Queen’s Speech

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to be debating this evening on the three issues which come so well together: levelling up, communities and transport. I welcome the fact that we are to have maybe one or more Bills—I am not quite sure but it does not really matter, as we will have plenty of opportunities for debate. There are many other things, such as maritime EVs, buses and air, which have not been mentioned.

Before I move on to more transport things, I have one question on housing. When the Minister comes to reply, can he say a little about whether the right to buy from leaseholds is to be included? That was something which the Law Commission produced in an excellent report several years ago. It was promised after the first leasehold Bill and I am wondering whether there is to be another, because I have a lot of friends with an interest in that.

The other interesting thing which the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, said in her introduction was about low-speed machines—I think she called them something like that—which seemed to be an excellent summary phrase for pedicabs, other e-bikes, scooters and the delivery of freight by bikes, electric or otherwise, some powered and some not. It may even cover what the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, said about wheels to work.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, mentioned in her speech the connectivity of people. I am pleased to be a member of her Select Committee on the Built Environment. I can understand how both she and the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, were pretty angry about and critical of pedicabs and e-scooters. The solution is probably some form of education, persuasion and discipline to make people use these things and park them in places which are reasonably attractive, without getting rid of their usefulness. I have been trying out one or two scooters in London—legally, with my driving licence—and I invite the noble Baroness to join me one day on a scooter. My noble friend Lord Snape gave an invite to the Minister too. I can see she is shaking her head, but they are actually very good.

The great thing is that when you get off a train at a station or off a bus somewhere and you want to go a couple of hundred yards very quickly, you can just jump on these things and off you go. Of course, I do it on the road; I pretend I am a cyclist most of the time. I think the idea of having something like that for personal transport and connectivity is terribly important and I look forward to the debate on this and the Bill when it comes out.

The next thing that the noble Baroness mentioned in her introduction was the commitment to net-zero carbon. Well, they are good words but, to me, the Government’s actions to date have, frankly, been the opposite. They seem to have reduced the need for road vehicles—cars and trucks—to comply with some reduction of carbon that should happen. Fuel duty has stayed the same for many years and rail fares keep shooting up with very little comment about the relative contribution to net zero.

On Great British Railways, the noble Baroness said that we are going to have a world-class transport network. Those are fine words but there may be some way to go yet. I need convincing of the benefits of Great British Railways. This all started with the Williams review in 2018, which is four years ago now. He produced a very useful demand analysis which is still missing. Perhaps we will have a new one when the Government publish the Bill alongside it.

I go back to what must be 20 years ago when the Government created the Strategic Rail Authority. Ministers were fed up with making decisions on very small details on the railways so they created the authority that was going to run the railways, the track and the operations—ticket sales, buying, maintaining and operating rolling stock, et cetera—so that the rail sector was in charge and not subject to the then Department for Transport mismanagement. They created it but then a few years later, not very long after, the Strategic Rail Authority did something that the Ministers did not like. What did they do? They abolished it and went back to micromanagement.

I was involved in rail freight at that time. There were two or three years at the start and finish of the SRA where nothing happened at all. There was no investment and no changes. I hope that is not the intention this time. The whole problem at the moment is money, and because of that the Treasury is running every detail. I would like to know—I probably will not hear it this evening—where will this change?

Most people agree now that investment in the railways is primarily needed for local and regional services. This is why it is so sad that very little electrification has been announced in the last five years. I know there was a problem with the Great Western line but I think that has all been solved by the industry. Electrification is where we are going to get much greater quality of service and better frequency, et cetera, but we do not have it.

I hope that when we get some legislation—if we do—on what I suppose is called localism in the regions, they will be able to drive investment in the railways. Will local leaders be able to do this? At the moment, it is the opposite. I support the Mayor of Greater Manchester in suggesting that a station should be an underground station for HS2 at Manchester. However, whether I am right or wrong, the mayor and a lot of the other mayors around there want that underground station while the Government want a surface station. Nobody has produced any costs as to which is better. Certainly internationally, through-stations at capital cities are much more efficient and much less land hungry and probably cause much less disruption. That is happening at Stuttgart in Germany at the moment. My question, really, is: why are the Government insisting, against the wishes of so many people in the region, on having something that the people apparently do not want, although of course they would probably rather have it than nothing?

The other problem is that the integrated railway project has allocated £96 billion for the regional projects, but that will all be taken by HS2, so there is no more money for electrification. That is not good for the regions.

On the Minister’s statement that this new structure of the railways will avoid spiralling costs, the only spiralling costs in the railways at the moment are for HS2, which the Government control. There is no electrification and we have nothing on fares; they keep on going up, but we do not have any new ideas on that. We have to encourage a system where people use the railways, and I suspect that the people who run the railways, including from the commercial sector, are better at deciding that than civil servants.

When we finally get the new Bill, I hope we will see some evidence of demand and of the changes that have happened, and that we will have a little more transparency. At the moment, the only forecasts that I know of are connected with rail freight. There is a forecast of how much rail freight is needed north of Crewe on the way to Cumberland and beyond, compared with the HS2 and west coast main line. That forecast is commercially confidential. I hope that Ministers will publish that—it is only two years old—along with a lot of other information to support the view that Great British Railways will actually be worth the hassle.