High Speed 2

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on his firm speech. I am speaking because I was responsible, at some time in my career, for the management of all the four main lines which go out of London to the north. They are now at least 85% full. When a system—a railway, water pipes, gas or anything—is at 85% capacity it is full, because just a small incident can spill over and cause havoc with punctuality or supply of service. So the capacity enhancement is urgently needed, but I am sorry that this thing ever got called High Speed 2 because it is not a high speed railway in international terms: they are not talking about going at about 250 mph.

The upgrading of existing routes is a hopeless proposition. I have just read that next year the west coast main line will be shut for 36 days for urgent engineering work at the London end, running through Watford. That will bring back the horrors but this time it will affect more people because more people are now using the railway. The London end of this project needs rethinking because the way it has been drawn up is wrong. I do not believe there is any need, at least in phase one, to demolish houses in the Camden area. I must cast doubt on the quality of leadership of the project because it has not gone for the most sensible option. We do not need to demolish lots of houses for phase one: we can do that quite easily by other means.

I was also responsible for the first stage of the HS1 extension. At the time people talked—in this House, I am sure, although I was not here—about the rape of the garden of England: it would never be the same again. However, a week or two ago I met a Labour MP from one of the constituencies affected. I asked him if he was getting a lot of trouble from HS1. He said, “No, none at all, but if you ask me about gay marriage I will bring you a few bags of letters”. That is the way in which the ill effects of this project have been grossly exaggerated by various opponents. There will be disruption while it is built but, as someone remarked, the wildlife and the birds come back. The railway does not have lots of service stations, garages and posters. It fits into the countryside and I am sure that noble Lords who travel around by train know many places where the significant Victorian railway buildings are not a blot on the landscape but blend beautifully into it.

The new line will free up a lot of existing capacity and the talk about Coventry, Rugby and Milton Keynes not having as good a service is just not true. This month the Desiro company, which has built many of the excellent suburban trains used between London and Birmingham, has been given permission to increase the line speed of these trains to 115 mph. They are more comfortable and will be nearly as fast as the Pendolinos, and I am sure that customers will like them better. I am certain that all the places affected will have a far better service than they have now.

I have a few requests for the Minister. Will she please facilitate the ongoing discussions about the London end? The Secretary of State knows about them and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and I have been to see him. We believe that we can save a lot of money, not the odd million but the odd billion, by these proposals. Look again at the appraisal methodology that these people used. They used the old-fashioned cost-benefit analysis that was invented by the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment in the 1960s and 1970s that compared the value of road schemes to see which was best. The process was never intended to value a project such as this. A recent publication by High Speed 1 has shown that the value of HS1 over 60 years is £17.6 billion. Will the Minister look again at the external benefits? This has been done by HS1, which looked at the effect on the value of property. Recently at Ealing Broadway it found that property prices are increasing sharply in anticipation of Crossrail. None of that value gets into the public purse but there is no doubt that it is of value, and it is time that the department looked at this issue to find a way to ensure that some of that value gets into public hands.

Finally, I ask the Minister to reiterate the commitment to the continuing expenditure on the rest of the network, such as the ongoing improvements at Reading and Birmingham New Street. They are a compliment to what our engineers can do but there is a limit to what can be done within the confines of the existing railway.

Transport: Bus Services

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Bradshaw]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to increase the use and quality of bus services.

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their magnificent punctuality, which should be the precursor of this debate. It is my great pleasure to welcome my noble friend Lady Kramer as the Minister. I am sure that her advent here will be warmly welcomed throughout the House. It is also a good thing to note that the Department for Transport has today issued a statement about the Better Bus Area Fund, with new additions to it in Merseyside, York, Nottingham and the west of England. This money has been competed for and is to go towards improving bus services according to those proposals put forward by authorities which were deemed to be the best.

I shall start by talking about the reimbursement of concessionary fares. This is still a bone of contention. I remember when the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was the Secretary of State, he invited a party of bus operators to see him. We had a full and frank discussion, but unfortunately it did not actually result in anything. The consequence is that there is a lot of ill feeling among bus operators that they are not getting a fair return for the services rendered. They should be neither any better off nor any worse off, but some of them are in fact considerably worse off. Unfortunately, that disadvantage is felt most severely by small and medium-sized operators, not the big five. They have the opportunity to cross-subsidise and utilise the swings and roundabouts. However, I have received a letter from a bus operator in Norfolk who is quite adamant that his operation is not getting adequate reimbursement. The letter states, “Certainly in my area, now with the highest proportion of over-60s among its population of anywhere in England, there are longer routes where the scheme comprehensively underpays any reimbursement, and this is causing services to be reduced or cut entirely”. I think that we are all conscious of the fact that it is not fair or reasonable to offer elderly people bus passes on the one hand and to remove their bus services on the other.

I want to ask the Minister whether she will take another look at what is going on and possibly meet with some more bus operators with, I hope, a better result than was the case after my last meeting. This is an important issue. I know that all the political parties are gearing themselves up to offer, at the next general election, to do something about young people’s fares. There is much justice in that, particularly following the raising of the school leaving age and so on. However, bus operators will not co-operate unless they feel that they are being treated fairly in respect of concessionary fares. Again, it is important that something is done about this because we should be reaching out to people when they reach the age when they can buy motor cars. It is rather important that they do not buy them because of the congestion that affects many of our towns and cities. This is the first issue I want to bring home, and I hope that the Minister will agree that we should have some discussions with operators.

The second issue that I wish to debate is profitability. The word “profit” has been bandied about recently as a thoroughly dirty word, yet any enterprise that is progressive needs profit to invest money. The bus companies have not been slow to invest money. They have much more modern, environmentally friendly and cleaner vehicles than they had a few years ago, which—thinking of the next debate—cannot be said of all train operators. However, some people are now describing “profit” as a dirty word.

I have been involved in the management of bus companies. I know that bus companies in both the public and private sectors have to earn a profit, otherwise they will not have money to invest. Where profits are at a reasonable level and companies are investing money, we should not pretend that allowing the public sector to take over the routes, which was more or less set out by Maria Eagle at the Labour Party conference, is a way forward at all. Reducing the bus operators to penury is not a very good policy. I can remember—because I am very old—what Greater Manchester buses were like when they were in public ownership. The buses ran late; they were filthy-dirty; the staff were thoroughly disobliging; and the service cost the ratepayers a lot of money.

We know that the authority in Tyne & Wear, for example, is trying to go forward with a quality contract scheme. The arithmetic of it seems to be very faulty. I know that there is a procedure that has to be gone through to convince the senior traffic commissioner that a scheme is good and will benefit taxpayers and bus users. The Government should be very careful that they get good, sound reasons for any change that takes place. I fancy that it will be a long struggle. The bus companies believe that their rights are being sequestrated without compensation, and the likelihood is that the case will go right to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if the scheme is not properly formulated.

Competition is necessary, but all attempts to regulate it through competition authorities have proved very expensive and ineffective. If the Minister looks back through the records of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission, she will see that they investigated the bus industry probably more than all the other industries in the country put together. It cost a huge amount of money and took up a huge amount of management time, and I do not think that any result was worth a row of beans.

Could not the traffic commissioners have a more active role in regulating any predatory behaviour that arises? The commissioners have to accept a registration. Before they accept that registration, they will know that Bill Bloggs proposes to run a bus three minutes in front of Bill Smith’s, after which there will be a long gap. That sort of thing does not need a genius to spot, and is extremely destructive of the network and public confidence.

Local government has a very active role in keeping streets clear of obstructions, be they parked cars or road works which seem to infest all our roads. I believe that when a traffic commissioner calls in a bus operator for not operating within the margins—margins which are going to be tightened up to mean no minutes early and nearly 100% on time, which is a very high target—the traffic commissioner should also summon the local authority at the same time to make sure that it is playing its part in the bargain because, unlike with the railway, the streets are separate from the operator. At least with the railway they fall within one armful with the Office of Rail Regulation.

There are a few things that might interest the Minister and I would be very happy to talk in more detail. This is the time of year when I raise the question of the bus industry which needs consideration.

Railways: East Anglia Network

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

I do not live in East Anglia, but because one of my grandchildren has recently gone to University in Norwich, I have sampled the passenger service. It was really quite a shock: it was so shabby—I think that is the word I would use to describe it. It did not seem to be like an inter-city service at all. The point I want to make is that the new franchise is due to be let in 2016. It is important that plans are made to find new rolling stock. Rolling stock off the east coast, which is called mark 4 rolling stock, is pretty good and would be very good if it were refurbished. It could be used to revolutionise the East Anglian service and the electric locomotives could go there as well, because the department has ordered the IEP trains—the express inter-city trains from Hitachi—to work the east coast services. I will not go into that saga—it has been much discussed—but whichever this franchisee is, it should be in the position where it negotiates with the suppliers of the rolling stock. This is not a process in which the Department for Transport needs to be or should be involved.

Rolling stock companies were set up and they were supposed to own or provide the rolling stock. The train operator was supposed to be what is called “asset light”. It was supposed not to own the track and not to own the rolling stock. Therefore, it could make decisions about hiring the rolling stock which was best for that route. I hope that the franchising process can be put in train sufficiently early for the potential franchisees to agree with the rolling stock companies what they want to do the job. There will be surplus rolling stock which they will be able to use. It is not the sort of thing for which the department has the skills necessary to actually make this happen. I am sure that these trains, if refurbished, would be a huge lift to the area because they have half their life left. I know that is not as good as new trains but it would be an improvement.

I urge the Minister to get the franchising process moving and, when the franchise is let, to let it for a longish period. Particularly in recent years, franchisees have been given short-term extensions during which they cannot possibly be expected to invest. They might apply a coat of paint, clean the trains and hire a few staff, but they cannot invest. The problem is the disjuncture between the long life of railway assets—40, 50, 60 or 70 years—and the very short franchises. The franchise should be long enough for the franchisee to see some return on his money. However, the franchise should not be extended unless there are means in place by which the franchisee is held to account for punctuality, cleanliness and reliability. Reliability is particularly important, because it is the long delays that upset people. Let us have a sort of quality partnership, whereby the franchisee gets a long franchise in return for achieving what is expected, both in return to the Treasury and in quality.

Airports: Passenger Numbers

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Earl agrees that, in answer to the Question of the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, the key issue is how many people move from one aeroplane to another at airports; and to exclude from some of these large figures all the people who stop here for a period? That way, we can separate the number of interlining passengers from the destination passengers.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, as usual, my noble friend is on the money. The Airports Commission has access to the statisticians and data available at the Department for Transport to inform its research and decisions.

Road Safety (Financial Penalty Deposit) (Appropriate Amount) (Amendment) Order 2013

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Rosser]

I thank the Minister for his explanation of the purpose and thinking behind the order we are considering. I understand from what he says that a hiccup may have been found that needs to be addressed, and I thank the Minister for pointing that out. I am not sure that I have entirely understood the order. No doubt my contribution will make it clear whether I have or not, and the Minister will put me right if I have incorrectly understood what it says and what it provides.

We know that the order provides for fixed-penalty deposits to be increased in line with the recent increase in fixed-penalty notices, to which the Minister referred. It also provides for a fixed-penalty deposit to be extended to less serious cases of careless and inconsiderate driving in the light of the decision that fixed-penalty notices can be issued for careless driving offences.

The Explanatory Memorandum states that the fixed-penalty deposit may be imposed by a police officer or a Vehicle and Operator Services Agency officer at the roadside on an alleged road traffic offender who does not have a satisfactory address in the UK. The purpose of this is to provide a guarantee of payment of a fixed-penalty notice or conditional offer in respect of an alleged offence.

The Minister has said that Vehicle and Operator Services Agency statistics show that more than 10,500 deposit notices were issued in 2012-13, with a payment rate of almost 100%. That suggests that if the individual who cannot give an acceptable address says that he or she cannot pay immediately, the vehicle is immediately impounded pending payment. However, perhaps the Minister could confirm that that is the case.

One would have assumed that most of the fixed-penalty deposits are, or will be, imposed by police officers rather than an officer of the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency. I say that in the context of the statement by the Minister in the Commons when this order was discussed there on 2 July, who said that the more than 10,500 deposit notices issued in 2012-13 were issued by VOSA officers with apparently none by police officers, which suggests that these notices related to commercial vehicles.

If that is the case, what happens in respect of private motorists who cannot pay—perhaps a private motorist stopped in the future in relation to a careless driving offence—when presumably it will be a police officer who will have stopped that motorist? If the motorist is unable to pay in circumstances where he or she cannot give a satisfactory address, does it mean that their vehicle will be impounded and they will be unable to drive it away, thus presumably maximising the prospects of 100% payment of the fixed-penalty deposit?

Who is in receipt of most fixed-penalty deposits? Presumably it is most likely to be foreign drivers or drivers with foreign addresses, but how many are issued to British nationals? In what circumstances, other than having no fixed abode, could a British national be deemed not to have given an acceptable address unless they are no longer resident in this country?

In the debate in the Commons, the Minister said that he would inform the Committee by letter of the absolute number of fines unpaid. I am not sure whether the Minister in the Commons was referring to fixed-penalty deposits, fixed-penalty notices or both but, whatever the case, does the noble Earl have those figures to give today and, if not, may I be advised of the answer in addition to the Commons Committee?

Finally, perhaps I may make a point about the extension of fixed penalties to careless driving cases. The Explanatory Memorandum shows the really quite dramatic fall that there has been in the number of careless driving proceedings in court over the past 10 years or so. I am not sure to what the decline can be attributed, although the Explanatory Memorandum suggests some possible explanations. However, I just hope that, with fixed penalties being introduced in relation to careless driving, a check will be kept to ensure that they are being used in only the least serious of such offences. There must be a temptation to use them in more serious cases in the light of the time savings involved and the paperwork that does not need to be completed and prepared, as it would have to be for a case going to court. I hope—indeed, I am sure—that the Minister will confirm that the necessary effective checks are in place. After all, the difference between careless driving causing a collision and injury and it not doing so can often be a matter of luck rather than the degree of carelessness in the driving. Certainly, from the Opposition, we have no objection to this order.

[Lord Bradshaw]

I have no objections to the order at all.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I am grateful for the positive response from noble Lords. As regards the hiccup, I will write to the noble Lord and the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, with full details of the impact and how we will cover it.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, talked about careless driving. Of course, careless driving is not necessarily a less serious offence. Some of the offences that we are already capturing under the graduated fixed penalty are less serious than careless driving. The issue is that we have brought careless driving into the fixed-penalty regime. I understand the noble Lord’s point about dealing with a more serious careless driving offence by means of a fixed penalty when it would be appropriate to take it to court. It is a matter for the police which way they go and I am sure that they will make the judgment correctly. However, I have details here about which would come out as less serious offences, able to be dealt with by means of a fixed penalty. I have no doubt that the more serious offences will continue to be taken to court. For instance, if a driver emerges from a junction incorrectly, he may pick up a fixed penalty but if he causes another motorist to take emergency avoiding action, his chances are that he will find himself in court.

Roads: Road Safety

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I do not think the noble Lord misses much at all. We have recently launched a Think Cyclist safety campaign and have made £35 million available to tackle dangerous junctions for cyclists across the country. The £35 million is part of the additional £107 million of investment in cycling that the Government have announced since February last year.

[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, in 2004 this House passed the Traffic Management Act, Part 6 of which was designed to enable local authorities to take action against matters such as cycling on the pavement, jumping traffic lights and all manner of moving traffic offences. That part has not been implemented by the Minister’s department. It languished under the party opposite and continues to languish now.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Colwyn said, this is quite a wide-ranging Question. I am afraid that I am not aware of that particular difficulty. However, I shall write to my noble friend about it.

Airports: London

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

The noble Lord knows very well that the issue is not about point-to-point capacity with the various London airports; it is about hub capacity.

[Lord Bradshaw]

On the subject of hub capacity, is it not relevant to think in terms of which airlines bring people into Heathrow who require the access to a hub? Many airports cater for people who are coming to the United Kingdom for short or long stays, and they do not need to interline. The announcement this morning of Birmingham Airport’s massive expansion, and the fact that it is going to be 35 minutes from the centre of London, should also be taken into account.

[Earl Attlee]

My noble friend makes many very good points, and I am sure that the Airport Commission will take them into consideration.

Railways: Crossrail

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, Crossrail 1 is very expensive and there is a now a possibility of Crossrail 2 which will be much more so. Have the Government given any thought to ways in which contributions from businesses which benefit from these schemes can be efficiently tapped into the scheme? For example, while at Ealing huge rises in property prices have benefited several private sector investors, the taxpayer gets nothing.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, the noble Lord is right that we will need to see a full business case for the revised scheme, and we hope to receive this from Transport for London in the next few weeks. We also need to see a convincing proposition for how the scheme could be funded and DfT officials are exploring options with TfL. I agree with the noble Lord about property benefits but it is difficult to capture them.

Energy: Biofuels

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I accept that several government departments are involved; however, officials do talk to each other. The Secretary of State, Ed Davey, was representing the UK in Europe, trying to find a solution to the ILUC problems.

[Lord Bradshaw]

Having given a modest reply to the first part of the Question and a slightly different reply to the second part, can the Minister please assure the House that the Government really take the biofuels industry seriously? For example, is he aware of plans to import through Milford Haven large quantities of biomass that is derived not from food crops but waste products from elsewhere? Is it not time that we see some of these strategies come to fruition, rather than the present process, which seems to shilly-shally about in minor adjustment here and there?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, we take the biofuels industry seriously; it is an important industry. However, we must have regard to the fact that we are regulated by EU and World Trade Organisation free-trade rules, and we therefore cannot put in measures specifically designed to protect the UK biofuels industry.

Roads: New and Young Drivers

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

Can the noble Earl tell the House what progress is really being made? Accidents and serious injuries among young drivers cause the largest number of deaths in that age group. I know he said that the department is considering something, but can he give us concrete evidence of any move which may reduce this toll of unnecessary suffering?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend that a motor accident is a very high risk for youngsters—probably the worst risk for an untimely end. However, the previous Government made good progress in reducing the accident rate and we will continue that work.