Queen’s Speech

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, Members of your Lordships’ House who were involved in the local elections might forgive us for doing something that the electorate certainly did not want. They wanted attention paid to local things. Most candidates who were successful had concentrated on local things. The first item on my list is the maintenance condition of our road network. It is absolutely disgraceful and if people are talking about emulating low standards, certainly the roads of this country are a disgrace. What is more, as water gets into the foundations of the roads, they will rapidly deteriorate further. I would like to hear from the Government that they will do something immediately to make use of shovel-ready schemes to give us a decent distributive road network. The problem is infecting even the main A-class roads and motorways of this country.

The second thing to which I will draw attention is the apparent failure of the M6 toll road. This has very serious implications for the Government’s ambitions to attract private sector capital into financing the road network. There have already been calls for the nationalisation of the M6 toll in order to relieve Macquarie, which was behind the scheme, of the liability that it openly accepted. One lesson that you are supposed to learn in a capitalist economy is that if you back a loser, you will lose money. That has applied to the banks but applies to other things as well. I would very much like to know how the Government intend to introduce private capital into this sector of the economy, which has been mentioned as being an important part of the recovery process.

Thirdly, in view of the possibility of Scotland somehow separating from England, I raise the case of the A1 in Northumbria. It is a key route between England and Scotland. It is a dreadful route with a dreadful safety reputation—and the diversionary routes are even worse. I believe that all the preparations have been done and that there is a shovel-ready scheme. This would be a step towards underlining our unity with Scotland rather than allowing the relationship to deteriorate into some sort of cul-de-sac.

The railways are desperately short of rolling stock. I advise the Government that the best thing they can do is get out of the way of investment, which they have inhibited for years by indicating within the franchise agreement a presumption that there will be a carry-over of rolling stock from one franchise to the next. This is very similar to the TUPE arrangements whereby staff from one franchise can automatically expect to move forward to the next. It does not seem that the Department for Transport is in any way equipped to work out a rolling-stock strategy for the railway. That should be done by the private sector. This was the original intention of privatisation. There were supposed to be asset-light franchises, and Railtrack was supposed to maintain the network. We know what happened there. The rolling stock companies are anxious to invest money and have large sums of money to invest, but they need the Government to get out of the way and allow commercial relations to take root between train operators and the railway.