The Green Party’s National Spokesperson for Transport and Healthy Streets, Matt Edwards, has told Rail Technology Magazine the steps his party would take to create a more sustainable rail network.
Mr Edwards said that decarbonising the rail network is integral to achieving net zero by 2030, and that the Government has done “nowhere near enough” to hit existing climate targets.
The Green Party has pledged £30 billion in its election manifesto towards creating a fully electrified rail network, with Mr Edwards lamenting efforts to electrify the UK’s rail network thus far as a “national embarrassment.”
He said: “We started electrifying the railway in the 1950s and 60s when technology was a lot more primitive, but I think in one year alone in the 50s you probably had more electrification happening than you’ve had in the decades since then.
“We would make sure that the Department of Transport is thinking rail first.”
Mr Edwards dismissed other alternative energy sources such as hydrated vegetable oil (HVO) fuel and hydrogen as insufficiently tested.
He said: “Electrification is tried and tested. With some the alternatives we are looking at, such as hydrogen and sustainable fuels, we really need to use quotation marks when we describe them as green, because they are not the answer.”
In this vein, Siemens Mobility last week announced a partnership with Tyczka Hydrogen to find solutions to make hydrogen a more viable alternative energy source for the rail industry.
The Green Party has also pledged to make the railway the “backbone of a sustainable transport system”. Mr Edwards said the Party would reverse the “de-prioritisation” of public transport that has taken place in the UK since the 1960s, and called for a coherent, rolling programme of upgrades on the rail network.
He pointed to ongoing projects including HS2 and the TransPennine Route Upgrade, where learnings in sustainable construction and development are being lost due to incoherent planning.
“If you look at projects using low-carbon concrete in construction, for example, learnings from these programmes are quickly becoming lost because the project finishes, that’s that and they move on.”
The Green Party has also stressed the importance of rail freight in creating a more sustainable transport network. Recent figures from the Rail Freight Group suggest that one freight train can carry the equivalent of 129 HGVs, while emitting 76% less CO2 per tonne. Meanwhile, the Office of Rail and Road reported that over 194,000 freight trains ran on the UK rail network between April 2023 and March 2024, carrying the equivalent of 5.65 million HGVs.
Mr Edwards said: “We need to provide incentives for the freight industry to look at the rail industry as an alternative, whether that be through subsidisation or tax incentives.”
Matt Edwards was elected to Bradford Council in May 2021, where he became the leader of the Green Party Group. He has stood for election as an MP in the Bradford South constituency in 2019 and 2024.
Image credit: iStock
