Well said—I very much agree. Following on from that, transport is one of the hardest nuts to crack in that decarbonisation agenda. Without a large-scale mass public transport solution, we are not going to get there. That is at the core of Oxfordshire county council’s strategy and this would help to deliver it, just as my hon. Friend’s project would in his constituency.
I have two more points. Vast numbers of people living in West Oxfordshire have to get to hospitals in Oxford for secondary and tertiary care. The unreliability of the road puts enormous stress on their lives; they—including members of my family, as it happens—often have to go backwards and forwards a number of times a week. People have to leave home for a 10-mile journey sometimes two or three hours in advance, because they are scared about missing their appointment. That is only set to get worse on current plans.
Finally, on defence, RAF Brize Norton is the biggest RAF base both in the country and internationally, with 7,500 people working there. It was built there because it had a railway connection, but that connection was ripped up 50 years ago. We must bring back that railway connection now. In times of peace, the lack of the connection is bad news, but in times of war it is truly terrible. Is that really how we want to run our country? The biggest airbase in the country, which runs all our international transport, does not have even have a railway connection. That is a disaster.
What has been going on to date? I give real thanks to the Witney Oxford Transport Group, which really took the charge on this issue in 2014, before I showed up. I am immensely grateful for its having made me chair in 2020. Since 2020, we have conducted a number of technical studies, particularly on defining a route that goes not only from Oxford to Carterton but through the Salt Cross garden village. Those studies gave the county council enough comfort to commission a feasibility study, which was published last November, and this year Lichfields is carrying out an economic analysis. That is all working towards the new local plan for West Oxfordshire, which is being worked up now. As a district councillor, I am working closely with my district council colleagues, as well as Sasha White—the planning and land use silk of the year; many thanks, Sasha—to work the railway line into our local plan. If the line is in there, we have a real chance of getting this railway built.
I used to work in business and I understand that there is really one thing that counts here: money. A key part of our work has been on the funding, and shaking a tin at the Treasury and waiting 50 years is not what we have in mind. Who have we been working with? It has been E-Rail so far, which has just funded 30% of the Ashington-to-Blyth line by going up to landowners and developers along that track and saying, “If you want to bring back a passenger rail line here, sign some voluntary, legally-binding contribution agreements, which will allow you to build houses around those future railway stations. Bluntly, the reason why you should do so is that you will make more money.” They will make more money for three reasons. First, the local plan will allow them to have houses sited around that railway station that would not otherwise exist. Secondly, they can build at higher density around a railway station. Thirdly, each of those houses is worth more because it is next to a railway station.
That might sound radical, but it is what our Victorian forebears did 150 years ago. It is what Japan, Korea and Hong Kong do, and what much of northern Europe does. That is how they fund their public infrastructure, and I would argue that case. Labour sometimes mentions land value, and I really hope that it looks into the issue because it is a way of using private and public funding to get things moving quickly—as opposed to just sticking it to the taxpayer, which is what we have had to do up to now. I really ask for the Minister’s help in exploring that. That would fund about 50% of the railway line, and the other half would come from Homes England. We would be delivering on our side of the bargain by getting all those houses into West Oxfordshire in a coherent and sensible way. Without a railway line, we will not have that solution and we will have an unsustainable, long-term problem.