LETTER TO TRANSPORT MINISTER

See below text of a letter I have written to Transport Minister following a meeting with her on Wednesday.

Rt Hon Theresa Villiers MP
Minister of State
Department for Transport
Great Minster House
76 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DR

20 July 2011

Dear Theresa

THAMESLINK ROLLING STOCK PROJECT

Thank you for your letter of 15 July 2011 and for facilitating the meeting attended by colleagues from Derby and Derbyshire and myself in Westminster today.

I am afraid that I cannot accept the apparently resolute position taken by the DfT on this matter, as it represents a complete disaster for the communities that my neighbouring MPs and I represent. As you saw earlier today, we are totally united across the normal party divisions on the Bombardier question. This unity will be reflected when a complete cross section of society rallies in Derby on Saturday.

I sincerely believe that you are being seriously misinformed by your officials, both on the way in which the Thameslink procurement has been undertaken and in your options for doing something about it. As a former local government leader, I can tell you that the default position of bureaucracies everywhere is to convince their political leaders that they are the passive victims of immutable processes. Please do not fall into that trap so early in your stewardship of the Department for Transport.

The Thameslink procurement was designed by human beings and can be amended by human beings. Whether or not Ministers in the last Labour Government should have understood the minute details of the Thameslink procurement process and to have done something about it is a moot point. That process was plainly designed by officialdom in a way that enabled Siemens to deliver a knock-out financial blow through the use of its unrivalled balance sheet and its status as a German bank.

This alone is justification for the Government to review whether it has truly achieved “the most economically advantageous solution” as set out in the procurement process. Siemens is now in a position to deploy the same trick again and again to the detriment of competition and innovation in the UK train market.

Moreover, as our discussion on the technological aspects of the process revealed today, Siemens has been given an extraordinary breathing space in which to develop a new lightweight train bogie. Furthermore, as your officials conceded, the Siemens bogie is still a theoretical proposition that only exists on a drawing board, there is a huge question mark hanging over the deliverability of the Siemens option.

For these reasons alone, British taxpayers will find it hard to understand why they should be put at risk to enable Siemens to bring its train to anything like the standard of the Bombardier design. Even then, its reliability will be questionable until it has actually been in service on real British railway lines, rather than test lines in Germany. I therefore sincerely question how this can be presented as the most economically advantageous solution for the UK.

As I said at our meeting, I am genuinely worried that unless this decision is overturned Bombardier could pull out of the UK altogether. Such an outcome would be a calamity for British manufacturing because, as you will be well aware, Bombardier is the last remaining British based train manufacturing company.

I do not doubt the sincerity of your concern over the future of our constituents in Derby and Derbyshire who are employed by Bombardier and its many suppliers. I also sympathise with the position in which you now find yourself following the pledges you gave during the General Election campaign.

Finally, I can assure you that using the power of your office to find a solution to this mess will secure nothing but praise from the people of Derby, Derbyshire and further afield. But if you and your colleagues continue to follow the lead of your dogmatic civil servants, I am afraid the impact of the Thameslink decision in our part of the world will never be forgotten by future generations.

Yours sincerely

Chris Williamson MP
Derby North