester western and northern relief road, the Langford turn in Bedfordshire, the Blackwall tunnel interim scheme on the A13, the A31 Stoney Cross junction improvements in Hampshire, the A59 Copster Green bypass in Lancashire, the M1-M62 link road between Wakefield and Kirklees, the western environmental route in the London boroughs of Hammersmith, Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea, and the Exeter northern bypass. All those schemes were cancelled by the Conservatives.

The previous Conservative Government obviously got the taste for cancelling road schemes, so in 1994 they announced a review. They then cancelled the schemes on the M12 and M606, and the A1 to M1 to Scratchwood link. They also cancelled schemes on the M1, A5, A6, A6/A46—I could go on. The list of schemes that the Conservative scrapped in 1994 is very long. There are 49 of them in all and I could use my entire time talking about them.

Like an addict who had had his first shot of some drug, the Conservatives realised it was rather fun to cancel road schemes, so back they came in 1995 to cancel schemes on the M1, the M5, the M23, the M25 and more. I could go on even longer on this list because there were 77 of them. If that were not bad enough, they came back again in 1996 to scrap schemes on the M1, the M3, the M4, the M5—the list goes on and on. They scrapped no fewer than 107 road schemes that year alone. Yet they have the brass neck to tell us we are not committed to road building where it is necessary and important.

Of the 40 schemes that we identified for the targeted package of improvements, 38 are on target to be delivered by 2010. Two remain challenging. Chris Grayling himself identified the Stonehenge programme, and I merely ask him whether he would have given the go-ahead to a £500 million tunnel under Stonehenge without looking again at the options. We called a review when we realised it would have been cheaper to move the stones and the mountain they were sitting on.

The Liberal Democrats were of course able to critique both other parties' transport policies without giving any constructive suggestions of their own. Three leadership candidates are going round the country at the moment with three very different transport proposals. Those of Simon Hughes seem to consist of saying that the only transport modality that should be available to any of us is walking around in open-toed sandals. The only transport contribution so far from Sir Menzies Campbell has been his saying that he will drive a little less often in his classic Jag. The contribution of Chris Huhne has been to say that no matter how we decide motorists should pay to use the roads in future, they should pay in euros.

All that hardly adds up to a coherent package. When the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington stands there giving us a list of transport proposals that would cost billions and billions of pounds, yet says that he agrees with the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife about the Liberal Democrats' public spending commitments, I have to remind him exactly what it was his right hon. and learned Friend said. He said:

"I am clear there is now no great public mood to increase the overall burden of taxation."

He added that current public spending was

"without precedent and must now level off."

Yet the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington stood there telling us about scheme after scheme that he wants to move forward.

Paul Rowen talked about Metrolink, telling us how we should move forward on that. I have to tell him that two of his neighbour Liberal Democrats have sat in my office in the past few weeks telling me we should go ahead with a £1 billion road scheme in their constituencies. Where does all the money come from? Where would the Liberal Democrats propose to find the money?

Will the Minister give way?

No.

The Government can be very proud of our achievements. We are not saying everything is perfect, but we are delivering. There have been more than 1 billion passenger journeys by rail, more even, as the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell admitted, than there were before the days of Beeching. Some 3,800 new carriages have entered service since 1999. There is not a slam-door train left on the network. The average age of stock has been reduced from 20 years to 13. Some £7.6 billion has been spent on west coast route modernisation, which has knocked half an hour off the journey between London and Manchester. East coast upgrade improvements are under way or already delivered at King's Cross, Peterborough, Leeds and Grantham. The list goes on and on and—

rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.

Question, That the Question be now put, put and agreed to.

Question put accordingly, That the original words stand part of the Question:—

The House divided: Ayes 226, Noes 318.

Question accordingly negatived.

Question, That the proposed words be there added, put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.

Mr. Speaker forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House acknowledges the importance of providing a clear strategy of sustained long-term investment and forward planning to address decades of under-investment in the transport system; welcomes the further investment and new strategic framework provided by the subsequent Future of Transport White Paper; recognises the achievements since the 10 Year Plan was published, including the highest number of people using the railways since the 1960s and the delivery of major strategic road schemes, with further schemes either under way or due to start before April 2008; acknowledges that one of the main reasons for the continuing pressure on transport networks is that the United Kingdom is enjoying the longest period of sustained economic growth for more than 200 years; and supports the Government's determination to take the decisions which will be required to meet these pressures and put UK transport on a sustainable footing, including tackling the environmental impacts of transport, trialling road-pricing and building on the improvements in rail performance, as well as planning for long-term transport needs.