Robert Jenrick – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Robert Jenrick on 2016-03-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, if he will take steps to ensure disabled access on all platforms at Bingham railway station.

Claire Perry

I would like to assure the hon. Member that we are committed to improving accessibility at railway stations. However, many stations date from a time when the needs of disabled customers were simply not considered and at present only around 460 of our 2,500 stations have step free access to every platform. We have therefore continued with the Access for All programme, launched in 2006, which by 2019 will have provided step free access at more than 200 stations and has already delivered smaller scale access improvements at over 1200 stations.

In 2013 we asked the industry to nominate stations for the latest tranche of Access for All funding. 278 were put forward and we selected 68 of these to add to the programme. To ensure the best possible value for money, these were chosen based on their annual footfall, weighted by the incidence of disability in the area. We also took into account the priorities of the industry and other factors such as the availability of third party funding. Around a third were also chosen to ensure a fair geographical spread across the country.

Bingham was not among the 278 stations nominated.