Railways

Part of Department for Transport – in the House of Commons at 7:34 pm on 9 March 2009.

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Photo of Norman Baker Norman Baker Shadow Secretary of State for Transport 7:34, 9 March 2009

I am afraid that that is the case. Many operators are reducing the number of carriages through necessity because there are none, or did so early on—perhaps three or four years ago—because it suited them better to pay less by way of track access charges.

The Government have continually said that they have ordered 1,300 or 1,400 new carriages, and the indication has been that the order is being speeded up and the carriages are being delivered as soon as possible. Announcements are made at regular intervals to tell us how it is all getting on. Yet a parliamentary answer to me from the Minister, dated 4 March, said that the last of the trains from the inter-city express programme will not come until 2018. Some of the delivery periods for the new trains are very long.

It all comes back to the statement on rolling stock that the Secretary of State for Transport made the other day. He spoke in complimentary terms, saying that the trains would be greener, more environmentally friendly and good for British jobs. We now know that the consortium was not British-led, although that is how the Department for Transport described it. It was a Japanese-led consortium, with John Laing as a minor partner. Furthermore, of the 12,500 jobs talked about, 10,000 are existing jobs at third-party companies that may conceivably benefit over the lifetime of the billed contract; even the other 2,500 jobs are disputable as the initial 70 engines and carriages are being built in Japan.

When we read the small print of the "good news" for British industry announced by the Transport Secretary, it disappeared and vanished into the ether. As far as the statement that the new rolling stock would be green and environmentally friendly is concerned, the claim was that the stock would consume less energy. That, however, is not correct: when we divide the total energy consumption based on total passenger capacity of the rolling stock, with a new, greater seat complement, we find that it is less energy-efficient than the inter-city trains that it is replacing. I mention that because, apart from the fact that it all seems expensive and that there seems to be an environmental question mark over the Government's train-ordering process, we are moving away from rolling stock leasing companies towards a more centralised ordering of trains.

The Government have made clear their dissatisfaction and unhappiness with the ROSCOs—the rolling stock leasing companies. I do not want to defend the privatisation foisted on us by a previous Conservative Government; in many ways, that failed and we are still picking up the pieces. Furthermore, the creation of ROSCOs enabled a great deal of money to be made to no real benefit, especially in the early days. But we are where we are. The Government do not like the ROSCOs and referred them to the Competition Commission, whose draft report indicated that the issue was a boomerang from the Government. The Government largely got the blame for the arrangements, not the ROSCOs. The Government's response has been to take hold of the InterCity express programme and order a train that is overpriced, not energy-efficient and does not particularly help British industry.

On top of that, last week Diesel Trains Ltd, a new rolling stock company that is owned by the state, was set up. We are told that it will produce a whole lot of new diesel trains. That is rather curious: how will that give an incentive to the ROSCOs to produce trains on spec, as they have been, in anticipation of orders? If they are to be squeezed out of the rolling stock market, they will have no incentive to build anything other than on the basis of firm orders. If they build only on that basis, when passenger numbers pick up—and they are doing so, in fact—there will be no rolling stock for the train operating companies to get hold of. That is precisely what is happening at the moment. The Government's over-centralisation of rolling stock ordering is causing a shortage of rolling stock rather than solving the problem, as the Government say they are doing.

The public sector ROSCO that I mentioned is being created by the Government in direct competition to the private sector. The hon. Member for St. Albans—