Extraordinary Funding and Financing Agreement for Transport for London

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. I will follow his excellent example by also declaring my interest as a resident for the whole working week in London for many years and a regular user of the District and Circle lines and the cheerful 507 bus service from Waterloo.

That said, and to pick up the noble Lord’s last point and the point he made about how important London is to the national economy, I think the Government have stepped up to the plate, keeping TfL running not with Londoners’ money but with more than £4 billion and counting of taxpayers’ money, gathered from all over the country—national money, in other words. So it is to me a considerable paradox that Members of our national Parliament cannot usually put down, say, a Written Question about TfL, because we are rightly told by the Table Office that it is independent and nothing to do with Parliament. Shedloads of money is going into London and TfL, but we cannot even have a Written Question such as the one noble Lords have tried to table in recent weeks on what is happening about the wearing of face coverings in London, because that is said to be something that is not for Parliament. So it is very hard for us to know, on behalf of national taxpayers like me, what is going on within the Bermuda Triangle that seems to me to characterise TfL accountability.

It is clear that the mayor should have done much more about the wearing of face coverings on the London Underground over the last few months and encouraging it. It is equally clear that the mayor and his team have made scant efforts to attend even to the basics in TfL, such as seeing that fares are properly collected and that fare dodgers are reasonably, properly and carefully brought to account. I hope that is something that everyone in this House would agree with.

The money to keep services running is being provided by national taxpayers, so the mayor now needs to show much more leadership and to take more financial responsibility himself. He needs to look at everything that could raise more funds to help run TfL from, for example, road users paying per mile to widening the congestion zone, however unfortunate and unpopular that might be to some, lest we be stuck into infinity with an annual round of campaigning from the mayor to cover up bus signs and shut down Tube lines in a fashion that even the late Dr Beeching would not have dared to do.

All that said, it is pretty obvious to the attentive noble Lord that I am a supporter of the Government in this, so I will save my last word for them. I certainly strongly support the Government—although I might be something of an endangered species, if you read the morning papers. As soon as the latest pandemic threats are evaluated and things get back to whatever the new normal is, I hope that Her Majesty’s Government will adopt an attitude or even a policy of creative courage where they can in order to, without any cost at all, bring passengers back into central and outer London.

One way of doing that is to bring civil servants back to their offices again, as soon as possible, for the good of the nation, London and the Civil Service itself. Bringing civil servants back to their expensive and now too often white elephant office blocks, to seeing and talking to colleagues at the coffee point and to helping and encouraging new joiners; all these things are critically important. To parody the old saying “Get on your bike”, it is more a case of “Get off your Pelotons” at home and get back into the office in the cause of a better Civil Service.

Merchant Shipping (Cargo Ship) (Bilge Alarm) Regulations 2021

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I have only three points to make. First, I welcome the eventual bringing forward of these regulations, which have been on the shelves of successive Labour, coalition Liberal-Conservative and Conservative Administrations since 2008. It is good that they have come forward and, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, just said, it is good that no one suffered in the interim. I do not think that legislation should be left to lurk, even in draft form, in the way these regulations have, so I warmly welcome them.

Secondly, I have one positive suggestion to put to my noble friend the Minister who will be winding up this debate. I am not a marine surveyor, nor a marine engineer, and I am ashamed to say that I have never been down a bilge, but the universal vessel to be fitted under these regulations by warning systems and guards of one sort or another is relatively small. There is a serious suggestion that the equipment should include alarm alerts linked directly to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at times of potential danger for seafarers—perhaps at night or in challenging weather—who might be on the move and not lucky enough to be moored alongside. I would like this to get proper consideration.

Thirdly, I believe that seafarers feel quite voiceless about these issues. The men and women are not listened to; they are well down the queue behind the ship managers and owners, ship insurers, P&I clubs, legal firms and others. They are often heard only by and through the efforts of voluntary organisations and charities. So it was interesting to see in the impact statement in the Explanatory Memorandum, at paragraph 12.1—let it not be said that no one has read these regulations—that there is no significant impact from the regulations on charities or voluntary bodies.

In practice, it is the other way around. These voluntary bodies make a great impact on behalf of seafarers, including those men and women working inshore, dredging or fishing, who are indeed generally voiceless. If it were not for the voluntary organisations, I do not think their voices would be heard much or at all.

The work of voluntary organisations in the maritime world, whether it be with small boats like these or vessels at the other end of the size scale, such as those lumbering container ships or cruise liners, includes always trying to help keep the crew in touch with their families, which is very welcome. We should be thankful that the voluntary organisations do this, as well as helping the crew if they are in need of medical or dental treatment or a dockside chaplain to come and give them counselling.

We are very lucky to have outfits such as the Sailors’ Society, the excellent Anglican Mission to Seafarers and indeed my lot—the Roman Catholic Apostleship of the Sea; they all play their part in helping people in need of help. By coincidence, it was only this past Sunday, two days ago, that the Apostleship of the Sea held its Sea Sunday. It is part of the largest global seafarers’ charity, known as Stella Maris—I know that noble Lords are all accomplished Latinists and will know that that means “star of the sea”. Stella Maris works globally in nearly 60 countries, with many staff at the dockside in some 335 ports, the last time I looked. Many of those are in the UK and deal with small vessels, which may not always be particularly well maintained. They make a real impact. If it were not for the voluntary organisations and the organisations that I have listed—it is a very long list, and I have pointed out only a few of them—I do not believe that the voice of seafarers would be heard. These charities very often listen to the voiceless.

I ask my noble friend and her department, where she does very important work, to do all that is possible to make sure that the Department for Transport decides to ensure that, challenging though it is sometimes, the voice of the average man and woman seafarer is heard, as well as the normal statutory list of invitees—the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, will remember this from her time in the Welsh Office—who are always wheeled out by civil servants, who say, “We must consult this or that organisation.” We need to consult the people really concerned—the seafarers; I do not think that they have a voice.

New Cars: Sales

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, we have been working hard on the Road to Zero document and are in the final stages of pulling it together, having welcomed the input of many stakeholders. It will be published shortly. I wish that I could give noble Lords an exact date, but I am afraid that I cannot at this point. We are working closely with departments across government on that issue. It forms part of all our efforts to reduce emissions following the Clean Air Strategy consultation, which was recently published. We set out our aim and ambitions in the manifesto, and the two strategies taken together—the Road to Zero strategy and the Clean Air Strategy—will help to deliver those goals.

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest, as I should, as the owner of a mark 1, series 1 Land Rover from 1950 which, if it could, would like to run on leaded fuel. What provisions will be made for owners of historic vehicles and historic collections of vehicles in carrying these regulations forward?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, I know that historic vehicles can be incredibly popular. It is possible to convert them to electric, as we all saw at the recent royal wedding. However, it may be that not all owners of historic vehicles can afford that conversion, so we have said that the 2050 ambition is for nearly all vehicles to be zero emission. There is in that a recognition that certain types of vehicles may need special consideration.

Railways: Reliability

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 31st October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

I hope I will not alarm the noble Baroness too much if I say that I agree very much with what she said. I also rise with some temerity to speak before the noble Lord, Lord Snape, who knows so much more about railways that I ever will. I well remember as a very green new Member meeting him on my first night in another place in the Strangers’ Bar, when he asked me what I did. I ‘fessed up to what I did, and asked him, “What do you do?”. He said, “I used to be with the NUR”. “What’s that?”, I asked. He said, “It stands for no use rushing”. I am sure that he remembers it as well as I do.

Before punctuality and reliability, connectivity comes to my mind, and the ease of finding stations and lines alike. This remains a great problem for many of our people, often still because of the closures for ever written against the name of Dr Beeching, whether fairly or unfairly, who in the late 1950s and early 1960s, helped by a supporting cast of experts, forecast the coming decline of our railways, which, of course, never happened.

Now, rather, there is pressure to reinvent passenger connectivity by reopening old lines, often by micromanagement. After some 50 years, for example, there has been the recent reopening in 2015 of links between two stations in Yeovil in Somerset, which are almost adjacent to each other, thus giving back local and welcome connectivity to Westbury and Weymouth. It is a little move but much welcomed locally.

On a larger scale we have the north-western powerhouse which may well soon be stimulated a bit by the north-south grand project of HS2, but in Lancashire, I am told there are groups pressing for more localised east-west reopenings or electrifications to bring back connectivity locally as well. That said, I am a very strong supporter of privately run railway operating companies. In saying that, I know that I may well be an endangered species. I think it is right, but I also recognise that they have a big responsibility to do better over reliability and timeliness, as do Her Majesty’s Government in writing new line contracts and renewal of contracts for franchises on our creaking railway infrastructure.

My weekly commute is on the Exeter-Waterloo so-called main line that is one of the mercifully few that still has substantial lengths of single track railway with attendant passing places—too often in my experience true loops of doom. Passengers, I know, long to have back the time in their lives that they have sat near Salisbury in the dreaded Tisbury loop—a kind of railway Bermuda Triangle in my experience. It is a black hole waiting for the delayed up or down train to pass, held up successively by maybe the wrong kind of leaves, the wrong kind of ice, or—once, late at night, it being dairy country—the wrong kind of heifers on the line.

There is no solution to this sort of thing from HMG. I am sorry to land these thoughts with my noble friend in her early outings on the Front Bench. The franchise was switched from the boringly named old South West Trains to the new, exciting and snappily named South Western Railway just last month. I went into it in some detail and it turns out to be a Sino-British outfit, promising in its franchise bid if successful, among much else,

“improved service frequencies and quicker journey times”.

I quote what it promised exactly.

Do Her Majesty’s Government have a well enough written contract with the means to claw back the franchise if these promises are not kept? I hope that they have, and I seek reassurances, not necessarily tonight, but in writing from my noble friend the Minister whom I am so pleased to see on the Front Bench.

The dualling of the whole of the Exeter-Waterloo railway is vital to the economic growth and social cohesion of the south-west, but in the meantime, it will be a Sino-British management failure if these promises are not kept. Above all else, it will be a central government failure if, together with the railway industry, and the new rail delivery group, we do not hammer out something that is more relevant to passengers than the currently imperfect public performance measure, rather concentrating much more, as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said in her most interesting speech, on an “on time”, or as some would prefer a “right time” metric, measuring real performance.

I am sure that this will be a central issue for the new pan-industry Rail Delivery Group, set up so recently to represent private companies and the publicly owned Railtrack, to stress their public-private partnership. I hope that this will not be just a spokesperson-driven lobbying group, blaming the wrong kind of Brexit on the line, or whatever, but I particularly welcome the proposal to have a rail complaints ombudsman by the summer of 2018. I regard that as of fundamental importance. I hope that she or he will be truly independent and have teeth. I hope that the Rail Delivery Group will be circulating all noble Lords with details of where to raise issues, if they emerge. I shall certainly while away the time when stranded in the Tisbury loop by composing my thoughts.

Brexit: Transport

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, rising as though from the Bench of Bishops, I take as my text this evening what the Latvian Prime Minister, Mr Maris Kucinskis, said during the weekend summit in Malta:

“What is most important is to think about a beneficial partnership … Every member state is looking to build the best possible trading relationship with the UK and I think that the whole Union will also benefit from a strong trading relationship”.


Those remarks certainly apply, as the Prime Minister of Latvia said, to transport as to everything else economically. He represents the new generation of younger, realistic EU leaders—still, small voices of calm who should be listened to very carefully.

In the end, my assessment of the impact of Brexit on the transport sector is that it will not be very great. That is because I think that the European weather is changing. Increasingly, grown-up voices, also since Christmas, have been urging the need for a change in the European weather, urging amicable separation, and no one more economically grown up—and, to me anyway, personally more admirable—than the brave German Finance Minister, Dr Wolfgang Schäuble. He was saying just that at Davos, as well as in a very carefully worded interview over the weekend in Tagesspiegel. He said that the euro was overvalued in relation to the German economy, continuing:

“We want to keep Britain close to us. London’s financial centre serves the whole European economy. London offers a quality of financial services that are not to be found on the continent”.


I respectfully agree with the man who has been German Finance Minister so successfully since 2009. What he says is critical for UK transport and much else in other economic sectors post Brexit. Flows of capital into and out of the City, where I work, are critical to the domestic economy. Had Dr Schäuble said the opposite, panic would probably have set in in the media overnight, and I think it is strange that the good news of his very positive views going forward have not yet been any more than scantily reported.

For the generality of people in the country at the moment, although the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, made her points so well, the transport matters following from Brexit are not of much concern yet—perhaps they will be later. People are more concerned about the chaos on British railways and on the Underground. That really need rapid attention. TfL and the mayor need to get going and sort out what is going on in London Underground. Above all, we need to bring about existential changes in industrial relations in the transport sector.

That said, the biggest benefits for the transport sector, by comparison, are not to be found in detailed Brexit negotiations but by our remaining stalwartly open to foreign direct investment, in a way largely unknown to most of our current EU partners. They do not necessarily welcome FDI in the same way as we do. Take the 1 February announcement of UK manufacturing figures for January 2017. It was a cracking start to the year in transport and other sectors—as my noble friend the Minister will know—and where German and French companies have long been players. We rightly regard our transport infrastructure and services as vital, but we do not protest against foreign direct investment and instead welcome it into this country. We do not adopt a protectionist attitude, unlike the French a few years back when they declared their yoghurt manufacturer, Danone, a strategic asset when it was receiving possible takeover attention from foreigners. We take a much more enlightened approach. The US has well-developed institutions governing the transport sector, and the professional consensus is that market liberalisation is well developed compared with many other member states.

Following Brexit, foreign direct investment into transport should be welcomed, whether in manufacturing or indeed service provision. Take rail services and the bidding for franchises: public procurement arrangements and international trade rules operate on the reciprocity principle. In these changing times, both sides will wish to see UK operators in the UK mirroring the treatment of EU operators wanting to win franchises in this country. It is totally mutually self-destructive not to do that. In the EU, all rail franchises must be competitively tendered in the 2019 to 2022 period, so all that is needed is for operators to continue to comply with regulations concerning safety and technical standards—ditto for UK operators wishing to compete outside the European Union, for the UK will remain an active member, and I welcome that, of the Intergovernmental Organisation for International Carriage by Rail.

I move to a second and last example, from rail to road transport. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, in the closing words of her very important and interesting speech, raised the issue of vehicle standards and emissions. In my closing words, I agree with her. Here, I think Brexit will allow us to show leadership to the rest of Europe on the approval processes and procedures for vehicles and their emissions. Not only is the UK happily one of the world leaders in car manufacture, but our companies have played it straight throughout on emission measurements in this country. They have certainly played it very straight compared to the emissions scandals affecting some German and French manufacturers, which are an utter European disgrace. I think the world’s consumers will look very favourably on any additional UK approvals as backing up the global reputation of our motor manufacturers. We can take a leadership role in honesty, which will be a great selling point for the UK, its cars and transport sector and so many other areas of transport policy.

Civil Aviation Bill

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, I am quite fearful of the effects of delaying what are, admittedly, politically and environmentally difficult decisions about airport capacity—not just for this year or next, but over the next several hard years for the United Kingdom’s economy and its employment. It may turn out to be seven quite lean years or more for the people and economy of the whole of western Europe. Against such a background, even the signals that we send out to potential investors—well in advance of actually being able to do anything on the ground to improve airport capacity—may well be critical, because they know good news is coming, albeit a bit delayed.

That said as background to my points, and declaring my business interests, I seek assurances that nothing in this Bill as drafted can get in the way of urgently needed airport capacity improvements. There may be some doubt about this. However, in general and overall, I welcome the sensible provisions that the Bill contains, following obviously careful ministerial consideration of the excellent and far-sighted recommendations of that distinguished public servant, Sir Joseph Pilling. It is good, therefore, to see that improvements have already been made to the way that the CAA works, even ahead of this legislation. In particular, there is the critically important separation of powers between chairman and chief executive. Its governance structures certainly needed modernisation and updating to reach reasonable modern standards.

The CAA should certainly be in a position, for example, to appoint its own senior executive directors and go on to fix their pay, easing the pressure on Ministers, who should not be involved in what are essentially operational matters. However, for a thoroughly modern public corporation, a board as large as proposed in this Bill—16—might turn out to be rather a lot for useful discussion. At the other end of the size spectrum, fixing pay, which is in the Bill, may need slightly wider scrutiny than that of the chairman and just one other non-executive director. That balance probably better demands two independent directors at least, for the avoidance of doubt. I also hope that the CAA, as it rolls forward, will be very leery—I never know how to spell that, but doubtless the Hansard account of my speech will get it right—of the advice of remuneration consultants. They often seem to be as unreliable and inflationary in their recommendations for increases in executive pay as rating agencies once were in their business recommendations.

We must see this Bill not in isolation, but in relation to the two aviation documents that the Government are likely to launch in the not too distant future; I hear rumours of July. First, there is their consultation on a sustainable airport and aviation framework, which is very important. Secondly, they are consulting on options for maintaining airport hubs in the United Kingdom. My noble friend Lord Bradshaw talked about their importance. I hope that I can go on calling him my noble friend, despite what is going on at the other end of the Palace of Westminster as I speak, and that we do not all need counselling as we go forward. What he said was interesting, and it is precisely why I seek assurances that none of the market power competition provisions in this Bill relating to specified dominant areas and dominant airports could be used in as yet unforeseen ways to inhibit the best choice being made as quickly as possible for the vital London airport expansion. These range from a third runway at Heathrow, as just put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, to fantasy schemes on estuarine islands and elsewhere.

To my mind, and I would like to test this against the provisions of the Bill, the best current option would be to bring into use the second Gatwick runway, as will be permitted from 2019. The two runways at Gatwick could then be linked to the present two runways at Heathrow by a cut-and-cover tunnel and rapid transport rail system. I know that this is a suspiciously round number, but I am assured that at current costs this could be done for about £5 billion. Shuttling between the two ends of what would be a unified hub, with two runways at Heathrow and two at Gatwick, could be done in 12 minutes or less. The payback for the Exchequer for this scheme, which of course is vital in our constrained economy, could be met by a £10 take-off or landing charge to clear the cost in 20 years or less. Once it was built, this would undoubtedly become known as the Gatrow Express in one direction and the Heathwick Express in the other.

That is my example and I simply ask this: suppose the Government decide that this—or any other scheme—is what they want to do. Does anything in this Bill prevent it being driven through if the scheme turns out to require dominance by one body, as defined in this Bill? Therefore, could the anticompetitive measures, which otherwise may be very welcome, be used to inhibit such development in the national economic and environmental interest? If the Bill was enacted in its present form, could it be used to slow down and prevent such development purely on competition grounds?

I say to the Minister that this is not some probing Committee-stage point, but one of general overarching principle. Have those drafting the Bill considered the possibility of future-proofing its provisions against the unlikely; and the difficulties of delays caused by the unlikely happening, as tiresomely it sometimes does? In a different way, I reflect what my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding—not presently in his place—said. He pointed out the uncertainty facing BAA in Heathrow in its necessary capital-raising grants, which we all support for infrastructure reasons. However, uncertainty would also be damaging if those who wish to come and develop using private sector money are inhibited from so doing. After all, look at the time it takes to bring about the simplest changes in the air transport system.

Take the world’s biggest airport, Atlanta, in space-rich Georgia. There are no problems there with overflying or inhibitions about developing much cherished green-belt land and the rest. The most recent proposal there was not to delay building a controversial extra runway, and not expansion inhibited by any competition regulations, but simply to build a much needed new international terminal in what is the world’s busiest airport. It has taken 16 years even in that relatively regulation-free, environmentally free and uninhibited atmosphere. We do not have 16 years in the UK. Wherever expansion happens, it will have to be in the London area. We have in aviation terms nothing like 16 years unless we continue to see our competitive advantage bleeding away. The Government need maximum room for manoeuvre. They should not be shackled in any way by their own legislation and I want to make absolutely certain that one potential set of shackles is not hidden in the middle of this Bill.