Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander: "It's Urgent That We Give People Confidence In The Railway Again"

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander (Photography by Tom Pilston)

Noah Vickers

@noahvickers14

Heidi Alexander feels your misery. “Passengers are at the mercy of an overly complex and inefficient railway, which results in people being stood on platforms on a Sunday afternoon and trains not turning up.”

The Transport Secretary isn’t done, adding that the current system “results in people paying a lot of money for rail travel but feeling that they are not getting a service which is worthy of the price they are paying”.

Clearly the government feels it is new enough, and Alexander herself sufficiently fresh to the role, to side with the huddled masses staring in vain at station departure boards for any sign, any sign at all, of the delayed 17.32 to Crewe. (Other delayed trains are also not available.)

But Labour knows it has only so long to turn around the passenger experience, and is banking a huge amount on quick benefits from its plans to renationalise the network. Three firms have so far been transferred back into public hands, with the others all set to have joined them by autumn 2027. At around the same time, their functions will be absorbed into one organisation – Great British Railways (GBR), which will also take on Network Rail’s responsibilities for maintaining track and other infrastructure. The new logo, with Union Jack heavily featured, has just been unveiled.

The legislation implementing the changes received its Second Reading on December 9. Much is technical but Alexander wants to stress the benefits that passengers will feel. In her telling, timetabling will be both easier and more accountable to local demands, fares will be rationalised and the watchdog, the little-known Transport Focus, given teeth. Most notable of all will be the GBR app, a competitor to commercial outfits like Trainline, intended to make booking cheaper and facilitate refunds.

Alexander says the changes will create “a railway fit for the 21st century”. But the 50-year-old MP for Swindon South has in previous interviews stopped short of saying that public ownership will enable lower ticket prices for passengers, as the government already subsidises the railways by around £2bn a year.

In last month’s Budget, the government confirmed it will freeze rail fares next year, though it has always had the power to do that under privatisation. What, then, is the point of nationalisation?

“You might say it was possible under privatisation – of course, it didn’t happen for 30 years,” she tells The House. This is the first time, she stresses, that a government has frozen fares since privatisation.

Of course I want to deliver a more affordable railway, but I also want to get the basics right

By integrating the management of track and trains into one body, those responsible for fixing problems on the network will be the same people tasked with communicating with passengers when things go wrong.

Alexander believes this will lead to more accountable and reliable services. Rather than train companies wasting resources trying to prove that Network Rail is at fault for delays, she argues those resources can instead be focused on preventing delays in the first place.

“In the longer term, of course I want to deliver a more affordable railway,” says Alexander, “but I also want to get the basics right and at the moment the system we’ve got in place is not delivering the basics.”

Awkwardly for the government, cancellations on South Western Railway (SWR) increased by more than 50 per cent in the first 12 weeks after being nationalised in May, compared with the same period last year. The Department for Transport (DfT) blamed “long-standing issues inherited from previous private sector ownership”, while SWR said the decline in performance was “not linked in any way to our transfer to public ownership”.

Will it take until GBR has been set up in 2027 for nationalisation to deliver improved services?

“No,” is the Transport Secretary’s answer. “I’m impatient for change and I think the travelling public are impatient for change as well.”

In SWR’s case, she points out that the number of new and more spacious Arterio trains in service has quadrupled since it became publicly owned.

“I’m not going to be hanging around waiting to get better management in place until 2027, because the public wouldn’t thank me for it, I wouldn’t be doing my job properly, and it’s urgent that we actually get on and give people confidence in the railway again.”

It remains unclear how far this government will go to create new railway lines. On High Speed 2, the government has said it will not reverse Rishi Sunak’s decision to axe the line’s ‘northern leg’ to Manchester. But Labour mayors Andy Burnham and Richard Parker are both lobbying for an alternative, lower-cost version of the rail link to connect their regions. Alexander chooses her words carefully when asked if she rules that out.

“I’m aware that there are likely to be capacity constraints between Birmingham and Manchester at some point in the next couple of decades,” she says.

“While we aren’t funding a new line between Birmingham and Manchester in this spending review, it is important that we think about the longer-term pipeline of investment that the country needs, and how it all fits together.”

No discussions, her team later add, have taken place with the private sector to see whether a new Birmingham-Manchester line could be privately financed, “but we recognise the importance of strong connectivity and will set out our ambitions in the near future”.

Creating a long-term, national vision for transport was one of Labour’s manifesto pledges. Alexander’s predecessor, Louise Haigh, had said the government would publish England’s first ever Integrated National Transport Strategy in 2025.

But with Christmas fast approaching, Alexander admits the strategy has been delayed, insisting it will instead be published “very early” in 2026, as the DfT “just want to get it right”.

The new year will also see further developments in the government’s plan to see a third runway built at Heathrow Airport. The scheme divides opinion among Labour MPs – especially in London, where mayor Sir Sadiq Khan is firmly opposed to it.

Alexander takes care to avoid giving her personal view on whether the economic case for Heathrow expansion necessarily trumps the environmental impact it will have, as she is likely to be the minister taking the quasi-judicial decision on whether to approve the project.

We won’t be expanding Heathrow unless the third runway can meet some very clear tests

When MPs last voted on a third runway, during Theresa May’s premiership, Alexander had resigned from her previous constituency of Lewisham East in order to become Sir Sadiq’s deputy mayor for transport.

Yet despite missing that vote, she appeared to make her views at the time quite plain.

At her confirmation hearing to join Transport for London’s board in July 2018, she told the London Assembly that expansion “would expose hundreds of thousands more people to worsening air quality and adverse noise impacts”. The mayor took “the right decision”, she added, in joining a legal challenge against the project.

Presented with those remarks, Alexander says she was “working for Sadiq and reflecting the position of the Mayor of London at that time”. Does that mean she was not actually giving her own view to the assembly?

“I think it’s right that you look at matters relating to climate, air quality, noise,” she replies. “We have said that we won’t be expanding Heathrow unless the third runway can meet some very clear tests in relation to economic benefit, carbon, noise and air quality.”

The last seven years, the Transport Secretary points out, have seen developments in sustainable aviation fuel, while improvements in fuel efficiency and airspace modernisation can also make flying less carbon-intensive.

London’s air quality, she adds, has improved since 2018, as the Ultra Low Emission Zone now covers the entire city – though Sir Sadiq argues that a third runway would wipe out those improvements. Is he wrong to still be concerned about it?

Alexander refuses to be drawn on this, and says she does not wish to get ahead of the planning framework which will assess each of those factors. She insists, however, that it will be a “robust and detailed process”.

In those same remarks to the London Assembly, Alexander also raised the infrastructure upgrades which would be needed to transport tens of millions of extra passengers to and from the airport each year. The then Conservative government, she said, was “suggesting on a wing and a prayer that Heathrow will pay for most of it”.

Yet there is a similar lack of clarity today over who will pay, for example, to improve the airport’s rail connections. In its proposal for a third runway, Heathrow says it is “exploring the option of promoting a new rail scheme” to link the airport with Surrey, Berkshire and surrounding counties.

But crucially, it adds that any such scheme “would generate wider economic and connectivity benefits for the UK, so a shared vision with the government on rail and agreement on the appropriate mechanism for funding these investments is vital”.

Alexander points out that the airport’s public transport is already better than it was in 2018, as the Elizabeth line is now up and running – and its frequency will soon be boosted as the government has funded 10 additional trains. New, higher-capacity trains will also soon replace the Piccadilly line’s ageing stock.

Heathrow’s plans, she adds, “aren’t predicated on all of the additional demand arriving on day one with the new runway – it happens over a period of time”.

The Transport Secretary admits, however, that talks are yet to be held over who will pay for any further “surface access” upgrades, should they prove necessary.

“This government has been clear that the expansion of Heathrow is a privately-funded infrastructure project,” she says.

“The way in which people get to and from the airport is obviously critically important. There are obviously a lot of discussions that need to be had with whoever the promoter of an expansion scheme might be, about their proposals for surface access and how they are funded – but our expectation is that this is a privately-funded scheme.”

Could transport hold the key to thwarting the threat Labour faces from Reform UK? A report by Michael Dnes at the consultancy Stonehaven last year found that all of the seats gained by Reform in 2024’s general election suffer from poor road connections in urgent need of upgrading.

“When I knock on doors in my constituency of Swindon, and I meet people who are flirting with the idea of voting Reform, one of the first things they will always talk to me about is the state of the roads and getting the potholes fixed,” says Alexander.

“That’s why we are investing £1.6bn this year in sorting out the decade of neglect that the Tories left – that’s a £500m uplift. So I think we’ve got to get the basics right – sorting the roads out, making sure that buses are there for people as well.”

For drivers, November’s Budget saw the announcement of an electric vehicle per mile tax. From April 2028, the charge will be set at 3p per mile for electric car drivers, while plug-in hybrid drivers will pay 1.5p per mile. Rates will go up each year with inflation.

Alexander says the policy will help create “a fair taxation system that is fit for the future”, while ensuring that incentives are still in place to help people switch to electric.

The Chancellor has boosted the electric car grant by £1.3bn, she points out, and new public charge points are going at a speed of one every 33 minutes. Changes to the planning system, to better enable cross-pavement charging solutions, are also being consulted on.

She does not give a definitive answer, however, when asked whether civil servants have carried out any assessment as to whether the per-mile charge will discourage drivers from swapping their petrol cars for electric vehicles.

“You would expect my department to be working very closely with the Treasury in advance of a Budget being conducted,” she says. “We’re confident that we are striking the right balance here.”

The secretary of state has not yet made the switch herself: she and her husband drive a petrol Mini they bought seven years ago.

“I know that the next time we buy a car, we will buy an EV,” she says. “My husband and I have had that discussion, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when we’re going to buy the new car, because it’s running pretty well at the moment.” 

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