Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Debate between Baroness Scott of Bybrook and Lord Berkeley

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for a very detailed reply, and I thank her for her interest in this project. I have one question: will we be able to see a draft or a copy of the undertaking from the Crown, which she has mentioned several times, before Report?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My answer is that I am not sure, but I will make sure that I let the noble Lord know. If we can do that, obviously we will.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Baroness Scott of Bybrook and Lord Berkeley

Report stage
Tuesday 11th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Prompted by the noble Lord’s intervention, I do not think that Amendment 1 is consistent with the Bill as it stands, because Part 1 comes into force, according to the commencement provision, two months after enactment, whereas Amendment 1 requires the statement to be laid one month after enactment—so the two are inconsistent, and Amendment 1 is probably not effective.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, before the Minister sits down, I thank her for what she said about the Isles of Scilly and my Amendment 11. I am grateful that she is happy to arrange a meeting with colleagues in the Department for Transport but, if it seems appropriate to have an amendment to the levelling-up Bill, would that be possible at Third Reading if she and the other Minister agree?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I think the House prefers not to have any amendments at Third Reading.

Homelessness: Homewards Initiative

Debate between Baroness Scott of Bybrook and Lord Berkeley

Tuesday 4th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

We have announced £35 million of new funding to enable local authorities to provide an increased amount of support for Afghan households and to move them from hotels into settled accommodation. At the same time, we have announced a local authority housing fund of £750 million, which will provide capital funding to councils in England to allow them to look at creative ways of getting more housing stock in, which will help the Ukrainian and Afghan arrivals. Together, therefore, we hope that we can get Afghanis into proper suitable accommodation as soon as we possibly can.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a welcome initiative. Has the Minister suggested to the Prince of Wales that he should allocate some of his extensive landholding to help this initiative, and possibly a little of his £24 million-a-year income?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I can assure the noble Lord that the Prince of Wales announced at the same time that he would undertake to make some of the Duchy of Cornwall land available for affordable housing.

Leasehold Enfranchisement

Debate between Baroness Scott of Bybrook and Lord Berkeley

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Certainly, we will be looking at the First-tier Tribunal issue, as we will be looking at all issues, when we get to the leaseholders Bill and the private renters reform Bill.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, when this new legislation gets published, can the Minister ensure that the exemptions on certain pretty ordinary houses on the Isles of Scilly, which the Duchy of Cornwall has opposed for so many years, will be included and they will be able to buy their leases like everybody else? I would have mentioned it to His Majesty this morning, but my train was late.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. I am afraid I cannot tell him whether the few cottages on the Isles of Scilly that he refers to will be covered, but I am sure he will ask further questions during the passage of that Bill.

Standards in Public Life

Debate between Baroness Scott of Bybrook and Lord Berkeley

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Blunkett on his wonderful opening speech. I took away four issues—procedures, processes, transparency and trust—and many other noble Lords have spoken about these, as well. I will give the example of what I believe is a disgraceful standard in public life, as applied by the Government to HS2. I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Adonis is in his place, and I am not going to start criticising whether it is the right project or not; I am talking about its management and the way that Parliament has been misled. I hope we can have a few lessons learned.

I remind the House that this is the most expensive public sector project on the Infrastructure and Project Authority’s annual review of government projects, and it has the dubious record of having the longest run of amber/red designations—seven years—followed by a red one. That means

“successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable”.

I believe this is a good example of a project that needs regular and detailed scrutiny, instead of what we have, which is a massive, long-lasting cover-up of costs.

This week, we received from senior managers in HS2 —I think you can call them whistleblowers—85 megabytes of files, so big documents. That is interesting because, for the first time, it says that they had produced a detailed estimate of this project from the beginning. They had always denied that to me and to many others, but they have an estimate and the problem is that it came out at £48 billion, at a time when Ministers were telling the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House that the cost was £23.5 billion. It was on the basis of that £23.5 billion that the House approved phase 1 of the HS2 Bill.

Everybody knew about this; it is clear from this documentation. I can list all the people who knew about it, and it goes back to a meeting in Oxford, at the Saïd Business School. The present Prime Minister was not there—this was in 2016—and the notes of the meeting, which we have, indicate that Ministers and officials knew that the project could not completed for the figure that they had given to Parliament. Somebody wrote an email to the current Prime Minister when he was assuming leadership of the Conservative Party, saying that the cost would be over £120 billion, when they were saying it would be £20-something billion. This is a serious misleading of Parliament and a breach of the ministerial code.

I wrote to the Cabinet Secretary on 7 July, suggesting that Ministers appeared to have misled Parliament on the costs and timescale, and asked him to set up an inquiry. I also asked him to look at the role of the Permanent Secretaries at the Department for Transport, who are the accounting officers and must have known all these figures. Did they tell Ministers, as they are required to under the code, and did they ask for a letter of instruction to authorise the funding? There is no record of either.

The Cabinet Secretary passed my letter to the Department for Transport, but the Permanent Secretary there is the accounting officer. It is interesting that the Cabinet Secretary thought it the right thing for the Permanent Secretary to investigate her department’s own failings, but there we are; that is what happened. The Cabinet Secretary has now replied to me and said that the decision to investigate any matters like this rests with the Prime Minister, which goes back to what several noble Lords said, including the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Kerr.

I quote in support a comment made to me by Sir Tim Lankester, a former Permanent Secretary, who has quite a track record from the Pergau Dam issue in Malaysia, 20 or 30 years ago:

“Like you, I think the continuing deception over the costs of HS2 is an absolute disgrace. We had come to expect this from ministers, trying to protect their own backs and trying to protect the project’s credibility against mounting evidence … But what I find utterly horrible, and in some ways even worse, is the Permanent Secretary’s complicity in this deception. Her weasel words … are utterly unacceptable from a senior civil servant, or indeed from any civil servant.”


That is a very telling comment.

The project is massively over cost, at £160 billion now. One of these whistleblowers—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Can I remind you of the five-minute limit?

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I was about to finish. The latest opening date for phase 1 is 2041, and I think this boil needs lancing. I hope the Minister, when he responds, confirms that he will pass on my comments to the Prime Minister and ask him to take some action to lance this boil.

Queen’s Speech

Debate between Baroness Scott of Bybrook and Lord Berkeley

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

There is very little new on transport in the Queen’s Speech, apart from promising a Bill for HS2 from Crewe to Manchester. As my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch said, there was a distinct lack of ambition for the transport sector in the Queen’s Speech. So, at the start of this new Session, it is time to review the purpose, benefits and likely outcome for HS2, and to ask again whether it is needed at all.

According to cost engineer Michael Byng, to whom I pay tribute for his professionalism and work in checking the cost of HS2, the latest cost estimate is £158 billion. Many would think that some of that could be better spent on improving the regional lines in the Midlands and the north, which need about £100 billion more to meet their levelling-up needs. HS2 costs have risen tenfold over 10 years, and it is time to bring to account those who have promoted it and withheld information from Parliament and the public since 2015-16.

I welcome the very powerful maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Morse. The National Audit Office has of course regularly investigated HS2’s costs and programme overruns. Quotes about its reports include:

“Ministers have no idea how much HS2 will end up costing”


and:

“The high-speed rail project is running wildly over budget and will not deliver good value for money”.


My worry, which I am sure the noble Lord will share, is why the Government ignore such advice and comments.

So I suggest that we go back 10 years, when there was a comprehensive campaign of cover-up to Parliament of the true costs and delays. At a Commons Select Committee hearing on phase 1, the DfT’s Permanent Secretary, Bernadette Kelly, when asked why her department had not given the Select Committee the latest and highest estimate, said that if they had done so, Parliament would probably have cancelled the project.

In January 2017 the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who was then Transport Minister, arranged a meeting for Michael Byng and me with an official from HS2, a man called John Stretch, and an official at the Department for Transport called Mike Hurn, to discuss the budget for phase 1. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, expressed surprised that Mr Stretch declined to provide a detailed, measured estimate in support of the costs that he was tabling. Later, during a meeting at the Oakervee review, of which I was deputy chair for a bit, HS2 directors admitted that they had no budget for measuring the work, despite having spent £11.4 million on cost consultants.

It was very odd that during 2018-19 Nus Ghani MP, the Minister of Transport, and Mark Thurston, chief executive of HS2, both stuck to the £55.7 billion figure when all the evidence led to new chairman Allan Cook’s stock-take of £88 billion, which of course left out quite a few elements of HS2 that would have taken it up to £100 billion. More recently I have received documents alleging that the Said Business School’s Professor Bent Flyvbjerg confirmed his earlier advice, given in 2015-16 to the then Leader of the Conservative Party, who of course is now Prime Minister. The forecast cost is supported by a presentation given in January 2018 by Jeremy Harrison, then director of risk and assurance at HS2, in which he stated that the total value of contracts for the entire project—without risk allowance—exceeded £80 billion. So the Prime Minister and other Ministers knew of this £80 billion figure in 2015-16. One has to ask why the Minister, Nus Ghani, and the chief executive, Mark Thurston, said three years later that the budget was still £55 billion.

The latest cost increase will be at Old Oak Common at the London end, where Michael Byng has finally costed the station at £7.1 billion, compared to a cost estimate from the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, of £1.67 billion. This is only a fourfold increase in costs—I suppose that is all right for HS2—but it does not include the cost of passenger disruption for trains using Paddington station, which will have its train and seat capacity halved for four years during the building. It is very clear that many DfT and HS2 officials and Ministers, with the honourable exception of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, have misled Parliament over years.

The NAO has stated that lessons need to be learned—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord of the five-minute advisory speaking time.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am grateful for the reminder, but a Bishop was recently allowed to carry on for six minutes and 40 seconds, so may I finish?

Doug Oakervee has stated that pressure from the construction industry persuaded him to recommend that HS2 went ahead. This need could have been met equally well by regional upgrades in the Midlands and the north, so I suggest that HS2 be stopped now and the relevant officials and Ministers held to account for misleading Parliament.

Covid-19: Department for Work and Pensions Update

Debate between Baroness Scott of Bybrook and Lord Berkeley

Tuesday 5th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook]

I thank the noble Lord. Many of the points raised today have been raised before in a number of recent debates, but I am sure that there will be other debates on the welfare system as we move forward through this difficult period. As for the changes that will happen in England—they possibly differ from what is happening in Scotland at this time—we will know more this Sunday, I believe, when the Prime Minister will talk about the way forward.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her Statement. In particular I congratulate the Health and Safety Executive staff, who have produced a very wide range of important activities, all designed to keep the workforce safe. However, I suggest that the guidelines it produced on social distances are pretty feeble, because for employers who do not comply—that is practically every employer in the land—the remedy in the guidelines is that,

“we will consider taking a range of actions”,

including

“the provision of … advice … through to … enforcement”

actions. Will the employers notice any of this? Perhaps the Minister could write to say how many enforcement actions were taken against employers in the last year. Surely the answer is to have binding and enforced standards for this purpose.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook]

I thank the noble Lord. I will get him the numbers of enforcement actions, which I do not have in my briefing pack, but if there have been any I will certainly let him know. However, much of what we are doing is in guidance and we are a country that works by consensus. It would be more difficult, and I think we would have to have more legislation, if we were to place a much stronger effect on any employer who does not comply with the guidance.

My Lords, I am going to go and turn my light on, but the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, should go on.