Hillsborough

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

The noble Lord raises an important point, particularly regarding the responsibility of the Police and Crime Commissioner. They will have an important role to play, but we will certainly be reviewing the situation. As further details emerge, I will write to the noble Lord about the steps we are taking. The important point is that there is a responsibility in the higher echelons of that police force. The noble Lord mentioned the statement put on the website which, as I said earlier, was both concerning and regrettable. There is a history of their making a statement and then retracting it. One would have hoped that, on this occasion, they would not have done so, but that is exactly what has happened.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I may be the only member of your Lordships’ House who was present at Hillsborough 27 years ago. I subsequently gave evidence to Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry and to the Hillsborough Independent Panel. I join all other Members in commending both the Statement and the contributions from all sides of the Chamber today. This House has matched the mood perfectly. I think that the victims’ families will feel that they have been vindicated, certainly as far as this House is concerned. I have just one question. Does the Minister agree that what has made the victims’ families’ agony so much more unbearable has been the refusal by the South Yorkshire police force, consistently over the last 27 years, up to and including the period of the inquest itself, to put up their hands up and admit that they were at fault?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I totally agree with all that the noble Lord has said. As for what he said about South Yorkshire Police, I think that that sentiment is reflected across the House.

High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. His modesty prevented him from describing perhaps his greatest moment as Minister for Transport, which was to resist, quite early on in his term in office, a very crazy plan from the British Railways Board and his Department for Transport officials to embark on a programme of closures of rural railway lines. I think about 40 lines were involved. He made quite clear that he would not stand for that, and more or less from that point the option of closures has gone off the political agenda. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, deserves a great deal of credit for the fact that we have a railway network of the size it is, which we are now going to build on.

I should start by declaring my various railway interests, which are on the register, particularly my chairmanship of the Great Western Railway advisory board. Other noble Lords spoke about the phenomenal increase in demand for rail travel. I will not go over those figures again but those of us who worked in the industry in the 1970s and 1980s, when cost-cutting, contraction and decay were all too frequent a feature of life on Britain’s railways, rub our eyes in disbelief at how great the transformation in the past 20 years has been. That growth has been achieved even when, for some of that time, the economy as a whole was in recession, or, as more recently, fuel prices at the pump made car travel cheaper.

Your Lordships will have seen the consequences of this doubling in the number of passenger journeys from 750 million a year to 1.5 billion in terms of overcrowding on the existing services. Each working day, 3,000 people must stand in the trains arriving at Euston, and a similar number in Birmingham. The west coast main line does not have enough train paths to accommodate the numbers wishing to use it. The railway tried to respond to the continuing increase in demand by fitting more trains on to the network, lengthening trains and reclassifying some coaches from first to second class to increase seat numbers, and so on. On the east coast, the new Azuma train fleet will add 28% more seating capacity at peak times for long-distance trains from King’s Cross. That may accommodate some years of demand growth, but on the even busier west coast main line the Pendolino fleet has already been lengthened, the busiest commuter trains operated by London Midland have had a 50% seating capacity increase, and extra commuter trains have been squeezed into peak periods by increasing the top speed of commuter trains to closer to 125 miles an hour.

That a limit would be reached by these kinds of measures has been evident to the Department for Transport for some time. In the competition for a long-term franchise for the east coast intercity service run in 2000, a bidder had suggested building a new high-speed line to accommodate an expansion of services. While the idea of a long-term franchise was abandoned on that occasion and it was let for just two years instead, the experience prompted the first serious examination of the case for high-speed rail in Britain. The study, which was carried out by Atkins, Ernst & Young and others for the Strategic Rail Authority and subsequently published by the Department for Transport, found that there was a business case for a north-south high-speed rail because the existing trunk lines—the west coast, the midland and the east coast—would all be approaching capacity limits, starting with the west coast by the mid-2020s. It took the imagination and foresight of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, as the then Transport Secretary, to get hold of a high-speed rail project idea and make a reality of it, and then, crucially, win cross- party support, so that when the Government changed the policy did not change with them.

I have to tell your Lordships that the problem of overcrowding on the west coast main line is not a new phenomenon. I came across this letter published in the Times, which said:

“Sir, I left Rugby yesterday by the 12.45 pm train which is due at Euston-square at 4 o’clock pm. We arrived at Euston-square at 5.50 … The cause of our delay was the breaking down of a luggage-train ahead of us. There is such an enormous traffic carried on what used to be called the London and Birmingham Railway that such delays (to say nothing of the danger to passengers) are constantly occurring. Would it not be a great improvement if the company were to lay down two additional lines for the sole use of luggage-trains?”.

The date of that letter, my Lords, which was signed:

“Your Obedient Servant, A Cockney”,

was 30 December 1846.

I come back to today’s situation. A number of noble Lords have talked about the impracticality of adding to capacity by further upgrades of the main line. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred to that, as did my noble friend Lord Rosser. There are other more radical solutions, two of which would be familiar to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. One is to discourage the number of people travelling by train by pricing services up so that only the wealthy could travel and by making them less attractive. You would have to accompany that with a huge new programme of motorway construction, the environmental consequences of which would be horrendous.

We have heard a bit about the Chilterns today. One has only to look at the website of the M40 Chiltern Environmental Group, which represents 25,000 people who live along the M40 corridor from junction 3 to junction 8, to understand how appalling life is for people living close to motorways. I quote:

“Day and night we all suffer from intolerable noise pollution”.

Years on after the M40 opened, they are still campaigning for noise barriers.

The third option—and the sensible option, of course —is to build a new network of high-speed railways, as has been done in many other countries in the world. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, made the point that I was going to make—namely, that no national system which has embarked on a programme of high-speed rail has regretted it or said that it would take those services out of use. Instead, they are constantly adding to the networks that they have. Compared with Japan, which opened its first Shinkansen line in 1964, we in Britain have been rather slower in realising the potential of high-speed rail travel. We have tended to assume that because the Victorians left us such a fine network of main line and secondary railways, we could somehow get by without building new ones. Perhaps that made sense when the demand for rail travel was static or even falling, as it was in the 1970s, but that is not, of course, the case now.

In November 2007, the nation’s first high-speed line was fully opened with a launch at a transformed St Pancras station, which was attended by Her Majesty the Queen, and High Speed 1 was born. After all the tribulation and all the objections to that programme, it was delivered on time and to budget. Once the Eurostar trains had to operate over the old Southern Region tracks into Waterloo, but once the new line was opened, they could run at much higher speed over the new Channel Tunnel rail link. One consequence of that was that complaints from residents about train noise ceased altogether. People in that part of the world now protest about noise from the M20 motorway.

The environmental standards to which High Speed 1 was constructed were stringent and of high quality, and the extensive consideration that has been given to these matters in the design of High Speed 2 will, I am sure, ultimately have a similarly good outcome. When the construction of High Speed 1 was planned, it was thought that only the Eurostar services would use it. However, Eurostar demand has grown to more than 10 million passengers a year, and rail now dominates the London to Paris and Brussels travel markets, where once air traffic was dominant. However, other domestic high-speed services have materialised and Kent’s Javelin services now carry a further 10 million passengers a year. Taking the two service types together, the 20 million-plus annual passenger levels are similar to those originally forecast for the Channel Tunnel rail link. Forecasting has inevitable uncertainty, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, to assume that the growth in demand will miraculously stop two years after the line is opened, is, of course, nonsense. That demand will continue and we have to plan for it well into the future. High Speed 2 has had the support of successive Governments. The Bill before us is the first part of what should be regarded as a national high-speed rail network.

Before I finish, I would like to stress a little-understood but important aspect of High Speed 2. Once it is built, the need to try to fit together “paths” for non-stopping express passenger services alongside those for freight and local and regional passenger services over the same railway is removed. Part of the capacity gain that High Speed 2 delivers arises from the new tracks it provides and from the services with longer trains they can accommodate. Another part comes from the narrowing of the speed range of services operating on the parallel routes—initially with High Speed 2, that will mean the west coast main line. This is the “capacity release” effect and it means that intermediate places on this line such as Coventry, Northampton and Milton Keynes and smaller places, too, will be able to get better services in the future. And it should be possible to accommodate more freight off our congested motorways and on to rail, especially container traffic to and from the major ports and major distribution centres. So High Speed 2 is not just a foundation stone for the national high-speed network, and for improving the links between our major cities, but it is also an essential device to overcome constraints on today’s network and allow the expansion of services at smaller towns and cities and create better pathways for freight.

I believe that High Speed 2 is very much a project for our times. I congratulate the Minister on the way that he introduced the Bill, my noble friend Lord Rosser on the way that he responded, and all the other speakers in this debate. The fact that there is so much support in this House for this Bill is remarkable and perhaps mirrors the experience in the other place, where the Third Reading of the Bill received 90% of the vote with a huge majority. I am sure that the Bill will have the same support in this House.

Railways: New Lines

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 29th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

The Government are committed to ensuring the regeneration of all railways. I will write to the noble Baroness on the details of that particular line. I reiterate that we are looking at ensuring that there is effective and resilient investment in our railways to ensure that they meet the needs of the 21st century.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is absolutely right to draw attention to the success of the community rail partnerships. They have contributed to growth well above the growth on regional railways generally and have attracted some 3,200 volunteers to help improve stations and to work generally on the railway alongside full-time railway staff. This is a great success story and it is important that the Northern Rail franchise embraces that. But does the Minister not agree that for that strategy to succeed, it will be necessary for Network Rail to look realistically at cost levels and get them down where it can, because those have been a bar to opening lines until now? I declare an interest as chairman of the Great Western Railway advisory board and, indeed, the author of a book which deals extensively with this subject.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I am sure noble Lords will be lining up outside the Chamber for a signed copy. Of course the noble Lord is quite right to point out the need to ensure best value and efficiency on our railways. That is why, as the noble Lord will know, the Secretary of State has appointed Sir Peter Hendy to look at the delivery of the investment in the railways across the board.

Railways: Suicides

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 21st December 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they plan to reduce the number of suicides on railways, and to reduce the disruption they cause.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and remind the House of my railway interests declared in the register.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport and Home Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are fully supportive of initiatives which the rail industry is taking, led by Network Rail, in liaison with the Samaritans and other organisations, to reduce the number of suicides on the network. They are beginning to show results. The initiatives include measures to reduce the ease of access to platforms passed by fast trains and to train staff to intervene to help people near the railway who may be in a distressed state.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, I am sure the Minister will agree that it is impossible to exaggerate the distress and disruption caused by people taking their own lives on the railway to the bereaved families and friends, to station staff and passengers who may witness the event and to the train drivers affected, many of whom are so traumatised that they never drive again. British Transport Police tells me that fatality delays this year will amount to more than 455,000 minutes and that the number is rising. Does the Minister agree that the railway cannot tackle this problem on its own and that, while much is being done with bodies such as the Samaritans, which he mentioned, there needs to be a national campaign involving the Government, the civil police, mental health professionals, rail staff and the travelling public to identify people at risk and discourage them from harming themselves on our railways?

North of England: Transport

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, judging from the many excellent speeches so far, the subtitle of this debate should be, “The North Fights Back”. We have just heard a very good example of that from the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. I congratulate the Minister on what I believe is his first speech from the Dispatch Box in his new role. I hope that he will not mind my saying but, coming after the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, who was in her place earlier, and my noble friend Lord Adonis, he has two very hard acts to follow. Both those Ministers presided over and contributed to the revival in Britain’s railways, in which I wholeheartedly rejoice.

Since 1997-98, the annual growth in passenger journeys has been around 4%, compared with just 0.3% in the previous 16 years. The Office of Rail and Road recently reported that the total number of journeys on franchise operators last year was up to 1.654 billion—the highest ever. Noble Lords, I think, will have heard me speak before about the contrast in recent years with the situation in which the railways found themselves in the post-Beeching 1970s and 1980s, when decline, contraction and penny-pinching were all the order of the day. I had better at this point declare my interests as the co-author of a book that described what happened with the railway during those years and to trail the fact that its sequel will be out in the autumn. I should also declare an interest as chair of the First Great Western stakeholder advisory board.

Just over 50 years ago, the Beeching report condemned local rail services in the north of England to a policy of retrenchment and disinvestment. The philosophy was that intercity rail and bulk freight might have a bright future and could be made profitable, but that local and commuter services would always lose money, and most should be replaced by buses. We look today with incredulity at northern towns such as Richmond or Ripon, Keswick or Washington, and wonder how they could have been stripped of their railways half a century ago or how the direct line from Manchester to Derby through the Peak District could be axed—I am sorry that the right reverend Prelate of Derby is not in his place to hear me say that. It is no surprise that campaigners are now supporting plans to bring trains back to Skelmersdale and Blyth, and between Skipton and Colne. How valuable the Harrogate to Northallerton line would have been in relieving the overcrowded east coast main line or providing an alternative during the regular engineering works.

Apart from local services—the north was exceptionally hard hit by closures outside the main conurbations—the Beeching philosophy also stripped out many east-west routes where better connectivity is now urgently required. The old Great Central line between Manchester and Sheffield, built for carrying heavy coal traffic, was the shortest route between the two cities. Its closure, soon after it was electrified and a new tunnel opened under the Pennines at Woodhead, is in retrospect utterly inexplicable.

Yet it could all have been a great deal worse—and indeed would have been had it not been for the creation of the passenger transport executives in 1968 for Tyne and Wear, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. They did a great job in putting rail at the heart of their transport strategy and, in those areas, a significant heavy rail network has led to progress, with more services, affordable fares and better marketing. Outside those PTE areas, however, British Rail local services continued to decline for another 20 years. Instead of investing in the railway to stimulate and satisfy demand, money was spent—and wasted—on pointless bus substitution studies and on developing the concept of a low-cost local railway, with most stations unstaffed and minimal station facilities. The drive was to cut costs, not to meet the demand for rail that grew with road traffic congestion and parking problems.

When the first generation of diesel trains finally wore out in the 1980s, many were replaced by the much-reviled Pacers, the low-cost trains based on bus technology, about which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, spoke earlier. They fall well short of the standards expected now and of the rail cars used on local lines elsewhere in Europe. But we need to remember that without their introduction from about 1985 onwards, many local lines would have disappeared. At the time Pacers were an affordable way for a cash-strapped British Rail to keep the services going. For a while it looked as though the Pacers would be around for some time yet. Indeed, according to the railway press, the bean counters in the Department for Transport advised the Permanent Secretary and the Secretary of State that the economic case for their replacement did not stack up. Can the Minister confirm that Mr McLoughlin was having none of that and took the very rare ministerial step of issuing a directive to the Permanent Secretary that the Pacers had to go?

Keeping our faith in the railways has really worked. During the fourth quarter of 2014-15, the introduction of additional services between Leeds and Manchester—to cite just one example—led to the largest increase in timetabled train kilometres anywhere. I welcome very much the Secretary of State’s statement on 23 March, when the stakeholder briefing document, Transforming the North’s Railways, was published at the same time as the invitations to tender for the next northern and trans-Pennine franchises. I particularly welcome his assertion that:

“These publications mark an important first step in the transformation of the train services in the north of England to support economic growth”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/2/15; col. 318WS.]

The railways’ contribution to economic growth is not something we have heard about very often from Transport or Treasury Ministers or their officials in recent years.

Another assertion by the Secretary of State that I am happy to welcome, since this is a non-partisan occasion, is what he said about High Speed 2 in his speech in Leeds on 1 June; the Minister echoed some of it today. Mr McLoughlin said that the argument for HS2 had been won and construction on the full Y network from London to Birmingham and Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds will start in just two years. He said that,

“we are moving forward with plans for new high-speed rail links, running right across the north, from Liverpool in the west, to Hull in the east. It will slash journey times, provide a substantial boost to capacity and help bind the north together as a single, powerful economic force. We believe in the power of transport to change things”.

The Secretary of State is right and I am afraid that my noble friend Lord Beecham, in what he said about High Speed 2, is quite wrong.

I commend to my noble friend the report by the consultancy group Greengauge 21 on the consultation for High Speed 2, which it says produced four main points. First, there is an ambition that High Speed 2 should be developed from north to south, rather than from London northwards. Secondly, related to that, there is a wish to see phase 2 implemented earlier than 2032-33—either the whole project or parts of it. Thirdly, there is an ambition for there to be more connections with existing lines so that services can be provided to and from city centre stations on to the high-speed network. A particular aim is that there should be fast connections and more capacity provided using High Speed 2 for travel between regional cities, where the existing network is often particularly weak. That would supplement High Speed 2 services to and from London and make fuller use of the new line capacity. Fourthly—and we have heard about this from the noble Lords, Lord Kerslake and Lord Shutt, and my noble friend Lord Woolmer—there are concerns, particularly along the eastern side of the route, that the chosen station sites will require significant complementary investment to provide good access and should perhaps be looked at a bit more. Leeds in particular needs better and fuller integration of the HS2 station with the existing station, and I believe that the same applies in Sheffield.

I conclude on a positive note. We can see that the future of rail transport in the north is looking good, with huge benefits likely to flow into the regional economy from High Speed 2 and from projects such as the northern hub, which will transform passenger journeys into and around Manchester. It was from the mid-1990s that strong and continuous growth in passenger numbers started, and this has continued to the present day. Local authority engagement, community rail partnerships and higher train frequencies have all helped, while traffic congestion, parking constraints and the unpredictability of the road system have all helped rail growth as more and more people see the advantage of taking the train. This growth is set to continue, and all the official forecasts point to the need for more rail capacity.

In this House, we tend to be somewhat London-centric. With 70% of rail journeys starting or finishing in London or south-east England, it is inevitable that more focus will be on that region than on any other. But the problems of overcrowding are shared around the country and are not limited to London. Indeed, growth rates on regional and long-distance services are currently outstripping growth in London and the south-east. Trans-Pennine trains from Leeds or Manchester are just as overcrowded as trains leaving London in peak time, and passengers get left behind at stations, unable to board, whether they are approaching Sheffield or Surbiton. The difference is that the trans-Pennine trains, typically, have only three cars, whereas those around London may have eight or more. Longer trains will obviously address this problem, but the rail industry is not building any new diesel trains and is relying instead on the transfer of existing diesels as routes are electrified and new electric trains provided. However—this is a very big “however”—the electrification programme is a long one and is slipping, as a number of noble Lords have pointed out in this debate. I hope that the Minister will be able to give the House some comfort that the electrification programme in the north of England, and indeed the west of England, will get back on track.

There should be no north/south divide on this. The needs of the north are as important as those of London and the south-east, although different in nature. Both will benefit hugely from high-speed train travel, which, with High Speed 3, will address many of the connectivity issues within the north of England as well as those to and from the capital and beyond to the rest of Europe—issues which other noble Lords have referred to today and which I know the noble Lord will wish to respond to in his speech later.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, my brief contribution to this debate picks up on the points made by the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Ribeiro, on the introduction of standardised packaging for cigarettes and tobacco products.

Your Lordships will recall that tobacco control clauses were added to what is now the Children and Families Act as a result of initiatives taken by a cross-party group of Members of this House. One of them I see sitting opposite me: the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich. The thought that standard packaging could be achieved as a child health measure had not occurred to Members of the House of Commons and we added the new clauses to the Bill in this place. We were delighted when the Government brought forward their own amendments to give effect to the provisions and were able to get them passed by overwhelming majorities in this House and the other place. The votes were a clear demonstration of the will of Parliament that these important public health reforms should be brought in as soon as possible.

For reasons which we understood, the Government decided that they should commission an independent study from the eminent paediatrician Sir Cyril Chantler on the public health benefits of standardised packaging, particularly as far as children and young people were concerned, before proceeding further. Sir Cyril’s report, published in April, was a model of careful and rational analysis. I urge anyone with an interest in this area of public policy to read it. Sir Cyril concluded that the policy was justified, saying:

“Having reviewed the evidence it is in my view highly likely that standardised packaging would serve to reduce the rate of children taking up smoking”.

Quite rightly, therefore, the Public Health Minister responded immediately that the Government would publish draft regulations by the end of April for a short further consultation before they were laid before Parliament. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, pointed out, we are still waiting for those.

The Government have committed to a six-week public consultation period after the draft regulations are published. It will then be necessary for them to notify the European Union of the draft regulations. This process can take up to six months. Counting backwards from a May 2015 election, we now have a rapidly closing window of opportunity. If the draft regulations are not published imminently, the chance to vote on them before Parliament is dissolved will be lost. That would be a very great loss indeed. The United Kingdom is a world leader on tobacco control, which is the achievement of successive Governments. It should be the common concern of everyone who cares about the health and well-being of the public that this is so; it should not be a party-political matter.

The facts are not in dispute. Everyone knows that most smokers start when they are teenagers. Two-thirds of existing smokers report that they started before their 18th birthday and about two in five before they were 16. Every day the Government delay in introducing regulations, hundreds more children start smoking for the first time. The younger the age at which smokers start, the greater the harm is likely to be, because early uptake of the habit is associated with subsequent heavier smoking, higher levels of dependency, a lower chance of quitting and a higher chance of death from a smoking-related disease.

While the wheels of government seem to be turning more slowly than usual, the tobacco industry and its small band of remaining parliamentary allies and recipients of its hospitality have been busy, spreading lies and misinformation through bogus research and grotesquely biased opinion-polling, and creating a climate of fear for retailers. Their objection is quite simple. The tobacco industry believes that its claimed “intellectual property rights” trump the requirements of public health—or, to put it more sharply, that its right to design products intended to get children addicted is more important than the children’s right to be protected from that addiction and the health damage it causes.

Cigarettes are the only legal product that kill their customers when used exactly as the manufacturer intends. Why should any company be allowed to promote such a product through advertising and marketing— especially to children and young people? When you see what they get up to in the third world, blatantly promoting their products to the poor and vulnerable—so brilliantly described by Peter Taylor in his two BBC2 television programmes last week and the week before—you wonder how their executives can sleep at night.

The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, has the opportunity when he replies to this debate to convince us that we have no reason for concern and that the Government’s policy on this subject is on track and as unequivocal as it was when he spoke on the Anti- social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill. He stated then that,

“The Government are determined to try to stamp out smoking as a habit, particularly among young people”.—[Official Report, 14/1/14; col. 141.]

I say “hear, hear” to that, and I hope that he is able to say the same thing tonight.

European Union: Justice and Home Affairs

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords—

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

The Question is that this Motion be agreed to.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I did wish to intervene in the Minister’s speech. I hope that is in order; I was on my feet before the Question was put. The noble Lord very helpfully gave an undertaking about the provision of an impact assessment for the measures that the Government are seeking to rejoin. However, he will be aware that in discussions with Ministers, the committees of this House have made it clear on a number of occasions that it is equally important that at that point there should also be an impact assessment, which has so far not been provided, on the measures that the Government are not seeking to rejoin. I wonder whether the Minister could give us some undertaking on that aspect. It really is rather important that the impact assessments provided should not be partial and limited to the measures that the Government wish to rejoin, because there will of course be impacts from the measures that the Government do not wish to rejoin. The House will need to be aware of those before it debates and votes on the final package to rejoin.

Hillsborough

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, as one of the very few Members of your Lordships’ House who was present at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989, I congratulate this Government and their predecessor on their determination to pursue the truth of that terrible tragedy. The Home Secretary deserves enormous credit, particularly for engaging with our much missed colleague, the Bishop of Liverpool, who has changed the whole nature of the way in which we are looking at the events on that day, 25 years ago. I was delighted to hear the Minister’s reference to the involvement of the former bishop as the Home Secretary’s adviser and with the family forums.

Does the Minister agree that the police, particularly South Yorkshire Police and West Midlands Police, have a lot of very difficult questions to answer? Was he as astonished as I was to discover that 2,500 police pocket books have only now come to light? How many more pocket books does he think there may be out there that contain vital information? How many police officers have so far declined to co-operate with the IPCC or the bishop’s inquiry?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I was as astounded as I think all noble Lords would have been at the discovery of these pocket books. I have no idea whether there are any other pocket books that have not yet been discovered. The pursuit of truth is clearly such a singular objective that everything must be focused on achieving it, and anybody who has information or pocket books that might be relevant to this inquiry or knows where they are should produce them for the investigations.

I can only add to the tribute paid to the right reverend Prelate the former Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones. What a remarkable man he is. It is odd, in a way, that we were discussing one of his projects—on forestry—immediately before this Statement on Hillsborough. He is a remarkable figure. I shall not say “public servant” because it goes beyond that. The fact that he has such integrity and is trusted in the way that he is is a remarkable tribute to him and to the work he has done.

Crime: Metal Theft Task Force

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will continue to support the metal theft task force.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Taylor of Holbeach) (Con)]

My Lords, no one doubts the success of the metal theft task force. The Government have provided funding from January 2012 to 31 March 2014. With a new licensing regime in place since October, we will take a view nearer the time as to how to take forward our efforts to tackle metal theft in the future.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is right to say that the metal theft task force has been successful. The British Transport Police, in particular, deserves a lot of credit for the work that it has done. This has resulted in a 44% reduction in metal theft-related crime in 2012-13 and, according to ACPO, has saved the national infrastructure £339 million, an incredibly good rate of return on the £5.5 million that the task force has cost so far. Does the Minister agree that, with the introduction of cashless transactions, which your Lordships added to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, and the passage of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013, we are at last turning the tide against this awful crime? Would it not be extraordinarily short sighted to cut off the funding of the metal theft task force at the end of March and should we not be building on that success and not jeopardising it?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

As I said, there is no doubt that the task force has been very successful and, together with the legislative change which this House assisted in bringing in, has made a great difference in the battle against metal theft. A judgment needs to be taken and the Government will consider this. The noble Lord might be interested to know that we received a letter on Tuesday from Paul Crowther, who is the ACPO leader on this matter.

Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, my name is added to this amendment, which I feel is very important. We know that when young people start smoking, their addiction potential and the long-term harms are very great. There is good evidence that children get cigarettes by proxy either, particularly in the case of younger children, by stealing from their own families or by purchasing single cigarettes from other children at school. However, a cohort in the older, middle-teens bracket seems to obtain cigarettes more through proxy purchasing. Quite often, with a very small incentive added to the cost of the cigarettes, they use a drug abuser or somebody else to do the purchasing for them. The retailers—the small shops—which sell cigarettes find themselves in a really difficult position. Rightly, they are not allowed in law to sell directly to the youngster, yet they are aware that there is no lever in terms of proxy purchasing, although it is they who would be prosecuted rather than the person doing the proxy purchasing.

It is important to bring the law into line with legislation on alcohol purchasing. The harms from tobacco are in a different group from those relating to alcohol, but they should not be underestimated.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I intervene only briefly. This is the first occasion on which I have spoken on an amendment supported by the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association.

It seems to me self-evident that the arguments made by my noble friend Lord Rosser and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, just make so much sense. It is entirely sensible to bring the law into line with that governing the proxy sale of alcohol and to follow the practice which has been adopted in Scotland with regard to the proxy purchase of tobacco. Persuading young people not to smoke is something to which we in this House have devoted a lot of attention. When we return to the Children and Families Bill at the end of the month, we will have an opportunity to do something on the standard packaging of cigarettes and on smoking in cars where children are present. This is also an important measure, which will make it more difficult for youngsters to start—and thus become addicted to—this terrible, dangerous habit.