Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Teverson

Monday 9th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, my comments on these three amendments reflect my comments on the first group. I welcome them. Again, we spent a lot of time debating them, and it is really good that the Commons listened to the very strong pressure from the various cycling organisations and persuaded the Government that the new clause under Amendment 6 should go in. It covers everything that one could have asked for. It follows on, as the Minister said, from the delivery plan. A duty to deliver a strategy was needed, and what is in these amendments is very good. Subsection (9) even says what happens if the Secretary of State does not produce a strategy, which is very welcome. It would be nice if the Minister could give an indication as to when the first one might appear. Is it this year, next year or sometime never? I know it is always difficult for Ministers to commit themselves.

One thing occurred to me on reading this amendment. I read it as applying to all roads, not just trunk roads, but maybe the Minister will confirm that. I know that there are not many cyclists on trunk roads, as most find it much too dangerous, but trunk roads are useful highways, connecting towns, villages and cities that are a little further apart with a bit more capacity and higher speed. In the Netherlands, they are making high-speed cycle lanes where people are expected to go a bit faster.

However, it is a really good start. I congratulate the Government on listening to all the pressure that has come from the cycling organisations. I look forward to participating and taking this forward.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, from these Benches, I, too, very much welcome these amendments. As we discussed in Committee and on Report, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, we felt that this was an important bit that was missing from transport strategy. The Infrastructure Bill is an excellent opportunity to put that right. The early clauses sounded very woolly to me, but as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, pointed out, new subsection (9) makes it rather clear that this is expected to happen rather than being something that is optional. That is a major step forward. I assume and hope that this will go forward and that we will approve it as soon as possible.

Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Teverson

Monday 3rd November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

The House should congratulate the Minister on the amendment. We have discussed it so often. We have been told on many previous occasions that Governments do not like lists; you can understand that. I shall not table an amendment saying, “Please add Segways and horses” or anything else. I take what the Minister says: this covers everything.

In that vein of thanks, the two other amendments in this group are to do with cycling and walking strategy. Some noble Lords have already spoken on cycling and walking. It may seem odd that on strategic highway routes there is not much cycling and walking. I suggest that there should be. It is important that, as part of the strategies that the strategic highway company will have to look at, it should have a separate cycling and walking investment strategy.

In this House we have debated cycling on many occasions. The pressure is on from many areas, not just from the cycling and walking organisations but also from those who believe that they are pretty healthy forms of transport, to get the Government to commit to a long-term strategy with some long-term funding. So far, Ministers have not been able to make any commitment to funding, but the recommendations from the All-Party Parliamentary Cycling Group’s report last year suggested that £10 per head of population per year—which is about half the figure in many continental countries, such as Belgium, Holland and Denmark—could be allocated on a long-term basis to improving cycling facilities, infrastructure and other things,

I know that Ministers have in the past said that this is a local problem and that it should therefore be funded locally. The problem is that local funding does not usually stretch to such things. Many people believe that, combined with a draft strategy, something like what is in Amendment 55 and the proposed new schedule in Amendment 96 should be done for the benefit of health, and for cyclists and walkers, and to reduce road congestion, pollution and the other things that we talked about earlier.

I look forward to the Minister’s response, and take into account that this is only the small tip of an iceberg. As my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham said, most journeys take place on local roads. Still, it is a start, and if it could happen on the trunk road network, I suspect that the other roads would soon follow.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, very much welcome the Minister’s amendment. It offers clarity and shows that the Government are quite clear that cyclists and walkers are important on the highway network. I admit that I could not resist backing the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, because, although I am not an absolutely regular cyclist, I get my bike out quite frequently in Cornwall, which is not the easiest of terrain to cycle.

I was in continental Europe over the weekend, and it was astounding to see how important cycling can be in terms of an alternative transport means and strategy. If it is one that is generally safe, and one that is accepted among families, then it becomes a normal way of getting to school, of getting to work and moving around. Indeed, I remember doing it as a child back in the 1950s and 1960s. I always used to cycle to school, save the bus fare and spend it elsewhere. That was my disposable income for the week.

Given the excellent work that, in particular, my right honourable friend Norman Baker has done in the other place in the past, and the Local Sustainable Transport Fund, this is something that we need to build on. That is why I was very pleased to support this amendment. It would be good to move to a proper formal government strategy in this area. It is also all part of our commitment to reduce carbon emissions in the transport sector, and a very important way of doing that. Having said that, I also understand the argument that—hopefully—as we devolve more fiscal powers to cities and non-metropolitan areas as well, this should be a major part of their focus of work, too.

It would be a sign that the Government is looking at this area and has some strategy that they see as a framework. It would also give a signal that the Government think that this is important, and would get them ahead of the curve on this important change that is gradually happening. It would be so much better for all of us: for emissions, for physical exercise and for congestion. It would have big pluses for all those points of view. That is why I am pleased that the Minister has proposed the amendment that she has, but I hope that the Government can consider this and take it forward in some way or another.

Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Teverson

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I would just like to ask the Minister where this figure of a £2.6 billion saving comes from. The two organisations Network Rail and the new strategic highways company will be quite similar, but one difference between them, which we will come on to in later amendments, relates to the role of the Office of Rail Regulation. Over the past 10 years, the Office of Rail Regulation has required Network Rail to make savings of about 60% of its turnover. That is quite a big saving, which has been achieved, while keeping the service going and the quality improving, because the regulator has very strong powers. If the savings are not made, or if the resulting performance of the network is bad, the regulator can fine Network Rail, as I believe it is planning to do next week.

The problem here is that the rail regulator will not have such powers over the highways authority but will simply monitor. You can sit monitoring things all your life, but you cannot incentivise or require an organisation to make the changes that it should. I am sure that there are changes to be made. I am sure that significant percentage savings could be made over quite short periods. On whether those would be the same as in the case of Network Rail, they probably could be, because Network Rail started off as a nationalised industry, which was probably pretty inefficient to some people. Although the Highways Agency has improved over the years, there is probably a long way further to go. However, unless we can get the ORR to have the same powers not just to monitor but to control and enforce cost reductions, I am not quite sure where we are with this.

Listening to other noble Lords, I am beginning to think that the only benefit from this that I have heard is the idea—which the Minister has, of course, denied—that the Bill is about getting the Highways Agency ready for privatisation.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I should declare an interest in that I, too, am a regular user of the A303. When driving down there, one of the greatest moments for me is being able to see Stonehenge, but I know that the fact that I can do so is not necessarily good for the millions of people who go to visit it. More seriously, perhaps I could also declare my interests for the rest of the Committee stage of this Bill. I am a director of Wessex Investors, which would have an interest in the outcome of some of the planning implications of the Bill, although I do not intend to speak on those particularly. Wessex Investors could also potentially have an interest in some of the energy provisions, as it is starting to negotiate with an organisation on an energy project in the south-west. However, I do not think that any of those affect what I am going to talk about.

I, too, shall be interested in hearing answers to the questions on this asked by the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Davies, but I want to make the point that it is important politically that the Government are saying in the Bill that we have had enough of the stop-start, ad hoc investment plans for roads, and we need to move on to a much more mature and grown-up way of looking at infrastructure in the highways sector. Whether that is absolutely dependent on changing the name and function or legal entity of the Highways Agency, I am not absolutely sure, but I know that the Minister will come back on that when she answers the debate.

However, the good thing is that there is a real intention to start to mirror the situation that applies to rail. My understanding of this is imperfect and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, will know far more about it than me, but, as I see it, we have a good example from Network Rail, for which we now have a £38 billion programme over the next five years providing the investment needed to keep this country moving and to move things forward and modernise that network. That seems to be incredibly successful as regards usage and how that has worked over the past decade and into the future. If we can start to replicate that in the way we treat roads in this country, that would be positive.

I am not a great person for advocating huge investment in the strategic road network—apart from for the A303—but that clearly needs to be done in some areas, and on a programmed and predictable basis so that the Government, users and contractors know that it will be rolled out and actually happen rather than be subject to the next budget cut. I therefore welcome that, and hope that the Minister will be able to reply in such a way as to show that this change of the legal status of the Highways Agency will enable that to happen. Clearly, we need to do that.

Energy Bill

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Teverson

Monday 28th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on Amendments 50 and 51. My heart is with them completely, and I congratulate the right reverend Prelate on his award. I am sometimes involved in green awards and energy efficiency—an area that has often been left out of these debates—and it is great to have someone who has been a recipient of one of those.

The difficulty with these two amendments is that they target a specific reduction in electricity. Coming back to the decarbonisation debate that we had earlier on today, better decarbonisation can, of course, actually be achieved by having an increase in electricity. One of the big challenges of decarbonisation is moving the transport sector from fossil fuels either into biofuels or, particularly, into electricity, using electric vehicles. We also eventually want to move home heating from gas into electric—non-carbon-generated electricity. It therefore makes it very difficult in these areas to have targets on terawatt-hours or proportions or whatever; you have to take it back to exactly what the right revered Prelate said, which is energy efficiency. I am a great advocate of the green deal, and it certainly has its issues at the moment and I hope it succeeds, though perhaps it needs a number of changes to do that. At the end of the day, however, the real thing we have to do is just to go out there and, perhaps rather brutally—whether it is street by street or village by village—ensure that we upgrade domestic and industrial premises so that they are energy efficient. Going down the route of specific electricity-target reductions could actually work against decarbonisation and the way in which we are trying to reduce carbon emissions in this country. I am absolutely with the intent, but I think the method in this case has great difficulty.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has some very good points there. If, as I do quite often, you go around properties in different parts of the continent, you find that the energy usage and consumption and insulation are generally a lot better than many of our buildings here. I have a feeling, having talked to a few people in the building trade, that it is because the standards to which we build our properties actually require less insulation and draught-proofing than those of many other countries. It may be because we think that the temperature is always the same here, so it does not really matter.

Another problem that we have to sort out soon is the greater use of air conditioning in buildings, because in some countries—I do not think it is the case here—the current use of energy for air conditioning is a great deal more than that for heating. It is possible to design buildings which need much less air conditioning. Noble Lords will have seen them in the architectural press at some time. I do not know why we do not encourage more of this in this country; it has been an issue for years.

However, I am still not convinced that the energy suppliers have any incentive to sell less electricity or gas. It is a bit like the water companies: they love having leakages and no meters, because they sell more water and seem to think that is a good idea in places or times where there is a shortage. We are stuck with some perverse incentives. I agree that these are probably not the right amendments to achieve what we want, but it is something that we need to do to get the incentives, insulation and building regulations right, and look at the air conditioning and the design of our buildings so that they are fit for purpose in the time of global warming, as we debated earlier.

Energy Bill

Debate between Lord Berkeley and Lord Teverson

Thursday 18th July 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson]

I hope that the noble Lord will not mind me intervening. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, asked a very interesting question about the decade when there was effectively this separation. Does the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, have any thoughts about whether it was better then, or does he have any other answer to that? It is quite an interesting issue that came out of the debate.

[Lord Berkeley]

I do not think that it was particularly perfect then. We thought that it would get better, but what is probably different between then and now is that the technology has moved on. We are able to trade and the physical network has got a lot better, so I am not sure that the situation is quite the same. However, I am sure that my noble friend will have more to say on that.