Mark Sewards

I beg to move, That this House has considered Government support for mass transit in West Yorkshire. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. Last week, I was delighted to have secured this debate, and the confirmation of its date came through just an hour before the news that the Government will indeed be investing £2.1 billion in West Yorkshire’s public transport, including more than £1 billion for a new tram in Leeds and Bradford, so I am now even happier to have secured it and to be leading it. I will start with the background to that decision and explain why it is such a huge moment for my home city, Leeds, and for our home region of West Yorkshire. Leeds is currently the largest city in Europe without a mass transit system—that is such a well-known fact that if I had been given £1 every time I heard it, I could have personally financed the mass transit system 10 years ago, with spare change for a space programme—but transport aficionados and Members from my part of the world will know that that was not always the case. Leeds had a horse-drawn tram as early as 1871, and at its peak the network—which did not have horses by that time—had 476 trams and 124 miles of track. But while the horses did not leave us completely, the trams did. What had once been one of the largest urban transport systems in the UK was finally closed down, and in 1959 we saw the end of our tram system. Leeds was often referred to as the “motorway city of the seventies”—I think that even appeared on a stamp—because we became entirely reliant on the car, which has held us back in some respects. There is only so much traffic that can be added to our roads before they have to be expanded, with new lanes added and traffic systems rethought—and often only for temporary benefit, before the next solution has to be considered. To their credit, policymakers and politicians figured that out—it is not something that we have just come to ourselves. Trams can carry approximately four times as many passengers as a typical bus, and they massively increase the transport capacity of any region. They are versatile and can run alongside road networks where needed, because they can be segregated from traffic to avoid congestion and improve journey times for passengers. Trams are also very consistent. That is why politicians have tried multiple times, without success, to bring mass transit back to Leeds. We have had everything: plans for trams; a trolleybus scheme; an elevated railway that was not dissimilar to the monorail in an episode of “The Simpsons”; and even, if we care to go back far enough, an underground proposal. That has left some people in my city highly sceptical of the announcement last week, because we have been burned too many times.