Airports National Policy Statement

Lord Brabazon of Tara Excerpts

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brabazon of Tara (Con)]

My Lords, I commend the Government on finally making this decision. As one of my noble friend’s predecessors, albeit 26 years ago, I can confirm the remark that the issue has been debated for half a century. I was not there for all that half a century, although my noble friend Lord Spicer was there for part of it. The decision is the correct one. Heathrow is the only answer. It is all very well talking about putting other runways elsewhere but you need the hub connectivity that Heathrow will give. Whatever the noble Baroness on the Liberal Benches says about hubs, they are absolutely essential: a proper hub gives people in this country the ability to fly to more destinations around the world, and this will do much to enhance that, so I commend the Government on having made this decision.

I have a question for the Minister about the night ban. I declare an interest as someone who lives in west London underneath the flight path into Heathrow. I live slightly further away than I did before but I am still affected by it. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, queried the word “expect” with regard to a six and a half hour ban. I hope we will be getting such a ban, if not a longer one, and that it really will be a ban. At the moment you are not allowed to fly within certain hours, except that there can be half a dozen or so in the morning. When they start coming in at 5 am, that is what becomes really irritating. I hope my noble friend can confirm that this will be a real ban and that there will be no flights, even emergency flights, between those hours.

High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Lord Brabazon of Tara Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendments 1 and 6 are also in my name. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has set out the reasons behind them very clearly, but there is a continuing worry about what is proposed at Euston. I think this is the eighth attempt by HS2 to come up with a scheme. If you produce something eight times, you begin to wonder what the problem is. The latest scheme is going to cause 19 years of construction or rebuilding of the station itself. That is a very long time for any project—very much longer than London Bridge, and that is not a great success—and there are ways of doing it much more cheaply. It would work to do it more quickly and within the Euston width —many people have heard us speak about that before—but my worst worry is about the cost, and I shall speak on that more generally in a minute.

In one of his helpful responses in Committee, the Minister said that lots of cost estimates had been done for both Euston and the whole scheme. The fact remains that the last one that was published—Additional Provision 3, issued about 18 months ago in September 2015 by Simon Kirby, the then chief executive of HS2—said that the total cost of the additional provisions was £66 million and that the cost of compensation was £97.8 million. Only a few months later Professor McNaughton, who was the man leading on HS2, told me and several colleagues that the compensation cost was actually going to be £1 billion at Euston. I cannot see how anyone can be happy with something that is out by a factor of 10. I think that there are still civil engineering problems there and, as one noble Lord asked about in Committee, that there are still plans to redesign the portal; we hope that it will be an improvement. It would be nice if noble Lords were told about this. There are quite a few residents I know in Camden who know about this, but none of us has been told, in spite of quite a lot of asking.

Euston may well be the right location, and we can debate the best way into Euston. In France and Germany, when a high-speed service has been built over the years, the last few miles into the city centre have generally been on the classic tracks because of the cost and disruption of knocking down enormous numbers of properties. Why we should be different, I do not know—we can ask ourselves the question. The reason for this amendment is to try to squeeze out of the Government their plans for Euston. If they do not have any, let us see if we can have an interim station that would really work at Old Oak Common, as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said.

Amendment 6 is grouped with this amendment. I will not repeat what I said in Committee, because it is clearly on the record. We organised costings with Michael Bing, a quantity surveyor who has written the textbook of costings for Network Rail; that is two years old now, so I hope that it will implement it soon, because there are problems with costs on the classic network. He concluded that the cost of HS2 at Euston, with the tunnel as far as Old Oak Common, was £8.25 billion. That did not fit well, in my mind, with the total committed expenditure limits from the Government for the whole of phase 1 of £24 billion, because it is about one-third of it for eight kilometres out of 200. So I asked the same gentlemen, using the same methodology and rates, to cost the whole of phase 1, and it came out at about £54 billion, which is actually double the Government’s estimate they published in a Written Answer to me on 21 December.

I am very grateful to the Minister: we had a meeting on this last week and agreed to look at it further. However, my worry is that the original costings that we produced have never been challenged by government. You would think that the Government would have come to me or my colleagues to say, “You’ve got it wrong. You are using the wrong assumptions and the wrong design”, or whatever. Well, we could not use the wrong design—it was their design that we were using—but nobody has come back to me to say that we got it wrong. That rather leads me to believe that we probably got it quite right—or nearly right. The consequence of that is that the £54 billion we have calculated for phase 1 is actually the total expenditure limit that the Government have announced for the whole project, including phases 2 and 3. As the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said, we do not want to stop at Birmingham. It is the sections north of Birmingham that are, in my view, more in need of improvement—at Manchester, Crewe, Leeds and beyond—than the southern sections are in the first phase.

It is very important that we get a handle on the costs. It is right that we should be talking about this at Report because it is surely up to us as parliamentarians to challenge the Government so that they know what the costs are before they start work. It is very easy on a project to start work and, then, after a few years, to scratch your stubble and say, “Oh dear! I got it wrong”, and go back for more money. It is quite possible to get the costings right. Noble Lords may have heard somebody from Crossrail on the “Today” programme this morning talking about its success. It really is a success: it is on time, I believe, and it is certainly on budget. So it is possible to do it. My argument, and my plea to the Minister, is: can we not get the same discipline attached to HS2, before it is too late?

[Lord Brabazon of Tara (Con)]

My Lords, I have one question. Perhaps it is for my noble friend the Minister or perhaps it is for the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. My understanding was that if Old Oak Common were to be used as the terminus for this railway, even in the interim, a completely different design would be required for Old Oak Common than is currently in the Bill. It would therefore require the Bill to be re-hybridised, and would put an almost endless delay on the whole thing.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I find it somewhat bizarre that we should be discussing these particular amendments at this particular time. I find it even more bizarre that these amendments should be moved by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley—both of whom are normally extremely supportive of railway matters. The effect of accepting either or both these amendments, as I am sure the Minister will tell us, would be to delay considerably the project as a whole. I am sure that that is not the noble Lord’s intention, but I hope he will agree with me that that would be the result. He shakes his head—he can come back to me on that in a moment.

I do not think that you could have a re-costing of a project this size and then say, “We will have Third Reading of the Bill in a week’s time, and that’s the end of it”. If the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, is saying that, he is an even bigger financial genius than I thought he was previously. The fact is that there would be further delay. It is seven years since my noble friend Lord Adonis, as a Minister in the last Government but one, came forward with the project—and here we are at the end of a seven-year period discussing two amendments that would, I would guess, have the effect if not of putting the project back another seven years then certainly putting it back for some considerable time.

As far as Old Oak Common is concerned, I say again to the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, that he has to answer the point put by the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, a former Transport Minister. The fact is that Old Oak, as it presently is, is in no way suitable to be a main terminal. I do not mean to be facetious when I say that if you asked people coming to London where they were going to when they got there, comparatively few would say Old Oak. In Great Western days there was a steam engine shed there, I understand, so trainspotters might well have gone there 50 years ago—but I cannot see there being a great demand to terminate trains at Old Oak, no matter how good the connections will be.

The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, talked about developments at Euston. He has an amendment which I am sure we will be discussing later about access around Euston station, which is the natural terminus. He makes the very relevant point that, for example, on the TGV in France, high-speed trains stop short of the main terminus, which is the reason for the delays that quite often occur. It seems to me to be a much more sensible engineering prospect to run high-speed trains into the centre of a city rather than making them share crowded tracks with other trains, as they do in other countries. So perhaps on this occasion we got it right.

Finally, whatever estimates are made of these projects often turn out, in the long term, to be unrealistic. My noble friend talked about Crossrail. I was on the Crossrail Bill, and it was said at that time that the estimates for Crossrail were unrealistic—but they proved not to be so. With all due respect to my noble friend’s opinion, he is no better a financier than the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, as far as this project is concerned. So if the noble Lord presses this to a Division, I hope that those of us who want to see this project, after seven years, get the go-ahead will vote in the Not-Content Lobby.

High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Lord Brabazon of Tara Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Lords & Report stage: House of Lords
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

As noble Lords will know, traffic regulation orders, or TROs, are a mechanism for local highway authorities to make temporary or permanent restrictions on the use of highways in their area to control traffic. They can include stopping up roads, restricting roads to one-way operation or restricting roads so that they cannot be used by lorries. Such orders could frustrate the construction of the railway by, for example, putting lorry bans on a road that is needed to reach an HS2 phase 1 construction site or point. We have already seen one example of a road in London that we intend using for construction traffic being made one-way, despite our intentions being in the public domain for more than three years.

The new clause and schedule will ensure that local highway authorities consulted the Secretary of State for Transport before making any orders that affected either specific roads identified for use by HS2 or other roads related to HS2 construction works, thereby avoiding this problem. It also allows the Secretary of State, if required, to make TROs, and to prohibit or revoke TROs that unnecessarily hinder the delivery of the railway. The Secretary of State already has the ability to prohibit TROs under specific circumstances, but this power will make that process less convoluted, which is necessary to ensure we do not create unnecessary bureaucratic delays and associated costs in the delivery of the railway.

Clearly, we hope that the regular meetings taking place with local highway authorities to consult on, agree and monitor local traffic management plans will ensure that there will be no need to rely on this provision. However, given the impact such TROs could have on the overall construction and delivery of the railway, we feel that it is both prudent and necessary for such a power to be included.

While a power in relation to TROs has not been required for previous hybrid Bills, given the scale of the project and the risk of issues that could arise during construction, we believe that it would be prudent for the will of Parliament and its approval for this project to be constructed not to be thwarted by a TRO. Therefore, I beg to move the amendment.

[Lord Brabazon of Tara (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for having explained the new schedule, which extends to four-and-a-half pages of quite draconian powers being asked for by the Secretary of State. It is most unfortunate for it to be introduced now, after the Bill has been through the hybrid Bill committee in both Houses, therefore denying the highway authorities the opportunity to petition against it, which I think I can say authoritatively that they would have done. I have been briefed by Camden Council, which says that it would have petitioned against the new clause, and I think the same can be said for Transport for London and various other highway authorities along the route, notably Buckinghamshire County Council.

It is most unfortunate that my noble friend should be introducing four-and-a-half pages of such a draconian new schedule but not allowing the people involved to petition against it. I would also like to know whether the Minister has actually consulted on the new schedule with any of the highway authorities that are likely to be affected by it. My understanding is that no consultation has taken place so far. I also rather wonder what the purpose is of HS2 information paper E13, which deals with the management of traffic during construction and how much of it is now being negated by the introduction of the new schedule. I hope my noble friend will consider whether it is really necessary or whether he might not just drop the whole thing and rely on the powers that the Government already have.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon. I have had communications from Transport for London, Camden Council and the West Midland Transport Authority, all expressing serious concerns about both the procedure being used and the practicality of what is proposed. In his opening remarks, the Minister said that the size of this project was unprecedented and therefore all these special regulations were needed to make sure you could get along the road. It is bigger than HS1, but not that much. Crossrail, going all the way through London was a pretty major project, too, and had many traffic issues. I was vaguely involved in both of them. As the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, said, that begs the question of why, if this legislation was thought necessary, it was not in the original Bill so that local authorities could petition.

In terms of consultation, I have a letter here from Transport for London, dated 6 January, to the Department for Transport expressing concern that it had a meeting before Christmas where the consultation consisted of bringing up this draft regulation under AOB and that was it. It states that the discussion focused on the removal of vehicles and did not cover the amendments. So there was no consultation. Camden, in particular, must be worried about lorries: the latest figure for the borough is 1,500 per day. We shall probably come to that in a later amendment. It is no good HS2 trying to ride roughshod over TfL’s Safer Lorry scheme or using bus lanes for its heavy commercial vehicles. For a bus user, why should HS2 trucks get in the way of buses? London has to continue to operate. The cycle superhighway network—which I love, of course—is apparently going to be affected. None of these organisations appears to have been consulted.

There is a way forward. All these organisations—and I am sure Bucks county council and others are the same—want to consult and find a solution. I urge the Minister to withdraw the amendment and organise some far-reaching and comprehensive consultations so that, if there has to be legislation, a new draft can be brought forward on Report. If he does not withdraw the amendment, I shall oppose it.

Government: Cars

Lord Brabazon of Tara Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his comments. The government ministerial car fleet is about 50% British and 50% foreign. However, I will add a note of caution, because the supply chain for the motor industry is international now. For instance, the BMW Hams Hall engine plant produced 433,000 engines for BMW plants around the world.

[Lord Brabazon of Tara]

My Lords, Toyota is a leading manufacturer in this country and a great asset to British manufacturing. It makes a great many cars here and, better still, exports a great many of them. Does it really matter if the particular model concerned is not made here, when Toyota contributes so much to this country?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, my noble friend makes an extremely good point.

Localism Bill

Lord Brabazon of Tara Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2011 Lords Chamber

204HB: Clause 103, page 83, line 10, leave out from “to” to end of line 13 and insert “support the development of the area to which the duty relates, or of any part of that area, by funding—
(a) the provision, improvement, replacement, operation or maintenance of infrastructure, or(b) anything else that is concerned with addressing demands that development places on an area.”

[The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara)]

My Lords, I should point out that if this amendment is agreed to, I cannot call Amendment 204J.

Amendment 204HB agreed.

London Local Authorities and Transport for London (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Brabazon of Tara Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord St John of Fawsley]

It is a great relief to support my noble friend on this issue, having voted for justice for young criminals, not without some experience of that matter. Since the Leader of the Opposition has made a habit of talking about himself, I will talk a little about myself, but not too much. The first social duty that I undertook was that of a prison visitor when I was my noble friend’s age—18. I have been Minister for Higher Education and I was concerned about the welfare of young criminals. I was equally concerned about protecting the innocent victims of crime. That is why I was moved to pay a tribute to the police this afternoon. I will not go into all that again; I made my point and I am extremely glad that I did. However, it is wonderful that my noble friend shows such persistence. That is what you need in politics; you have to keep going and keep at it. I hope that my noble friend Lord Steel will take the same line with his Bill. He should get on with it, not give it up. In the end, if you persist you will get somewhere but if you give things up you will not. My noble friend deserves every support and congratulation on the way in which he has persevered with this Bill, as does the noble Lord opposite who played such a distinguished part in the committee.

I have an interest to declare as when I left government because of the unemployment figures my noble friend was instrumental in my securing my next appointment. I had the honour to be appointed chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission, a post which I held for 15 years until the whole of the commission was abolished by fax. Not even the Vatican in its worst days would behave in such a way. When the Orthodox Church got rid of the Orthodox Archbishop of London, it did so by fax. However, it provided a charge: namely, that he coveted thrones.

[The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara)]

My Lords, I wonder, as the person responsible for the conduct of Private Bills in this House, whether I may bring the House to order. We are dealing with three amendments moved or spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, at Third Reading. We are not dealing with the Second Reading of the Bill or with other issues, such as those that my noble friend Lord St John has just raised. We are considering three amendments that deal with the recovery of street cleansing expenditure—nothing else.

[Lord St John of Fawsley]

My noble friend the Chairman of Committees is quite right. I was following the bad example of the Leader of the Opposition. One should never talk about oneself. It is a subject that is of interest only to oneself and no one else. I merely wanted to congratulate my noble friend on his persistence in proceeding with the Bill. Here, I make just one point; it is very important that Select Committee reports are speedily implemented. I heard the Select Committee being attacked because of its report. I answered on the millions of pounds spent by the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, on the urban nonsense of turning us all into Dutch flat dwellers in five words that are all that needs to be said on that issue—and I shall then sit down. Those words are: “English people love their gardens”. That is it.