Sub-national Transport Body (Transport for the North) Regulations 2017

Debate between Lord Shipley and Lord Liddle

Monday 18th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I strongly welcome the regulations. I am glad that the Government are bringing them forward, and I echo the words of the Minister when she said that some excellent work had been done by Transport for the North since its inception.

I shall raise two issues. The first relates to the constituent authorities and the definition of them. There is a list of them on the second page of the regulations. What happens if the structures change? There could be different structures of combined authorities, for example. How easy might it be to change the regulations to reflect any structural changes to those constituent authorities? I am thinking in particular of the North East Combined Authority and North of Tyne, but also of the discussions going on in Yorkshire.

The Minister is absolutely right that the main function of Transport for the North is to prepare a transport strategy for its area. It is hugely welcome that there will be one; as the Minister said, it will be by the north for the north. However, I would like to ask the Minister about money. Does she accept that the north of England has not had its fair share of investment in recent years? Given that, does she accept that one of the key roles for Transport for the North will be to define and prioritise the resources needed across the north of England? In that event, do the Government accept that there would be little point in Transport for the North doing a lot of work and raising expectations if the Government do not meet the financial consequences of that work?

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of Cumbria County Council and, more particularly, as a railwayman’s son from Carlisle. I, too, welcome the establishment of Transport for the North. I think it is excellent that we will now have a planning and co-ordinating body that will bring some coherence and, we hope, a transport strategy for the north.

I follow up what the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said about resources. In repeating the statement, the noble Baroness referred to a sum of £260 million for which Transport for the North would be responsible. What caught my eye in the recent Budget Statement was paragraph 4.53 on infrastructure delivery, which talks about the Infrastructure and Projects Authority setting out a 10-year projection of public and private investment in infrastructure in Britain of around £600 billion.

The interesting question is how much of this £600 billion will come under the purview of Transport for the North. I very much look forward to the noble Baroness being able to tell me in her reply. Mr Hammond promised some worthwhile things in the Budget. For instance, in the transforming cities fund, there was £243 million for Greater Manchester and £134 million for the Liverpool City Region. There was a £300 million fund for ensuring the links between HS2 and other infrastructure in both the north and the Midlands, but £300 million is not very much. Of course, there is the new rolling stock for the Metro—one of the finest achievements of my friend the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, when he was Transport Secretary in the Callaghan Government.

We need more information. My county of Cumbria has vast unmet infrastructure needs. I have a letter here that I could read out about Cumbria’s requirements for road investment. I am conscious of the requirement for rail investment. The west coast main line has been modernised, but the coastal railway, which goes through some of the most beautiful country in England, up to Sellafield and then on to Carlisle, is back in the 19th century in its infrastructure. Yet we are talking about a new nuclear power station being built in west Cumbria and how we try to relieve traffic congestion in the Lake District. These questions need to be addressed, and they will all cost money.

I say just three things on money. First, in my view, London and the south-east should make a bigger contribution. They constitute one of the richest parts of Europe, and I would like the Mayor of London given power to raise more money through property taxation in London for infrastructure investment. Secondly, as long as you stick to the traditional cost-benefit analyses of how transport schemes are assessed, you will always end up with London and south-east projects at the top of the list. That is because there is not a broad enough conception of public value in how transport projects are assessed.

Thirdly, I do not want the Secretary of State for Transport telling us that he has no money in his budget, because that has been exposed as a total fallacy by his decision on the east coast franchise in the last few weeks. He has basically allowed Virgin and Stagecoach to run away with hundreds of millions of pounds that they owed on their franchise payments—possibly as high as £1.5 billion, I am told. He has allowed them to run away with that, because he was not prepared to go along to the House of Commons and admit that their franchise had failed. That is money that could have been spent on transport projects in the north of England; it has not been spent—and what is the explanation?

Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Shipley and Lord Liddle

Monday 29th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 44F very briefly. We had a helpful debate last week about the nature of a combined authority which had close to it less populated and rural areas that nevertheless were part of the urban area in terms of service provision. What we have here is a form of words which I hope the Minister may find helpful, in that it enables maximum flexibility but protects the rights of rural areas. It is a statement of principle about the opportunity for local authorities, which are not part of a combined authority but may be close to it, to enter into collaborative working arrangements with a mayor or other appropriate governance structure which operates in a city or metropolitan area. I hope the Minister finds it a helpful amendment because it is a statement of principle and would enable rural areas to feel more integrated, rather than taken over by urban areas. I hope she is able to think about this amendment and that we can pursue the matter further on Report.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendments 44H, 44J, 44K and 44L are in my name. They are probing amendments, and in speaking to them I am very proud to declare an interest as a member of Cumbria County Council. I speak to these amendments with the full support of the Labour leader of Cumbria County Council, Stewart Young. I very much hope that the outcome might be some kind of constructive cross-party—I emphasise that—dialogue between the county council, the generality of local government in Cumbria and DCLG Ministers about how best to streamline what are really cumbersome arrangements for local government in our county in the wider public interest.

We desperately need a simplification of the present structures to provide better value for money at a time when things are very tight and will possibly get a lot worse; to make local government more effective at doing its job with limited resources; to improve democratic accountability and closeness to the people for the entirety of the services that we deliver; and, most importantly in the context of the Bill, to enable the people of Cumbria and the new authorities in Cumbria to seize the opportunities for devolution of power from an overcentralised Whitehall that the Bill is all about.

The amendments are to Clause 10. We are quite far along in our deliberations but it is the clause that justifies the inclusion of “and Local Government” in the title of the Bill because it widens the scope of what we are talking about from what I think in reality initially started out as a big cities government Bill into something that can transform local government in many of our smaller city and county areas. I remind my Labour colleagues that I think this is in line with the party policy at the last election, where we stressed the importance of devolution to county regions as well as city regions.

Clause 10 does not seek to impose a single model on local authorities, and that is very welcome. That flexibility is right but the aim of the amendments in my name is to remove what we in Cumbria believe will be an insuperable obstacle to the necessary transformation of structures; that is, the requirement in Clause 10(3) that regulations can be made,

“only with the consent of the local authorities to whom the regulations apply”.

This requirement for local government unanimity—in my view and, I venture to say, in the view of many people in Cumbria—gives far too much weight and leverage to what I would describe as the forces of small “c” conservatism. I hasten to add that the position I am putting forward is supported by many large “C” Conservatives in the county. This is not a party issue; this is a view that unites people across the parties in my county council.

My amendments try to offer a number of options for what could take the place of Clause 10(3) to facilitate the creation of new single-tier councils in what are at present two-tier local government areas. I emphasise that in Cumbria that would not necessarily be a single, unitary council but it would be a streamlined model of authorities. In our view, substantial consensus in the community would be necessary to support such a measure but not unanimity, which experience has shown over 25 years—it has been 25 years since this was first discussed—is impossible to achieve. I am putting these amendments forward as options. Some are mutually contradictory. We are interested to hear what the Government think and whether they are prepared to move on this question.