It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) on securing the debate. I pay tribute to him and to the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) for their leadership of the important all-party parliamentary group. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling). I am very fond of Clacton. I have been a resident of the east of England for nearly 17 years, and I know my hon. Friend’s constituency well. We campaigned on a by-election together, with good long-term results.
It is important to say that the contributions so far have included some serious issues that need to be addressed, which I say as the Member of Parliament for Witham for just over 12 years. My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton is the chairman of GEML, which for the benefit of Hansard is the Great Eastern Main Line taskforce. I co-set that up nearly 10 years ago: GEML was all about getting infrastructure investment into that main line. We have been successful, though I will touch on some elements that have not materialised. There are important areas, highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney, that speak to lamentable actions across Government and the low confidence that my hon. Friend touched on. I want to speak specifically about those.
First and foremost, infrastructure clearly covers road and rail. That has frankly become a joke in the overall way that Whitehall has failed to integrate. That is not to do with the Minister’s Department; it is a failure of the Whitehall system to work across Departments and integrate funding. Basically, securing investment in our infrastructure is one example of how we can support levelling up. It is a statement of the obvious.
We have new rolling stock on our line—part of the GEML taskforce—for a very good reason. A decade ago, I and colleagues across that network went to the Treasury and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, the former Member for Tatton, and put forward a business case. Some of us are capable of putting together presentations and business cases. We put that forward in conjunction with Network Rail and it secured £600 million, linked to a nine-year franchise that was very much about delivering rolling stock, improvements on productivity, performance and so on. We achieved that, but it is only one example.
The failure to secure funding for Ely junction and Haughley junction was not the fault of the taskforce but of Whitehall, and its lack of integration. Those sites
are not in my constituency, but they are east of England infrastructure projects that would unlock the economic potential not just of the east, but of the nation. It is interesting that, at a time when HS2 is again being vilified for a range or reasons, such as being over budget and not on time, we have to stick the course with infrastructure projects.
The problem is that the Armitt process has not been published. That is the funding mechanism, which sits in the Department for Transport, for securing these major infrastructure projects. The other problem, as we have already heard, is that the east of England is a net contributor. Our main line has been subsidising the rail network for the rest of the country for decades. That money goes to the Treasury. The revenue base sits with Treasury, and the Department for Transport is deprived of the funding stream to help with the financial pipeline of rail investment.