Richard Foord

I beg to move, That this House has considered the potential merits of reopening Cullompton and Wellington railway stations. It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Butler. The Minister may have heard some of these arguments before, but there have been developments in recent months that he should hear before any decisions are made in relation to Cullompton and Wellington stations. The south-west has suffered from chronic under-investment in transport infrastructure—a legacy of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, when communities were cut off as many stations across the country, including Cullompton and Wellington, lost their rail services. The campaign to bring back those stations commenced almost as soon as they were lost. In 1996, Devon county council commissioned a preliminary design for a new station at Cullompton, and by 2013 the metro board had been established, bringing together MPs, local councils, the rail industry and enterprise partnerships. Since then the metro board has met more than 30 times, co-chaired in recent months by my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and me. The studies have culminated in the submission of a final business case to the Department for Transport in May 2024. Later that summer, my colleague and I received letters from the Chancellor pulling the plug on Restoring Your Railway funding. That was a gut punch for communities across the country with less well-established programmes, but I am pleased to say that Restoring Your Railway had already done a lot of the hard work relating to Cullompton and Wellington stations.