East Coast Main Line
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
The industry is currently close to finalising its response to the east coast main line major timetable change consultation that was undertaken in 2021. While it will not be possible to address every concern raised, I am confident that the industry proposal is an improvement over what was offered in consultation. The Rail Minister is in regular contact with Transport for the North, having met with the chair and chief executive in recent months.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, has the Minister been able to assess the amount of spare capacity on the rail system serving both north and east of a critical place in what we call the east of England? Does he agree that there needs to be a plan for the future—maybe one that cannot be implemented immediately but that we can set our minds on to ensure that it takes place without waiting another 10 or 20 years?
Disabled Air Passengers
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
I absolutely agree with the noble Lord and suggest that that is under way as a result of the round table of the noble Baroness, Lady Vere.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, might it not be particularly helpful to draw the airframe manufacturers into this discussion as soon as possible? They surely could set a standard that should then be led by all their customers.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My noble friend makes a very good point. I know that that is under way with some aircraft manufacturers, particularly in terms of toilets on board aircraft and the ability of people in wheelchairs to access those toilets.
High Speed 2
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(7 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The noble Lord makes a very interesting point. It is right—and this is not only for High Speed 2 but for many major infra- structure projects—that local interests can sometimes cause the cost of projects to increase. I need only mention, for example, Chesham and Amersham, where I think there is a Liberal Democrat Member—and they are deeply behind HS2, apart from any candidate who wins a by-election. Sometimes, to please certain groups of people, additional expense must be had, and sometimes that is absolutely valid. That is the difficulty with building major infrastructure. But the planning permission that goes into it and the DCO process—or in this case the hybrid Bills—have to reach the right balance, and sometimes one has to question whether it is in the right place.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister recognise the risks that we are going to run? First, the country will be seen as a laughingstock if we can no longer build a railway. Secondly, the expectations of people in the north and the east Midlands will feel betrayed.
It is very difficult to persuade visitors to this country that Old Oak Common is any part of central London. I hope that we will bear in mind also, despite all that has been said in the argument that has raged over the years, that speed is at the very heart of the human psyche. People want to do things faster than has been done before—and that still exists today.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
We are already building a high-speed railway. Phase 1 for HS2 is well under way. We expect services to commence by 2033. Before the noble Lord completely dismisses Old Oak Common, if any of us is alive in 20 or 30 years’ time —I look at myself in this regard—that whole area will look completely different. It is 1,600 acres, and there will be 40,000 homes and 65,000 jobs. That is something that I think we should be proud of.
Network Rail: Ely Area Capacity Enhancement Programme
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Haselhurst
To ask His Majesty’s Government what progress Network Rail has made in the Ely area capacity enhancement programme.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, I appreciate my noble friend’s ongoing interest in the proposed rail enhancements at Ely and Haughley junctions. I reassure him that the Ely area capacity enhancement programme is being considered as part of the update to the rail network enhancements pipeline.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
I thank my noble friend for that response. Do His Majesty’s Government recognise how powerful a driver of economic growth it represents? It is not just for the east of England but would benefit the Midlands and the north, bringing significant improvements in the passenger experience, the movement of freight and, not least, the quality of the environment. It also has a very favourable benefit-cost ratio, so—to coin a phrase—can we just get it done?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, when it comes to any enhancement on the rail network, the Government do a very detailed analysis to devise the business case for each and every one of the enhancements. We are of course doing that for Ely, but we are doing it in the context of revised and different travel patterns and an increased focus on freight. It is necessary for us to go through the processes to understand which projects can be prioritised.
Great British Railways
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(10 months ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I am very grateful to the noble Lord for his helpful intervention.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, can my noble friend provide assurance about some of the small schemes that are in waiting, such as the Ely junction enhancement which will have benefits east, west, north and south?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The Government are investing record amounts in the railways. In control period 7, between 2024 and 2029, we will be investing £44 billion in infrastructure. Obviously I cannot comment on specific schemes at this time, as the RNEP will be published which will set out which enhancements we are able to prioritise.
Global Britain: Traffic
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(11 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I shall write to the noble Baroness with further clarification of my remarks, because the £200 million is in addition to other funding and, unfortunately, I do not have that figure with me today.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, on the basis of the evidence that we have so far of the effect of the Elizabeth line on the traffic flow through London, should we not now be dusting off the papers about the possibility of a Crossrail 2? It should not be forgotten.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, there are many competing demands on the Government’s resources. Certainly, Crossrail 2 would have its benefits, but we need to look at that in the context of other projects that might come to pass.
Network Rail: Funding and Reliability
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
The noble Baroness raises some very important points, which demonstrate exactly why we need this uplift in funding. However, it is not always about just funding; it is about how we make the necessary repairs and how we do maintenance. She mentioned bridges, which are incredibly important, as there is a bow wave of older assets which need to be maintained. However, by using box structure flyover bridges to replace old flyovers and bridges, one could do that at a vastly reduced cost. Those are the sorts of modernisations we need to get into our maintenance regime.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister agree that, if a list of the major projects awaiting attention were published, this might attract support from industrial sources and local areas? The additional station in Cambridge is a case in point.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My noble friend is absolutely right that there are many sources of funding for improving our transport sector. The discussion today around the £44.1 billion of funding does not even include enhancements—that would be in addition. Those projects will be set out in the RNEP, the pipeline of public sector projects, but there is also the opportunity for local government and the private sector to get involved.
Public Transport in Towns and Cities
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, I compliment all my colleagues who have contributed, particularly those who sat on the committee during the preparation of this report.
The most important recommendation that we put forward—reference has been made to it already—is in paragraph 116:
“the Government should formally link the production of Local Transport Plans with Local Plans”.
Yes indeed, I have to say. I have come to believe over the passage of 60 years that the commission report prepared under the chairmanship of Sir John Redcliffe-Maud was right. We are beginning to see the advantages of city regions. If the balance throughout our country is to be right, we need to have powerful authorities, whether we achieve them by saying that we are levelling up or by the twin of that, handing down. They will be in the best position in planning and construction. They will have the resources to ensure that they are advised to the highest level. They can raise standards and ensure the importance of place, space and design.
These large authorities will have transport issues. We all understand why the use of cars is to be discouraged, in terms of health, climate change and, to some extent, congestion, but we should always remember that the alternative has to be good, otherwise we are taking away an instrument of freedom of choice from those many hundreds of thousands of people who say, “Let’s just get into the car and go out somewhere for a nice day”. If you take that away, you have to find some alternative way in which to ensure that they can take advantage of the facilities in their orbit.
Trains, trams and buses can all play a part in finding the right mix for getting people from outside cities and towns into them for marketing or pleasure purposes. The experiment that impressed me most—and colleagues will know that I spoke about it a great deal—was what we were shown about very light transport. It is being developed by Coventry City Council with the help of Warwick University. It means that the cost of laying track for those vehicles is slashed to something like £10,000 per kilometre rather than £50,000. It could be a game-changer.
What I would like to see is the Government of the day talking to the regions about their ideas. I would like to think that there would be independent people there, be they top civil servants or people who have been in the building industry for a long time and have an objective perspective on these matters, so that the plan, including transport, can be perfected over a period of time. There would be a contract, if you like, between the Government of the day and the authorities concerned, so ideas may be borrowed from one place’s plan for another. One begins to see how these things can be done to overcome the worries that we have had about certain matters.
There are other ingredients to put into the pot, as it were, if we are to get this right for the future. We have had, since the report was concluded, the ideas on autonomous cars and how we will deal with that. There will be air taxis and vertiports, perhaps mostly for the transfer by drones of minor freight—and the growth, it seems without correction, of the use of e-scooters. I really begin to worry when I see reports appear in the papers of a league table of the number of injuries and deaths caused by the clash between them and pedestrians. I do not want to spoil anybody’s pleasure, but we have to watch this particular development, otherwise we will face considerable risk.
Let us see hope in public transport being developed and taking people from where they are living in a new development and from their new homes to where they work. All those things can be dealt with by public transport, if there is intelligent planning. Let us call on those who have the skills in planning, construction and financing major developments and try to ensure that we will have a better future. We have been grumbling in the committee about what has happened in the past and worrying about some of those difficulties that have been aired again today. That is the pattern that I see—that we really need the big players throughout the country to level up to the Government and to their neighbours and so on, so that we have the best and safest transport systems in the modern world.
Rail Services
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I am very concerned that the noble Lord states that guards are being sacked. If he could let me know who is doing that, I would be very happy to take that forward.
Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that, in improving railway services at present, it would be best to concentrate on the provision of more track capacity, especially as it might improve connectivity to our seaports and airports in ways that will improve the movement of passengers and freight and go some way towards undoing the damage done by the Beeching proposals some 60 years ago?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I am very grateful to my noble friend for raising this issue. It is something that is top of mind—and, indeed, the pandemic certainly showed everyone in the nation how important freight is and how important it is to get it moving around. The Government have published their future of freight strategy, and Sir Peter Hendy has published his Union Connectivity Review. All these are looking at these very important elements of connectivity to our ports. In the Autumn Statement, the Government recommitted to transformative growth plans for our railways, and we will look at rail enhancements to our ports as part of that.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Haselhurst Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Lord Haselhurst (Con)
My Lords, I join other colleagues in congratulating the right reverend Prelate on his maiden speech, which was very impressive. It must be some 70 years ago now that, in post-war Britain, I first identified myself as a Conservative supporter on account of the emphasis that was being given at that time to home ownership. It was a very popular policy.
We have to ask ourselves how it has come about that successive Governments have run into considerable local resistance to their plans to build more houses. The economic activity in this country has been uneven. The south has outstripped what has happened in other parts of the country as older industries have declined. The pull factor of our capital city is very powerful, and we would not wish that to be diminished, but we have not yet succeeded in establishing one or more of our great provincial cities as a major alternative port of entry into this country, whether for business or tourism. Development has acquired a bad name—in too many places, deservedly. Promises have been made that could not be fulfilled, and standards have been set and then compromised. I represented the constituency of Saffron Walden for 40 years, and at the end of it I felt deeply troubled that the housing waiting list for a local authority home was as long in 2017 as it had been for most of the time since 1977.
All this has persuaded me to look again at the recommendations that were made by Lord Redcliffe-Maud about the organisation of local government and published in 1969. He recommended unitary authorities across the board. I have to say that, being the third person to speak who is a member of the Built Environment Committee, I have come to the conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that a larger local housing authority, or combined authorities, would be more likely to have the resources and expertise to promote building back better, and to ensure that space and place are in the design of new communities and that they have the strength to uphold guarantees of commensurate infrastructure.
Transport is one of the most potent elements in the levelling-up process. We are already aware, for example, that the promise of HS2 is having a positive effect in Birmingham and the West Midlands. The prospect of the next phase of that railway making Manchester only 63 minutes from London will also be a game-changer. Once it is recognised that the journey time between home and work can be so dramatically slashed, the distance between home and place of work becomes less of a limiting factor when local authorities are planning the construction of new homes.
The second sentence of the gracious Speech announces the Government’s intention to
“level up opportunity in all parts of the country.”
I take heart from that, and I end on a note of special pleading, which is relative to my interests as recorded in the register. In 1985, Margaret Thatcher’s Government decided that Stansted should be the site of London’s third airport, although 20 years earlier a previous Government had accepted the advice from Dr Beeching to reduce that railway line from Liverpool Street that serves the airport now. He recommended that its capacity be reduced from four tracks to two. Could we please have them back?