King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord McLoughlin Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord McLoughlin (Con)]

My Lords, I join other Members of your Lordships’ House in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, to his position and congratulating him on his maiden speech, which opened this debate. I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, to his post. He brings, without any doubt, an expertise in his subject that is probably equivalent to that of the noble Lord, Lord Vallance.

The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, has managed to travel from being first appointed by Ken Livingstone to being reappointed by Boris Johnson when he was Mayor of London, to being approved as chairman of Network Rail by David Cameron when I was Secretary of State for Transport and then being made Rail Minister by the present Prime Minister. He certainly knows how to travel the highways of political responsibility, and there is not much pressure on him to show that he has the answers to these problems.

I welcome certain parts of the King’s Speech. The preferences played, as far as transport is concerned, are vital. I meant to refer at the beginning to my interest as chairman of Transport for the North. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, talked about the way in which the metro mayors will become more important in shaping transport in their areas; that will be very important for the Government to deliver growth. I regret the decision that was made by the last Government on HS2—I think it was the wrong decision. We cannot have big national infrastructure projects in the planning for 15 years that are changed overnight, as HS2 was. A lot of thought went into that, and HS2 was not about speed; it was about capacity on the network.

That will be one of the big challenges. I noticed what the notes that come with the King’s Speech say about the high-speed rail Bill for Crewe and Nantwich:

“We are not reversing the decision to cancel the second Phase of HS2”.


That is a bit different to what was said at the time that decision was made from the now Government Benches, then the Opposition Benches. One only has to look at the impact that HS2 is already having around Birmingham to see the benefits it can bring as far as long-term development and growth are concerned. We need to see a rebalancing of the country from outside London. It is particularly important that we talk about Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle, and that we talk about interconnectivity between our great cities—it is not a matter of London or not. When I was Transport Secretary, I would go down to the south-west and people would ask, “What are you doing for the railways down here?”. I said that we were rebuilding Reading station, and they would look at me as if I had gone completely mad. It was a huge investment, but it was essential to improve the capacity around the throat into Paddington station, which was one of the big rail bottlenecks.

I wish the Government well in their transport policies. Privatisation of the railways—“franchisation” as it now is—brought huge benefits. The railways under government ownership were starved of finances because there are other priorities. There always will be other priorities: health, defence and education will take a stronger role than transport will. Before privatisation there were 700 million journeys a year on the railways; there were 1.8 billion the year before the pandemic—that was driven by partnership. I urge the Government to think very carefully about this. We just heard about partnership with the private sector. Franchising has basically failed over the last few years because of the pandemic, but please think of what resulted from getting that investment. Places such as St Pancras station, where you would not have wanted to spend five minutes, are now destinations in their own right. I urge the Government to think carefully and tread cautiously on this.

I fully support what they are saying and wanting to do on buses; a lot more work needs to be done. As with anything in transport, we can all set out great plans, but nobody knows greater than the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, about the difficulty of seeing such plans introduced. The trans-Pennine upgrade currently taking place will take 10 years. I wish the noble Lord and the Government luck with this because, to get growth, they have to get transport right.