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Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Oldham]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement made in the other place. I think that the House will have gained exactly the same impression as was gained on that earlier occasion; namely, that there is great complacency in the Statement in the face of the appalling suffering which so many of the travelling public have endured over this weekend, whether they have been trapped on railway stations without information as to when trains might arrive or caught up in traffic jams without any ability to understand when they might have a chance of escaping. More particularly, the Statement has failed to explain why, at airports, scandalously low levels of information have been given to the travelling public. I thought that the whole point of privatising many of these transport assets was that privatised companies cared about their consumers. There was not much care about consumers over this past weekend, when the advice given to individuals consisted of one telephone number which was inevitably jammed for the whole time that people were trying to get through. There was no alternative strategy for anyone to take.

This will not do. The noble Earl says that his right honourable friend had a meeting with transport bosses today. There is no suggestion that there was any dressing down done about these failures over the weekend; instead, there was a meeting at which they met on, I suppose, cordial terms to talk about the difficulties that the transport system has suffered. This is not good enough in circumstances where so many people have suffered so much.

Regarding airports, particularly London Heathrow, it is also important that we protect our national reputation. Whether we like it or not, London Heathrow is a gateway to much of the world and a lot of people get their experience of Britain from Heathrow. Consequently, the chaos over this last weekend has produced real difficulties and I would have expected the Government to have responded in rather more forthright terms than the Statement has suggested.

The noble Earl referred to the Quarmby report. He knows that in the summer that report produced 28 recommendations. He indicated in the Statement that only a certain number of these recommendations have been carried through. We will be able to see, with the full publication of the report, just where negligence has occurred. It will not do for the noble Earl to indicate that the Government had no warning of this. We did learn from last winter; that is why the Quarmby inquiry was set up. The report was presented in good time—by July of this year. Why, therefore, have the Government not taken more forthright actions?

There are several points that specialists in the field have also indicated. I would have thought Ministers would have expected this sort of expertise and advice to be available to them in the department and acted upon. What is this nonsense about lorries jack-knifing in the middle lanes of motorways and blocking the whole motorway? Why on earth has it not been recognised that, in circumstances such as the very difficult travel conditions this weekend, some restrictions should have been put, as the AA recommended, upon the movement of lorries so that they stayed only in the inside lane? I recognise the disadvantages and inconvenience to lorry drivers, but, my goodness, that is as nothing to the blocking of the whole M25 or parts of the M40 by jack-knifed lorries.

Why is it, with our rail system, that information is not readily available to customers? You can have railway lines which are only six miles apart and at the station where you ask the question and at which they are experiencing delays on the line, they have no idea whether it would make sense to get across to the other line, which might be running a fairly good service. The system does not know, or the people are not equipped to deliver the service they should. It is a reflection of the very limited resources that have been put into customer care and that is why, in these circumstances where great difficulty occurs, it is the passenger who suffers.

Finally, it was timely, this weekend, that a Member of Parliament and close friend of the Prime Minister should have indulged in a little light relief on the virtues of chaos theory. I am talking about the leading party in the Government, the Conservative Party. He said something like, “We do not think much to planning in our party, we think that planning can be overemphasised and it might be that a certain amount of chaos theory should obtain”. Well, no one in the coalition should be preaching chaos theory regarding transport this weekend. A bit of thought by Ministers, a bit of planning, and some of the difficulties that our fellow countrymen and others have faced might have been minimised.