Labour's great rail revival has already hit the buffers

Telegraph

23-07-2025

Labour came to power with a pledge to improve Britain's creaking railways, spearheaded by a headline-grabbing commitment to renationalisation.
But a year on, the Government stands accused of blocking the resurrection of dozens of routes across England, most of them mothballed since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.
The decision to relaunch just one defunct train line out of dozens was announced by the Government earlier this month.
In doing so, it has sparked anger in communities across the country, many of which were given hope by ministers who pledged to reconsider a fleet of reopenings, despite scrapping Boris Johnson's Restoring Your Railway programme last year.
In the event, the Bristol to Portishead line was the only new service to feature on a list of more than 50 rail and road upgrades unveiled on July 8, touted by the Government as 'the biggest boost to England's transport infrastructure in a generation'.
When asked about future reopenings last week, Lord Hendy, the rail minister, said that the projects would have to compete with other upgrades and would get no special treatment
Douglas McClay, a campaigner for the restoration of passenger services on the 31-mile, freight-only Ivanhoe Line between Leicester and Burton-on-Trent, says its exclusion from the department's to-do list was a severe disappointment.
Named after the historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, which was set partly in the area, the line would have provided the Midlands with a new east-west corridor and restored passenger trains to towns including Coalville, Swadlincote and Ashby de la Zouch, costing £100m in the process.
'I simply don't understand'
The route was one of hundreds of branch lines and low-footfall services that fell victim to Dr Richard Beeching's infamous 1960s savings plan, as the former British Railways chairman oversaw the closure of around 5,000 miles of track and almost 2,500 stations.
'We were still holding out despite what had happened with the Restoring Your Railway fund and the message from one of the MPs on our line was that things were coming along, don't worry too much at the moment,' says McClay.
'But this seems to close the door. I can't see anything else that's likely to appear. The irony is that our business case had been scrutinised and was, we gather, at the top of the list for reopenings and sitting on the minister's desk to be signed off when the election was called.'
Rebecca Smith, the Conservative MP for South West Devon, says the Government's assessment of the value created by reopening railway lines is flawed.
Appearing before the House of Commons transport committee last Wednesday, Lord Hendy said proposals were considered according to their estimated impact on economic growth, employment and homes.
However, Smith told the meeting that another of the rejected lines, from Plymouth to Tavistock, would have helped address chronic transport in an area set to receive £4.4bn of defence investment that the Government says will create 25,000 jobs.
'They say everything has been done with a focus on jobs, growth on housing,' she says. 'But if that is the case, the rural lines are exactly what they should be investing in.
'The lines already exist or the trackbed is there, so to not even give the money to assess a business case, I simply don't understand. They seem to find the money for the things they want to spend it on, like the pay rises for the train drivers.
'It has always felt to me like quite a political decision. There are a few things that were just scrapped because the Conservatives thought of it first.'
Smith says the Tavistock Line would have linked Plymouth with places as far as Dartmoor and 'followed the money' being ploughed into the city's naval base.
'If you want to invest in these areas because they're useful to the country, in our case for defence, you've got to think about how the people you want to house in these areas are going to get to these jobs,' she says.
'And when you've got the beginnings of some projects that could be explored, you've got to put your money where your mouth is. Other countries throw up railways and stations way cheaper and quicker than we do. We're told it will cost a fortune and nobody questions it.'
She cited the success of the nearby Dartmoor Line between Exeter to Okehampton, which attracted a higher-than-expected 500,000 passengers in the two years after it reopened in 2021, as evidence of the potentially huge returns from restoring defunct routes.
McClay adds that the Ivanhoe Line would also have served 'huge housing developments' along the route that will now have to rely on single-carriageway A roads.
'We've been disenfranchised'
The Restoring Your Railway programme, launched in 2020 with a £500m budget, attracted more than 150 applications, with around 20 earmarked for development.
However, only the Dartmoor Line and the Northumberland Line, linking Newcastle upon Tyne with Ashington, Bedlington and Blyth, were given the go-ahead before Rachel Reeves scrapped the scheme last July, with just £50m spent in one of her first acts as Chancellor.
The 100-mile East West Rail project between Oxford and Cambridge, which involves reopening tracks on the former Varsity Line, closed in 1968, and received £2.5bn in funding from Reeves last month, was not part of the scheme.
Scotland, by contrast, has added several new lines and around 70 new stations in recent years, including Britain's highest-profile reopening to date – the £350m, 35-mile Border Railway south of Edinburgh on the site of the former Waverley route to Carlisle.
Lord Hendy said that proposals previously financed under Restoring Your Railway should be regarded as 'unfunded' rather than cancelled.
He said: 'When the prospect comes round of future funding, they'll have to be considered alongside [other projects]. What I can't say, of course, is what other demands would come up.'
However, Smith says the Government should provide 'direct answers' as to which schemes have a chance of being taken up rather than give 'false hope' to rural towns and communities.
McClay says the prospects for reopenings have also been hurt by the creation of a two-tier system where areas under a mayoral authority get money to finance local projects while others 'have their transport priorities dictated by Westminster'.
He says that the Portishead route appeared to have been one such beneficiary, with the West of England mayoralty stepping in to provide financial backing for the line alongside the Government and local councils.
The Northumberland route also fell within the remit of the North East metro mayor.
Since the Ivanhoe Line straddles Staffordshire, Derbyshire (part of the East Midlands mayoralty), Leicestershire and the City of Leicester, it lacks a single cheerleader.
McClay said: 'We are spread thinly across those authorities and we are not top of the agenda for any one of them. The great joy of the Restoring Your Railways scheme was that it treated all applications equally and did not require a local authority to sponsor them.
'Really, we've been disenfranchised. We're going to keep the home fires burning and we're not going to give up, but we have to be realistic.'
Smith said she suspects that rail reopenings have slipped down the government agenda in part because they tend to provide links to market towns, when Labour is intent on directing spending at largely urban areas where its core supporters are concentrated.
'It depends how cynical you are,' she says. 'I think that might play a part. It feels like if it's not in the big city, they're not interested.'
The DfT said that while £10bn is being spent on rail improvements across England and Wales overall, including three stations proposed under the Restoring Your Railway scheme, it has not been possible to fund every reopening scheme.
A spokesman said: 'We have had to take difficult decisions given the difficult financial situation, but we continue to keep future funding under review.'