King’s Speech

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, when I was introduced to your Lordships’ House some 24 years ago, the then Chief Whip of the party, John Harris, gave me some advice: to speak about what you know about and otherwise keep quiet. During my career on the railway, I have managed the west coast main line on four occasions, and have kept in close touch with it since. I feel qualified to talk about it professionally. The route is the major railway line between the south and the north of Great Britain.

I will set aside the effects of the pandemic and the subsequent industrial disputes. If this route were being managed by a guiding mind, the demand would be forecast to be 12 passenger trains plus four freight trains an hour, in both directions, north of Birmingham. This amount of traffic cannot be accommodated on the existing railway without very substantial and disruptive investment. It was this issue of the shortage of capacity that led to the development of HS2.

I am not attempting to defend the management of the project to date. This must rest with government and its appointed agents, and it is not the responsibility of professional railwaymen. But I am arguing for the continued safeguarding of the route north of Birmingham so that in future a new team of competent railway personnel should be given the task of reworking the proposals on a value-for-money basis. This had to be done with HS1, the route from London to the Channel Tunnel, when Union Railways, the Government’s chosen contractor for the then project, failed and a team of railway professionals took over and delivered the project on time and on budget.

Next, the timetable for the whole route needs to be recast on a flighted pattern, which would increase throughput to the maximum possible. This is a job for the guiding mind, acting independently of government and private interest groups. The potential prizes for this are immense in the context of climate change. Many road-based journeys would transfer from road to electrified rail, particularly if fares were simplified. For example, it is estimated by the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport that 5,000 lorry journeys each way could make the switch, with significant savings in emissions and fuel burned.

If we do not improve the railway north of Birmingham, we will have a terrible railway journey going south and north, to Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. There is really no alternative to developing HS2, because it took 14 years of parliamentary time to get the wretched Bill through—and another 14 years will probably be a point at which we give up travelling altogether. If any money is immediately available arising from the decision to postpone work on HS2, the Government have at hand proposals from the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport to fully electrify gaps in the core freight network. Can the Minister confirm that she has got these proposals in her hands, as I believe she has? They may form some part of the money that the Government are still to spend.

National Infrastructure

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, those of us who work in systems industries are well aware of the fact that when you are using 85% of capacity—whether it is roads, water, electricity or railways—you put yourself in a position where a slight aberration in performance starts to collapse the system. We have to get our priorities right and we have to invest early enough. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, will remember that when he was Secretary of State, we persuaded him to order 200 new diesel trains but he was unpersuaded after the OECD notice and I do not know why.

The noble Lord, Lord Deighton, would do well to address the whole issue of the appraisal of schemes and the capturing of the economic effects. Last night’s Evening Standard announced that house prices would rise 54% in Whitechapel because of Crossrail. As far as I know, none of that money accrues to the public purse or is even credited to Crossrail. We create wealth but it is not created for the public purse.

Air quality and congestion are enormous problems. As at present constructed, business cases do not give enough emphasis to that. In the infrastructure plan, there is a very imaginative scheme for Bath city centre. The local council wants to improve the appalling traffic flow and the huge damage to buildings by relieving the whole pressure of traffic on Bath. However, it is difficult to get the scheme to conform to the appraisal system. While I am on appraisal systems, I do not think there is any economic justification for adding together huge numbers of very small time savings and justifying things on that basis. They have to be credible and realisable time savings to be worth being taken into account.

I am very pleased to say that the railway franchise bidding procedure is at last taking quality into account. That has long needed to be done but the Treasury has shied away from it because it cannot be proved in financial terms. It is very heartening to see that the Stagecoach bid for the east coast and the Abellio bid for the ScotRail franchise have taken these things into account. I ask the Minister to note that the railway franchise system overspecifies the service. Lots of small stops are put into routes. Lincoln to Nottingham could be a very fast service, end to end or stopping at Newark, but it is precluded from that by the passenger service obligation.

I am interested in the idea of an independent infrastructure commission, as advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I am a victim, I suppose, of the Strategic Rail Authority. In the years in which I was involved with it, we had constant fights with government departments as to who was in charge of what. A decision has to be made about who will be in charge—Whitehall or the independent infrastructure commission. There have to be clear lines of demarcation.

I endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, said about training. Training is essential. We need huge numbers of engineers and people to support them. I am very pleased that this Government have at last delivered a great increase in the number of apprentices.

Airports: Heathrow Third Runway

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawhinney (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords—

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Hill of Oareford) (Con)]

My Lords, we will hear from the Liberal Democrats, if we may.

[Lord Bradshaw]

I wonder whether the Minister might turn his mind to the very effective competition that Gatwick and Birmingham are now providing against Heathrow. Perhaps he will he also say that this is not simply a matter of tax revenue; it is very wide-ranging research about the impacts on employment and revenue for the Treasury, which takes a lot of time. I am certain that whoever caused the pause did so in the proper interests of the country.

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, my noble friend raises a very important point—which is that whatever happens in terms of a particular airport in London in the future, it is very important that we have a range of airport capacity. Manchester Airport and Birmingham Airport play very important roles. My noble friend also referred to Gatwick. On current projections, Gatwick has spare capacity at the moment and will not fill it until about 2020.

Barnett Formula

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

In his reply, I would like the Minister to address the point that if any reform—which he may or may not agree to—is to be worth while, the work on structuring it has to begin now. Elections are coming along and it is most unlikely that people will put forward radical solutions before an election. If you wait until after the election takes place, you are five years from the next, and action has got to be a very early priority for the next Government.

Other noble Lords have explained how this money is needed and I will not spend time talking about that. The previous speech indicated that bold action is necessary, but bold action rarely comes very late on in a Parliament, so I do not expect it to happen immediately. However, I do expect a real attempt—cross-party agreement would be achievable—at a proper in-depth examination of the issues which have been revealed. I do not know how such a thing can be set up or how independent it can be but I urge the Minister to really look forward and give us some hope that things are going to get better. Everybody knows that local government services in many places are on the point of breakdown. As these cuts continue for the next two years, it is going to get very serious indeed, and politicians, at the next election or immediately afterwards, have to come up with some convincing formula about how this is going to be tackled.

It is no good talking about how the Barnett formula has served us well—that is really a lot of nonsense. It was a short-term measure set up to get through a difficult election period. However, that does not mean there is any justification for letting this hang on—it is time for new and radical thought, into which local government has a really good input. I commend that to the Minister and would like to hear in his reply what he intends to do about it.

National Infrastructure Plan

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 4th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I will give you a change from criticism. This plan is one of the first attempts to bring our infrastructure up to date but—there is a big “but”—we do not have the trained people to build power stations, develop the railway or set up the broadband. It is essential that we put some real life into the provision of engineering apprenticeships to provide the skilled people we need. I ask the Government to focus the necessary attention, once again, on our poor record in engineering training.

[Lord Deighton]

I thank my noble friend for his praise for the plan. It is important to focus consistently, year after year, on improving our capability to deliver infrastructure. I absolutely accept the importance of ensuring that we have a pipeline of engineering capability, brought right through from schools—and a renewed focus on STEM subjects—universities and research establishments, to enable us to deliver these projects effectively.

Economic Prosperity and Employment

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

I, too, add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Haskel. I am going to take a rather different line from some noble Lords. I have worked in industries which employ engineers. Engineers were my colleagues. They were highly respected. Over my career I have seen that respect for engineers go down and down so that now the engineer is lucky if he sits at the top table because it is crowded out with people qualified in finance, human resources and other things, when it is the engineers who actually drive our businesses forward.

Several noble Lords have referred to the list of apprentices and how the number is increasing. I ask you to look very carefully at who these apprentices are. They are not technically trained. There are people with apprenticeships in things like catering, business services and law, but those are not the skills which drive the economy forward in the way that I think we all want. I also want to comment on our professional institutions. The professional engineering institutions went through a period where they insisted on graduate entry, yet many of my colleagues started their careers as premium apprentices, took their higher national certificate, got practical experience and then qualified as professional engineers. Fortunately, that approach appears to be coming back—at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, for example—because people need to know what they are doing. I want to draw to your Lordships’ attention the paucity of maths and physics teaching in schools. It is awful in many schools and there are so few students actually studying these subjects. Without an understanding of these subjects, we are not going to be able to provide the engine for the growth which all of us desire.

I was struck by the question that the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, raised about evaluation. Many large infrastructure projects of the sort which are being discussed here are judged on the values of time. This is an old system that was invented to evaluate rival road schemes in the 1970s. It was overseen by an organisation called the Standing Committee on Trunk Road Assessment, and it forms the basis of a lot of Treasury thinking. If you can prove that you can save 10 minutes going to Birmingham or a few minutes by putting an extra lane on the motorway, that will often be the deciding factor. However, if you build an extra lane, say on the M25, and at the end of three years you still have congestion as bad as when you started, I cannot see that that value of time is delivering a measurable quantity. On a visit to city hall this week I was heartened to hear that the Mayor of London is saying to people, “Are we creating jobs and building houses? Are we doing good?”, not focusing on how much time people are saving in whatever they happen to be doing.

We need to have a target for funding registered technicians. We should look very carefully at where the money spent on apprenticeships is going and make sure that enough of it is going towards engineering technicians. We are not going to re-equip our railways, modernise our water system, build new power stations or engage in fracking unless we have the skills here or we import them. The Government have more or less set their face against immigrant labour, so we have an urgent task in encouraging some indigenous labour to do the job. Finally, we really have to recognise the status of the engineer and his value to the community.

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.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, I am going to talk about railway freight electrification, and in doing so I hope to cover six of the seven subjects that are featured on the screens. The economy of the country would benefit from a 10-year programme to electrify the bulk of our freight railways. Heavy lorries are at present dependent on diesel engines and there is no prospect of changing that in the immediate future. If our ports, factories and distribution centres were linked by an electric railway, this would be a means by which the logistics industry would use fewer heavy lorries for trunk haulage, thereby reducing pollution, congestion and accident rates. Of course, final distribution would require lorries, but they would probably be smaller ones.

The Government have made a brave start in providing an electric railway. The last Government produced nine miles of electric railway in 13 years. Since the coalition came to office, we have committed to 800 single-track miles of electrification, and I hope that we will add another 130 miles to that target very shortly. Most of this increase is focused on the passenger business. I would argue that the focus of electrification should embrace the potential for freight use and that the forthcoming review of the railway budget and plans, which must shortly be approved for the five years from 2015, should address this subject.

Railway electrification creates jobs in Britain. It cannot be imported. It is a long-term investment in the future. Strategically, it makes us less dependent on imported oil. Efficiency, the prosperity of the regions and strategy have not, up to the present, been reflected in the appraisal systems for new infrastructure investment used by government. These systems are excessively dominated by the practice of adding together a very large number of small time savings made by road users, many so small that they cannot usefully be taken into account by those who are deemed to benefit. This is changing because of the Government. I was told this afternoon that the system had its genesis in Barbara Castle’s day and continued to be used by the previous Government, despite my going to countless meetings at the Department for Transport.

The prospect of freight electrification has been brought a good deal closer by the development in Europe of an electric locomotive. It has a superior load capacity and, most importantly, it has a “donkey” diesel engine so that it can operate away from the main electric railway into depots, distribution centres and sidings where one does not want overhead electrification anyway. Locomotives would be purchased by freight companies provided that the Government paid attention to the diversionary routes and longer loops needed to accommodate heavier trains as well as electrifying the main lines. As this policy is developed by the Government, which I hope it will be, and the prospects of the rail freight industry are kept to the fore, we will be able to look forward within 10 years to having a prosperous, efficient freight railway that would create jobs in its building and that is not dependent on fossil fuels. It will bring benefits for many decades.

Later this year the Government will make a statement of the funds available—the so-called SOFA—after which the Rail Regulator will determine the improvements to our railways that will be made in the five years from 2015. I hope that the Government will take the opportunity presented to bring forward bold plans for the electrification of our freight railway, and I have every reason to suppose that they will. I am sorry to be a bit optimistic in a thoroughly pessimistic House, but I believe there is a real winner here.