National Networks: National Policy Statement

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I am grateful to the Minister for the way in which she presented the issues in her opening contribution. It was welcome to see the extent to which it was a question not of “predict and prescribe” but of “listen and respond”. That is to be much commended. That is listening and responding not only to the general public consultation but to debates in this House and in the other place, which have also contributed significantly to a much improved government position. Still, as the Minister would expect me to say, the Government’s position falls short of the aspirations that have been presented on this side of the Committee.

I am very glad that my noble friend Lord Berkeley was able to enter the debate in the gap, as I feared that I would have to spend considerable time on the issues of rail freight and the relationship to road/rail connections. He provided a crucial dimension on that link and questions for the Minister to answer. I particularly appreciated the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, on connectivity, which I am sure is at the heart of these issues, not just in the areas that he mentioned, but the relationship between the strategic road structure and local roads. We all know that those responsible for our local roads—our local authorities—are having a parlous time at present in sustaining the quality and effectiveness of the roads. It would not be possible to have this debate, however far-reaching and far-looking it was, without emphasising to the Minister that there is a real need which needs to be incorporated into any documents of this kind.

My noble friend Lord Berkeley was kind when he said that the document has been a long time coming. It has been a mighty long time—what I would call a Parliament—in coming. It is, after all, the product of the Planning Act 2008, and here we are with the coalition Government, having taken up the reins of office in 2010, producing a planning document—let me emphasise again that it is a planning document and not a policy document—a couple of months before the next general election. So the Minister stands chided that the Government have neglected these critical issues, and they are critical. The Minister’s response to what has been said in criticism of the original documents shows how critical these issues are. The Government have largely neglected these issues over a considerable time, and that is bound to be a cost to the nation.

It is not as if the Government are not practised at the art of postponing big policy positions until after the general election. This document at least obliges them to respond to a debate in this House a couple of months before the election. However, action—the question of what resources will be available with the Government’s commitment to eliminating the deficit by 2018, if they are in office—raises profound issues. Those can of course be brushed aside by their strategy of not committing themselves too far before the general election. It is a bit like the airport issue, where all the real issues will be dealt with after the next general election.

As my noble friend Lord Berkeley indicated, we welcome the statement because it should ensure that fairer and quicker decisions are taken on major infrastructure projects. We are glad that the extensive work has been done and that there has been the opportunity for a response to the initial documents, which I think on many sides were regarded as somewhat inadequate to the issues which confront us. The Government came in for much criticism, some of it from the Opposition, but the Government would expect that. After all, that is the Opposition’s job.

The Minister mentioned the Select Committee on Transport in the other place. It emphasised the issues which were developed in the other two speeches that we have heard thus far. In particular, what has been emphasised is the link-up between road freight and rail. The rail freight interchanges are clearly critical, as an issue of connectivity, to the expansion of the economy and the effectiveness of conveying freight. My noble friend Lord Berkeley gave us a most interesting and up-to-date example of that. It was a tremendously important one when we think of the amount of trade that we have with China these days, although I wish that he had picked on the process of the outward movement of goods rather than their inward movement. I would like to think that that massive vessel he referred to and the containers on it were full when going back to China as well as when arriving at Felixstowe in such extraordinary and welcome circumstances, given the size of the vessel.

I hope that the Minister will talk a little more fully about rail freight interchanges and the clear objectives that we must have on almost every dimension of transport policy to get goods, as much as we can, off our crowded roads and on to an expanded rail capacity. This part of the programme might well have been accelerated if this document had been produced somewhat earlier in the Government’s life. However, the statement, after all, is meant to carry across changes of government as an infrastructure position to which both major parties in broad principle subscribe. The other major parties also subscribe to the principles that infrastructure requires some continuity of investment and production. The Minister will be in no doubt that we broadly welcome the statement in those terms. As she will know, we did not press the issue to a vote in the other place.

One issue which I think the Minister touched on and indicated that the Government were responsible for—but I do not think she has given satisfactory responses at this stage—is in response to that criticism which came in from outside bodies, fully voiced by the Select Committee on Transport in the other place, that there seems to be little in the way of serious integration of modes of transport in this country. After all, this statement is no roads and rail statement; it is a roads statement and a rail statement. That indicates the important point that we have to think in terms of the effective connectivity between two major forms of transport on land.

On roads, many well informed critics have detected a return to “predict and provide” rather than clear evaluation of priorities. As my noble friend Lord Berkeley and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, noted, Governments’ record on prediction—more than one Government—does not give one the greatest degree of confidence and is often characterised by an overestimation of traffic demand. The Campaign for Better Transport was quite emphatic in its criticism of the estimates. The Minister touched on that in her opening statement, but I hope that she will furnish us with more detail on how this will be presented in a more effective and confident form than has been the case in the past.

The central forecasts for rail have remained despite the anxieties of Network Rail, which is in a position to make serious judgments on the matter. It is clearly concerned that if expansion is not carried out rapidly enough, present problems of overcrowding in certain parts of the country will remain. We know of parts of northern England where it is acute, but my goodness there are still major problems on commuter lines into London and our other major cities in England. An issue which stood out in the discussion on HS2 was that something had to be done about New Street station in Birmingham because of the sheer pressure of commuter numbers there and the necessity for that station to be vastly improved. Unless that situation is to deteriorate, we need a bit more than HS2, which after all is a considerable way in the distance. We need within this framework some clear realisation of what needs to be done.

The Minister will forgive me if I failed to listen to her opening remarks carefully enough, but it was extraordinary not to hear the word resilience, and I do not think that it appears much in government documents. That gives one the thought that it does not occupy minds much in government in circumstances where we are anxious about climate change and the ferocity of certain aspects of climatic events. The Dawlish phenomenon may not be unique. I give the fullest praise for the way in which Network Rail reconstructed the line at Dawlish so effectively and so quickly, but it did not alter the fact that a significant section of western England was close to being cut off for many weeks. We can think of other pinch points that might be a good deal more disastrous than the line that goes through Dawlish down to the south-west. I hope that the Minister will therefore acknowledge in her response the necessity in planning for rail for a degree of resilience that enables us to overcome real disruptions of existing networks and indicate how provision is made for alternative strategies in the mean time.

Prior to the debates and the Transport Committee’s response, I had anticipated having considerable criticism for the Government’s approach to carbon emissions, which I thought was pretty cursory. In her speech opening the debate, the Minister spent considerable time on that matter, so I will not take it amiss if she feels that she does not have to repeat all that in her winding-up speech. I take pleasure in the fact that that has come to the fore of thinking in circumstances where we know that carbon emissions are an important aspect of the quality of life and health of the public. Certain people happen to inhabit areas much more exposed to that problem than others, and they deserve consideration.

I know that the Minister is concerned about the Highways Agency and the strategic roads, and so she should be, because they are critical. They take so much of our freight and we all rely on an effective motorway system. However, I hope that she will say something about the question of local roads. After all, they are the receivers from and, we hope, deliverers to the main highway system, and there is precious little in the statement about the interconnectivity of local roads.

We broadly welcome the statement. After all, we look forward in a few months to starting to implement certain aspects of it. However, we would feel a good deal more confident about the brief which we will pick up if the Minister gave us some convincing replies to the questions asked by the three of us who have spoken after her in this debate.