Parliamentary
Candidate Mike Weatherley bemoans
Labour’s transport failures
At
last years Labour Party conference, the Prime Minister told us he had no reverse
gear. Well he certainly has put the
brakes on motorists travelling in Brighton and Hove. During the last bank holiday traffic was grid-locked with
huge tailbacks on the A27 and A23. Even
during a normal weekday cars are bumper to bumper from the Seven Dials down New
England Road to Preston Circus continuing up Viaduct Road and right round the
Level and down to the seafront. Traffic
queues are partly as a result of the total failure to provide adequate parking
or realistic alternatives, clogging up the roads with people looking for
somewhere to park. A seaside resort
such as Brighton and Hove, relies heavily on tourist trade. The cities business need people to be spending money in
shops, restaurants and bars, not driving round looking for somewhere to park.
Due to the Labour Party’s anti-car policies Brighton and Hove is losing
possibly million of pounds, as day trippers and holiday makers will
understandably not come back once they have experienced the chaos and shambles
of having no where to park their car.
In
1997, John Prescott said: 'I will have failed if in five years time there are
not ... far fewer journeys by car' but the Department for Transport tells us
that traffic levels have risen by1.8 per cent between the first quarter of 2003
and the first quarter of 2004.
Mike
Weatherley, Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Brighton Pavilion, has been
campaigning for the Government to end its war on the motorist.
Commenting on the latest figures Mike said:
"Brighton
and Hove motorists have been Let Down by Labour. Only last week, Kim Howells
Minister of State at the Department of Transport, said that he did not think
fuel was particularly expensive in Britain. After the Minister's comments, it
seems likely that the Government will impose yet more tax rises in attempt to
price people off the roads.
"There
is no quick fix solution to solving the problem of congestion, but waging a war
on the motorist by taxing them out of their car is certainly not one of them. We
need to use our roads, especially in urban areas, more intelligently but this
Government has shown neither the confidence, enthusiasm nor commitment to tackle
the problems on our roads today."
And
it isn’t just the roads where Labour has failed.
In April 2004 a Labour-dominated group of MPs slammed the Blair
administration’s failure to sort out the crisis-riddled rail industry. In a devastating report, the cross-party Commons Transport
Committee demanded a radical restructuring of the railways, and its chairman
Gwyneth Dunwoody declared: “The Government has had years to address the
problems of the railways, but has failed to take effective action.”
Commenting
on the report Mike Weatherley said: “This is a heavily critical report from a
Labour dominated committee and it clearly shows how Labour have let passengers
down. Despite being in power for over seven years, performance has got worse.
And the network is still in turmoil.”
Declaring
that the report finally “slams the door on Government attempts to play the
blame game over the transport system”, Mike continued: “The Government will
have to stop passing the buck and finally accept responsibility for our crippled
railways. What the committee makes clear is that the structure put in place by
this government is failing the railways and failing passengers. The SRA and
Network Rail were both set up by this Government and yet both failing to deliver
the improvements needed.”
Network
Rail plans to spend £26 billion on upgrading the network over the next five
years, in an attempt to improve services and get the trains running on time.
However, industry chiefs have acknowledged that passengers will have to wait
until 2006 before timekeeping and reliability are back at the levels achieved
before the October 2002 Hatfield crash, which killed four people.
Mike
adds:
“As
Network Rail announced recently that it will spend £14 million a day on the
rail network, people will rightly ask how much more taxpayers money will go on
the railways with little to show for it. Far from setting up yet another body to
run the railways, with more disruption, and more bureaucracy, what they need now
is some stability so they can get on with the job of delivering for passengers.
The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. What passengers want is a
real improvement in services, not just promises of jam tomorrow.”
In
yet another spectacular blunder Kim Howells, the gaff prone Department of
Transport Minister said in a recent interview that the
whole structure of Britain's railways needs a radical overhaul to tackle
"crazy" bureaucracy. Its
"maddest manifestation" was the power given to rail regulator Tom
Winso., It was "insane" that the regulator, not the transport
secretary, decided how much would be spent on the railways each year, he said.
He signalled a review of the industry would curb the regulator's powers.
Mike
Weatherley said: “After seven years of this Labour Government, passengers are
still not seeing any improvements and many services are getting worse.
As someone who commutes daily to London I experience first hand how run
down and unreliable the trains are. Without
proper choice, is it no wonder that people continue to drive their cars.
I spend well over £3,000 on rail travel every year. As financial director to Peter Waterman, which
includes a £10m per annum turnover Rail Freight Servicing Company, my
job takes me around the country for numerous business meetings.
“The
railways need a period of stability and the last thing they need is yet more
Government interference. If Kim Howells thinks there’s too much bureaucracy,
he’ll just make it worse by giving more powers to the Department for
Transport.
“The
railways need private sector investment but the private sector needs the
confidence of knowing that there is independent regulation. If the Government
overturns that, it will make things worse and improvements for passengers will
take years.”
The rail company in the Pete Waterman Group is London and North Western Railway Ltd, which has service bases in Crewe and Leeds.