Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, listening to the many excellent contributions to this Second Reading debate, I thought I would read again the Long Title of the Bill. I see how it can cover a multitude of different subjects. If I were feeling a little wicked, I could think of an enormous number of amendments to table on any conceivable subject that would probably be allowed under this title. Of course, I shall not. Perhaps it can be construed as a curate’s egg—some good and some bad. We have heard about many things that concern me, led by many colleagues on these Benches and by my noble friend Lord Adonis. However, I shall concentrate on one part of the Bill, the planning of major projects, which comes under the “good but not enough” category.

In her opening remarks, the Minister said that the intention of the Bill was to reduce the delays to major projects, which I fully support. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. That is a laudable intention. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, spoke enthusiastically about how the recent changes to the planning system had helped a lot. I submit that cost, time and delay for such projects are still very real problems. They reflect rather badly compared with the processes that appear to take place in some other member states, such as France, Germany and others, which were summarised in a report by Infrastructure UK a year or two ago as well as in the McNulty report on the railways.

I start with the planning Acts, which established a new regime for authorising nationally significant infrastructure projects. That regime was intended to provide a unified and more efficient decision-making process for the important projects that we are talking about. I welcome that. Early experience has shown that things are going reasonably well but that more improvements need to be made, particularly as regards an efficient and unified consents process and in moving towards a sort of one-stop shop for developers.

Some amendments have been proposed to the Bill but I suggest that one or two more are necessary and desirable to further reduce all the things, such as delays, costs, uncertainty, that affect developers. The one-stop shop idea is good but it has subsequently been changed so that the final decision on projects is taken by Ministers rather than the Infrastructure Planning Commission. This introduces yet another problem, which is that of timing. The IPC, or the PINS project which follows on from it, is supposed to take a maximum of one year, which is perfectly reasonable. However, there are two problems.

The first is what happens pre-application and the second is the time taken for a ministerial decision at the end. At the moment, the pre-application process seems to leave the applicant for a development consent order rather on his own. There have been one or two examples recently of applications being rejected due to the lack of involving the transport or planning authorities, so there is an argument for saying that it might be useful if the Planning Inspectorate and the examining inspectors had more involvement in and control over programme management, in a case oversight role, at the pre-application stage. I hope we could look at that further in Committee.

At the other end of the process is the time taken for a ministerial decision. The best example of this is an intermodal logistics terminal site in beautiful Radlett in Hertfordshire, which is at an old airfield that the developer applied to turn into a logistics centre. I think he has been at it for 10 years and how many tens of millions, or more, have been spent is not clear. It went through two public inquiries and a judicial review; finally, before Christmas, the Minister made the decision to allow the project to go ahead. This is the problem when things get political.

Some five or six years ago the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said to me, “You are involved in rail freight. I live in Radlett and I do not really want this thing on my doorstep”. I said, “Well, perhaps you would like to meet the developer, who might be able to persuade you that not every truck going into the terminal will knock the hanging baskets of Radlett as it goes past because there will be access from the motorway”. Radlett is a politically difficult constituency because both the Tories and the Lib Dems believe that they should represent it in Parliament and neither want a nasty development in their backyard. Things have moved on since then. I had thought that the Liberal Democrats were in favour of such developments, but apparently not in their backyard. Anyway, two public inquiries and one JR later, the project is going ahead but at what cost? It is a pretty bad example of how our planning system works, or does not work.

As other noble Lords have mentioned, we now have the idea that the Planning Inspectorate should be given extra projects to look at; perhaps 10 or 15 more are in the pipeline. But apart from whether the people in the inspectorate are the right ones to do this work, are they suddenly going to have the resources for it? If they do not, there will be problems. This is something we will need to reflect on during the later stages of the Bill.

I have two other issues to mention briefly. The first relates to Clauses 22 and 23, which would remove the special parliamentary procedure from certain types of project. My concern is that the availability of such processes will be removed from railway and ports infrastructure. These both consist of pretty critical infrastructure projects for the UK so there is a strong argument for saying that if there is a real problem requiring a special parliamentary process it should still be allowed—although probably by reducing its scope to only those issues that are relevant to the concerns raised, rather than revisiting the entire planning application.

My final issue concerns something that is not in the Bill, but which I hope will be if Ministers accept it later, and which has been brought to my attention by Transport for London. TfL is trying to develop a new road tunnel under the Thames at Silvertown which is to have a road-user charge attached to it. As part of the development consent order requirements, TfL has discovered that it has to build toll booths and big toll plazas. It is not allowed to bring in what might be called automatic road-user charging because of the detail that would be required in the DCO for the project. We could say, “Well, it’s one tunnel in east London, so what does it matter? Dartford tunnel used to have charges”, and so on. But apparently the Government will introduce new toll roads soon. The A14 has been talked about. The Birmingham northern relief road has a toll on it and I believe that the operator, the Macquarie group, can charge what it likes for any type of traffic for the next 50 years or so.

It would be useful if the Government could look at the wider policy here. They are talking about road-user charging for trucks nationwide, but I think they are going down the wrong road by introducing the charges on a time rather than a distance basis. We have the congestion charge in London and perhaps in some other places. If each new road being built might have a different system for tolling, we are going to look extremely stupid within the next 10 years. I am told that the Chancellor of the Exchequer does not like the idea of distance-based road tolling because it might affect him driving up the M1 by his having to pay more. I hope that that is not the real reason and that in future stages of the Bill we can see whether a DCO really needs to specify what type of collection is used for a project, if it is to be tolled.