North of England: Infrastructure Spending

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Damien Moore) on introducing this important debate.

I want to build on what my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) has just said, although I both agree and disagree with it. HS2 and other big projects are important, but I think she was saying that they cannot be exclusive, and they must form part of a bigger picture. She is absolutely right that this is not just about transport links and that fibre broadband infrastructure is going to be revolutionary. Many of us have noticed during lockdown just how difficult it can be at certain points in the day even to open emails. That stands in stark contrast to what needs to be done.

My view on infrastructure, as laid out in a paper I hope to publish shortly, is that we must look to the short, medium and long terms. This is where I differ from my right hon. Friend: I believe there is value in the long-term projects, which will take a long time to build, although it is vital that we have these small, short projects, which are sometimes as simple as 1 km of train track that completely opens up different rail routes. There are lots of those around the Liverpool area, I understand. My hon. Friends might be able to build on those comments.

There are medium-term projects such as light rail infrastructure around my city of Leeds—something that has been in the offing for decades and where money has been supplied, but we have been talked out of it because the project is too difficult and upsets too many people. These things need to happen. However, I want to focus on the main big projects over the long term, which really make a difference, and on particular issues that will be in the report we are producing soon.

In the north of England we are lucky in our maritime position, with the port of Hull and the port of Liverpool. If the globe were tilted to give the relevant perspective, it would show that that corridor is more linked into mainland Europe than the other corridors are. Germany has been able to adapt its economy regularly as the world has changed and moved forward, and the one fundamental truth about where and why that happens is the River Rhine. It is a huge transport link, and a lot of engineering work has been done to link it to other rivers.

Of course, we do not have that between Liverpool and Hull. The canal system was built, but that is not what I am talking about. We need to look at a fundamental freight rail transport system that is akin to what the River Rhine does for commerce in central Europe and Germany. That is there to be built on. On that route, we could build inland freeports, to which the railway freight would be brought from, say, Hull, having come out of Europe. With value-added engineering in tax-free freeports, it would go back on the railway, over to the port of Liverpool and off round the rest of the world—or vice versa, coming back the other way.

We must think in the short, medium and long term, but the long-term projects, which will cost a huge amount of money, need to be really transformational and to put the country in a place that we have not been in before. Is that blue-sky thinking? Is it dreaming? Maybe, but it has to be the ambition. That would go a long way, through infrastructure, towards levelling up the north of England.

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[Christian Wakeford (Bury South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gradually. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Damien Moore). I do emphasise the term “Friend” because we go way back—before either of us took up a seat in this place.

I will start by touching on a point highlighted by the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury): this is about not only hard infrastructure, but soft infrastructure. Unfortunately, I think he was approaching this from the wrong angle, and I much prefer the approach of my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell).

We think of infrastructure very much in terms of concrete, new roads and new rail links. To me, that is not what infrastructure is, or what levelling up is about; for me, it is about education, skills and those communities that we represent. How many times do we speak about large-scale planning applications and then say that there is no real infrastructure to support them, when what we actually mean is that there are no schools, doctors, dentists and real economic centres to support thousands of new homes? That is not just an approach that the Treasury needs to take when moving forward, but an approach that planning policy needs to adapt to to fully understand what is going on in our communities.

The white elephant of HS2 has been raised already in the debate. I have spoken in favour of it previously, and it is the right kind of approach. However, we cannot think of all roads leading to London, because that is a falsehood. People from the north should not be forced to choose between HS2 or HS3, just as the people of London were not forced to choose between Crossrail and Crossrail 2; they were able to have both, and they were able to have their cake and eat it—that is the point of having cake.

We do not necessarily want a quicker journey to London—again, it is a falsehood that HS2 is framed in terms of speed rather than capacity—but we do need to ensure that our northern towns and cities are linked together so that we can truly make the northern communities the economic powerhouse.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

My hon. Friend is talking about HS2 and linking northern cities. There is a delay coming on phase 2b, as we have heard. Does he agree that we should look at this creatively and extend HS3 from Manchester to Leeds, so that we do not have to wait decades to link up northern cities?

[Christian Wakeford]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend; in fact, he framed that argument so succinctly that I do not need to add to it. As I said, the choice between HS2 and HS3 is a fallacy; we can, and should, have both.

In terms of the view that all roads lead to London, the economy is not driven by London; the economy is growing more and faster in the north than anywhere else in the country, and we need to support that.

Much of this east-west connectivity is also driven by the private sector. Drax wants to improve east-west connectivity so that it can ship its fuel source from Liverpool over to Hull. That is part of our green infrastructure recovery; it is about not just greener fuel but carbon capture, which is intrinsic to meeting our net zero target. When we focus on our infrastructure for the north, it truly has to be a soft infrastructure-led, community-led and community-driven process that we are all part of .

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[Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate the hon. Member for Southport (Damien Moore) on securing this important debate. I heard one or two murmurs as I came into the Committee this morning: “What on earth is an SNP member for the north-east of Scotland doing intruding on a debate like this?” Let me put hon. Members’ minds at rest: it is not to provoke a regeneration of the Wars of the Roses. I think some Members have been quite capable of stirring that up all by themselves, and I take no sides; I am strictly neutral in that. However, it quite simple for me: whether Scotland is inside the UK, as everybody else in this room presumably hopes, or outside the UK, as I earnestly hope it will be, the infrastructure—particularly the transport infrastructure—in the north of England matters to us as well. There are extensive business and family connections between Scotland and the north of England—or not-the-north-of-England, depending on whether we include Stoke-on-Trent, and where we draw the demarcation.

The north of England lies between us and markets in the south of England, as well as crucial markets in Europe, so it matters to us that the A1 is so poor after Berwick, and between Berwick and Newcastle. It matters to us that the A66 between Penrith and Scotch Corner, which gives access to Yorkshire and the east midlands, should be accessible in all weathers. In that respect, what matters to people in Scotland probably matters as much to the communities all along those corridors. Particularly important is the discussion about what goes where, to what timescale and, crucially—as noted by the hon. Members for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) and for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), who is no longer in his place—who gets to decide. It is not just about existing infrastructure; future infrastructure in Scotland is also affected by what is or is not decided for the north of England and the rest of the UK.

Let me return to the subject of HS2. It is clear that there are diverse views in the governing party on the merits or otherwise of HS2, perhaps governed in some part by how close MPs are likely to be to a station on the route that is chosen. For us in Scotland, however, it is quite simple: there is a real benefit in relation to climate. If we can get the journey from Edinburgh, Glasgow and other parts of central Scotland to London below four hours, that is an absolute game changer. Nobody would fly, unless they were going somewhere close to the airport. If somebody is going from central Scotland to central London, of course they would take a high-speed train. It is a game changer.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I have a genuine question. The hon. Gentleman will have heard the speculation about a link between Northern Ireland and Scotland, and what strikes me is the ability to build a high-speed railway between Belfast and Glasgow, and then down the west coast to London. I am genuinely interested in the hon. Gentleman’s thoughts on that.

[Richard Thomson]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Not so much in Scottish politics, but certainly in Northern Irish politics, it is a bit of a standing joke that whenever a bauble needs to be dangled, there is talk of a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland. There are tremendous technical challenges with that going over Beaufort’s dyke, which is exceptionally deep and full of munitions. Technically, it would be extraordinarily challenging. However the Green Book formula works out, I do not think we will ever see a benefit-cost ratio that will make such a project work, but I am content to let the accountants and number crunchers work that one out. Certainly, in theory, if we could create better connections in the south-west of Scotland and link Northern Ireland to Scotland and elsewhere, I am all in favour of that.

On HS2, if the line is to split either side of the Pennines, it is pretty important to us in Scotland to know on which side of the Pennines it will go. If it goes both sides, logically it is going to head north more slowly than it would otherwise. That matters, because if it goes by Carlisle, we would build a high-speed rail network in Scotland between Glasgow, Edinburgh and Carlisle. If it goes up through Newcastle, we would link Glasgow to Edinburgh and Berwick, and go down that way. Frankly, there is no point spending any money until there is absolute certainty about which way the line will go. That affects the rest of Scotland, because we would be building new infrastructure that would free up train paths capacity and give line speed improvements for the rest of the rail network in Scotland to get into Edinburgh and Glasgow, so the decisions that are or are not taken also matter to us.

There is little doubt that if HS2 had started in Scotland to go to London, rather than t’other way about, it would have happened a great deal faster than it now appears to be happening. That sums up the problem. We can change the formulas in the Treasury’s Green Book, but changing attitudes is another matter entirely. The Prime Minister once notoriously stated that a pound spent in Croydon was worth more than a pound spent in Strathclyde, and I think we can take it that such an attitude also prevails for Merseyside, Manchester and Tyneside. It is quite an embedded mindset in the British Government class—I do not think it is as rare as some hon. Members might wish to think. We will hear later today about the Chancellor’s spending plans and see what transpires.

My final observation is that since 1999, under various shades of political administration, Scottish Governments—whether the Lib-Lab coalition, minority SNP or majority SNP—have moved on investment in Scotland considerably better than in the bad old days of rule from the Scotland Office and Westminster. That is why it is crucial where decisions are taken and why devolution ought to be such an important part of this debate for the north of England.

The UK Internal Market Bill is set to encroach on many of Holyrood’s powers, including the power to set infrastructure spending. Under the guise of “taking back control”, the UK Government are in many respects actually taking away control, and I know it is not just people in my party who regret that that is the case. London clearly receives 60% more per head in capital expenditure than the north-east of England, and 50% more than the north-west. Ultimately, that dial needs to be shifted.

In conclusion, I strongly suspect that it will take a great deal more than today’s announcement to shift that decades-old structural imbalance in where power really lies in the UK, because that power imbalance has roots in politics and the electoral system, and it goes well beyond simple allocations of public expenditure.

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[Jesse Norman]

—I have a bit of time left to spend talking about the specific comments that have been made, which have been extremely helpful and interesting. My hon. Friend the Member for Southport was absolutely right to encourage us to look at rural areas as well as cities. He painted an almost garden of Eden-like picture of life in Southport, where people stroll airily from flower shows to comedy festivals to air shows, while striking a mean four iron on Royal Birkdale. I thought that an exquisite moment in his speech. He rightly highlighted the importance of railway, the stronger towns fund and the freeports, which he will know we have announced, and from which the north could benefit hugely in this competition.

The hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) is no longer in his place but I thought that he was right to focus on devolution, which I touched on in earlier remarks. The point about the capillaries and arteries of infrastructure was well made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey). My right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) was absolutely right to focus on the short, medium and long term. As he will know, one of the great unsung heroes of transport policy over the last few years has been Sir Rod Eddington. His report was very much about managing smaller schemes—often enormously important and not to be forgotten—that move people, particularly in suburbs and areas of large volumes of traffic, by rail, road or other means, and it was absolutely right.

My right hon. Friend’s call for a new Rhine system of navigation in the north was optimistic, but I respect the intent and energy behind it. My hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (James Grundy) was right to pick up on light rail. When I was in the Department for Transport, we did a consultation on light rail, which has such great potential. It is extremely inexpensive compared with some of the heavier rail alternatives, and it could be a beautiful new industry for the UK to develop. We have a tremendous amount of relevant skills in the supply chain, and I very much look forward to hearing more about that from colleagues.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

If my right hon. Friend will indulge me for one second, we have had a good debate and many colleagues have participated. I just want to put on the record that some of our colleagues have been unable to contribute. For example, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), who was unable to take part due to his commitments, is equally involved in infrastructure in the north, and his ambitions are there. I just want to get on the record that many colleagues in the north were unable to take part—I am sure the Minister will have responded to them—but they are as important in this conversation as the rest of us.

[Jesse Norman]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The unheard voices are as important as the voices in the room. Of course, as he knows, my door remains absolutely open for them at any point, in this debate or otherwise.

My dear friend the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys rightly raised the point about BCRs, which is an important technical point and they should not be abused. There is a certain art and craft to effective valuation assessment. The centre for it across Government is in the Department for Transport rather than in the Treasury. We have a great deal of respect for the work that they do there, although there is a very high level of understanding of industry in the Treasury, in a way that has not always been true. That means we get a better client relationship between the two sides, or a better interaction between the Ministries, the Departments, and the centre.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell) raised the idea of a funding pot for MPs, which I have to say raises all kinds of worries in me. We have been there before in our history some 100 years ago, so I am a little bit nervous about that, but the idea that there should be significant political leadership in making choices, and accountability for that, is absolutely right. I think the stronger accounts fund is rather a good way of tying those elements together, so I do not disagree with him about that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford) talked about infrastructure of the mind, as I would call it. Skills are so important, but so easy to forget, and only to focus on transport, and he was absolutely right about that. I commend to him the work of the new university we are setting up in Hereford, which does exactly that. The importance of cultural infrastructure was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden). I hope I have said enough to recognise the contributions otherwise made, so rather than overrun, I will allow my dear friend the Member for Southport to close the debate.