JOHN HUMPHRYS: But first the railways. Britain is seizing up. It's hardly a secret that our roads are becoming more and more congested and unless many more of us start leaving our cars at home our cities and our motorways will become one big, endless traffic jam. The solution: better public transport. Especially ... better railways. The BBC's spent the past week looking in some detail at the problems facing the railways and we've brought together all sides for this debate, politicians and passengers, train operators and Railtrack, to see if there's any common ground and any agreement on how to get out of the mess we're in. It's not exactly a new mess. The problem's been building for the last half century and as governments have come and gone the general view has been that they've left things worse than they found them. John Redwood, speaking of the last government of which you were a very senior member for a very long time anyway the fact is that Margaret Thatcher didn't like the trains, there was very little public investment in the railways, your solution was to privatise them and the result was a shambles. JOHN REDWOOD: No it wasn't a shambles. The result of privatisation has been a big increase in the use of the existing railway network and a big increase in investment but I think if you look at the transport problem we have in Britain now I think anyone would conclude we need more capacity of all kinds. We need more capacity on the trains on the buses and on the roads, indeed the buses need roads as well as cars and we should remember always that out of every hundred miles that passengers travel only six miles is travelled on the railways. Now we're all in favour of expanding the railways but it's not going to solve the overall problems we also need to look at bus and car transport as well. HUMPHRYS: You say you're all in favour of expansion but the fact is when you privatised them you didn't expect that there would be any great expansion. I quote Sir Alastair Morton "There was no government prognosis of growth for a rail industry in privatisation." That was the reality of it. REDWOOD: Well I thought there would be because I always think that as soon as you introduce a bit of competition and a bit of choice and a bit of private capital you do tend to get things going a bit better. There's still room for colossal improvement and one of the reasons we haven't had as much improvement in the last two and a half years as we need is Secretary of State Prescott's refusal to make the crucial decisions the rail industry needs to be able to get on with the job. One very important example is that Railtrack have said to John Prescott, 'If you let us earn a bit more money for providing new capacity and balance that by a bit less money for existing capacity you would find that a lot of the bottlenecks would be dealt with much more quickly.' Now why won't John Prescott make a decision on that. I would immediately. I would have them in and I'd negotiate a sensible deal for the tax payer and the rail traveller and make sure they could get on and get rid of the bottlenecks. There are chronic bottlenecks into London for example from all points of the compass. It needs a hundred million here, three hundred million there to put in the extra bits of track, the better signalling so that more trains an hour can go through. Why don't we do that? HUMPHRYS: Well why we don't do it, presumably, is because your people negotiated the original deal and they didn't want to do it then. REDWOOD: I'm saying that there is a better idea on offer..... HUMPHRYS: So they got it wrong? The last government got it wrong? REDWOOD: It made a lot of progress because there's been a big increase in use of the railways following the privatisation, now the rail industry has come to the government and said it could be even better. I agree with the rail industry. I think the Secretary of State should sit down and sort it out and whilst he's doing it why won't he encourage the rail industry to provide more car parks at stations because most people don't live on top of a train station, they need to drive to the station to get on the train. Why can't we look at parkway stations because it doesn't make a lot of sense for someone like me to drive ten miles in the wrong direction into a very congested town before I can even get on a train to start a train journey? It would be much easier to have a parkway station. Now these are positive common sense ideas that we are putting forward from the opposition benches. John Prescott says he likes the railways but he won't take any decisions on any of these things and so he is becoming the main obstacle to growing the railways which we want to do. HUMPHRYS: So that would cost money of course. All these things cost money. You'd be quite happy to stump up that money in spite of your record? REDWOOD: No. We're saying that this is money that can largely or wholly be found from within the rail industry and we have a proposal on the table in the Secretary of State's office from Railtrack about how the revenues could be re-jigged so that it would be worthwhile to put in exactly these kinds of de-bottlenecking investments. And if you look at investment I think it makes a lot more sense to have a crash programme of investing in getting rid of bottlenecks then in electrifying a complete new mainline. It's much more important now to be able to get more trains an hour into and out of London in particular because we are just chronically short of capacity. My constituents often have to stand even if they have bought a first class ticket in the morning because the trains aren't long enough, you can't get enough trains an hour through so we need to sort out a system. HUMPHRYS: But I mean there is billions of pounds of investment shortfall as we speak and you're saying don't spend it on the railways, spend it on car parks which some people might find a bit odd, The railways can't cope with what they've got at the moment. REDWOOD: Well I'm saying that you need more car parking so more people can leave their car and get on a train (both speaking at once) and you've got to allow the rail industry on the proposals that they have put forward, or something like them, to come forward with that investment in improved tracks and improved capacity so that more people can move around by train. We also need to make sure that the passage to train stations by car are not so blocked up by this government's other 'bash-the-motorist' policies that people can't actually get into the train station in the first place. HUMPHRYS: But that's what you're really interested in isn't it is a roads programme? You would spend the money on the roads. That's where conservative ideology always has been and still is. REDWOOD: We think you need to spend a lot of extra money on both roads and trains and we've put forward a number of proposals as to how we could increase the expenditure on both getting much more money from the private sector so that the tax payer doesn't have a huge extra burden. We have for example put forward our idea of a Londoner's tube. We think that would be a massive increase in private investment in the tube which would free money in the existing Environment department budget to spend on other things that are much needed but what has happened under this government is that they came into office, they abandoned our privatisation scheme for the tube, didn't have enough money to make up the shortfall and so they've actually slashed investment on the tube at a time when London is booming and when more and more people want to travel around in London and so London is chronically short of tube capacity at exactly the point when it's growing rather well. HUMPHRYS: But what you would do is you would say, 'well alright, we will spend more money on the roads and that would be public money. If the railways want more money, that has to be private money'? That's essentially how it breaks down surely. REDWOOD: Well not all of the money for the roads need be public money..... HUMPHRYS: No but the vast majority of it...... REDWOOD: We would look at a toll road scheme where it was a new piece of road which provided a missing link or a useful...... HUMPHRYS: No but the point I'm making is that the money for the railways would be private money. The money for the roads, or the vast majority of money for the roads....... REDWOOD: The bulk of the money for the railways would be private money because we think the markets are quite happy to produce that money as long as the sensible decisions are made of the kind I've indicated and I think Railtrack will confirm that when you discuss it with their head in a few minutes' time. It is quite possible to raise a lot more money from the markets, for the tube and for the mainline train services. If only John Prescott stops huffing and puffing and actually makes some sensible decisions for a change that would allow the rail industry to get on and do the job. HUMPHRYS: Alright. Thanks for that.