If, like me, you’re a commuter at Bolton railway station, then it’s likely that your patience is often tested.

Whether it’s the cancellations or delays caused by signal failures and infrastructure repairs, or the trains you miss because of overcrowded carriages.

It’s even worse if you’re elderly, disabled or a parent with young children and you arrive to find the lifts are broken, again.

Kearsley station in my constituency was ranked the worst station in the UK when 82 per cent of trains were delayed or cancelled.

Wherever you find yourself in the country, the picture is similarly bleak. Cancellations are at a record high, and fares have risen almost twice as fast as wages since the last government took office in 2010.

The Conservative’s failed experiment with franchising has caused passengers misery while costing the taxpayer millions. The last government itself admitted that franchising doesn’t work – and took four operators back into public ownership. But for ideological reasons, they couldn’t admit that its system had failed. Review after review was undertaken, but things only got worse. For years we saw Conservative ministers rewarding failing private operators and huge sums of money wasted on management fees and shareholder dividends.

For too long our railways have been in a state of continued managed decline.

Earlier this week I travelled to Parliament (on yet another delayed train) to vote for the first stage of the Public Ownership Bill. 

As the first Bill of our new Labour government, it will bring private train services back into public ownership, taking each private rail contract back into public hands as it reaches its end, so taxpayers don’t have to pay a penny in compensation. It establishes a new body – Great British Railways – and a new passenger watchdog to hold it to account on behalf of passengers.

Passengers deserve good quality rail services that are reliable, safe, efficient, accessible, and affordable. We need trains that turn up on time with enough carriages and working toilets, tickets that provide better value for journey and a straightforward system of compensation when things go wrong.

This week’s vote marked the beginning of the end of decades of failed privatisation of our railways, an end to the waste and the chaos that define today’s railway network and a focus on delivering for passengers and the taxpayer.

It will not be easy, and it will take time but at last we have a government that has a comprehensive plan to fix Britain’s broken railways.