Sarah Russell

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae) for securing this important debate. I have spoken previously about train services in my community; I will not spend a huge amount of my limited time on them, but I want to flag that we have been in government for two years, and train strikes in my constituency have written off our Sunday services for the entirety of that time. We talk a lot about bringing train services into public ownership, but those train services in my area were in public ownership. My residents are furious that they have no Sunday service from Congleton station and have not had one for a long time now. I would be very grateful if the Minister took that back to the Rail Minister with the utmost urgency, because this really needs to move forward. We also have a long-standing problem with accessibility at Sandbach station, which is frankly disastrous. It is a huge problem for anyone who cannot manage the extremely steep stairs. The service runs to a major city and an airport, so by definition people have luggage, buggies and so forth. What I really want to talk about is buses. There are so many problems with buses in my area. The Government’s transport improvement funds for buses have helped, and so have section 106 contributions from developers. I would like to praise my local council, which has been able to put on some additional services with those two sources of funds. None the less, there are so many problems. When I spoke to young people at Shipton Explorer Scouts, they spoke at length about the difficulty of buses that are just too full: there are too many students trying to get on them, so the buses stop letting them on. I have GCSE students who are terrified. One called my office recently because his bus simply had not shown up. We eventually got to the bottom of it: the app was not working, the bus had been diverted because of roadworks, and no one had informed the school or the pupils. These buses only run once an hour. When children and young people need to get to life-changing exams, the consequences of unreliability—buses that do not show up or that do not stop because they are too full—are potentially devastating. Local employers I speak to in places like care homes and nurseries, some of which are not in the centre of town, have huge problems recruiting because people simply cannot get to them without car access. In rural and semi-rural areas, this is a huge, long-standing economic problem. It makes it difficult for parents to work, because they cannot reliably get their children to school on public transport. The economic and other impacts for people are absolutely massive. My constituents also talk to me about a sense of rural isolation—which I would go into further, but I have run out of time.