Rail expertise must be saved

This role will also expand significantly when work begins on a new high-speed line. The expertise of skilled engineers – knowledge acquired over decades – will be paramount.

As such, it makes the Government's decision not to intervene following the demise of York-based maintenance contractor Jarvis even more perverse.

This ambivalence, apparently based on assurances offered to Ministers by Network Rail, is also at odds with Gordon Brown's interventionist approach that has helped keep many redundancy-threatened workers in jobs.

Of course, there must be guarantees that "subsidised" private firms are viable entities and Jarvis, for one, has endured a chequered history. It was, in part, liable for the 2002 Potters Bar disaster, and it has previously struggled to fulfil government contracts because it took on too much work. Yet the risk, according to the Yorkshire MPs now fighting to safeguard jobs, is that there is every prospect – from the experience of previous redundancy rounds – that the affected workers will relocate to the Continent, and their expertise will be lost to Britain.

It is why the Government, they say, should have made a Railway Administration Order to guarantee the engineers work until the company's future can be resolved.

Given this, it is paramount that Ministers think again – and that organisations, like Yorkshire Forward and the unions, work together to present an overwhelming argument to the Department for Transport and Network Rail. Safety is too important for it to be subjected to the whims of short-term decision-making.

Furthermore, this one company's plight, again, highlights the fragility of Britain's economic recovery, and why the main parties cannot afford to lose sight of this issue during the election. For, while they are arguing about their respective policies, there is the prospect of many people losing their livelihoods because Westminster's response to the recession did not go far enough.