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Baroness Blake of Leeds Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a former Secretary of State for Transport, I think one of rather many in this House, and as an adviser for many years to the Central Japan Railway Company, which is now busy building the fastest railway in the world, the Yamanashi Maglev. It may be of some comfort to all sides of the House that it is running considerably over budget and two or three years late, emphasising the point that these gigantic projects again and again, almost for the last century, have been becoming wildly over budget and raising all sorts of issues, such as social and environmental consequences, that were not seen to start with and were not brought into the consultation. That remains the situation.

I welcome the moves the Government are making to pull it together with the new appointments, which I am sure are of the highest quality. I think we should all try to live with the remarks of the Minister and others that it is all the previous Government’s fault. They always say that. We should swallow our pride and recognise that if we have joint support, all round, of the least partisan and most constructive kind, we will get this project through. My Japanese friends said from the start that building should have begun from the north and come downwards rather than starting from London. There might have been rather different politics if it had.

Is the Minister aware that there will be more overruns? There will be more costs that no one had foreseen. Their efforts should be welcomed, as I said, but they must also be prepared for being quite frank in coming before this House, and obviously the other place, with the details of where the overruns are and how they fit in. There is a much bigger lesson, as my noble friend rightly said in his excellent opening remarks, that in these giant projects, we have not quite got right the co-operation between the Government, the state and the private sector. I see another huge whitish elephant coming up at Sizewell C, not because there should not be nuclear power there—I am all for that—but because it is the wrong design. It is vast. It is going to take years, and it is going to cost nearly the same sort of money in the end as we are spending on this railway. Figures of £30 billion to £40 billion are freely mentioned. There needs to be a vastly greater concentration on combining finance by the state that does not end in borrowing and taxation that we cannot afford with the private sector, where there is lots of money ready to go into well-formed and properly investable projects.

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)]

I remind the House that this is an opportunity for Back-Benchers to ask questions. We have several who want to intervene, and we will run out of time if we are not careful.

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord and former Secretary of State, of which there seem to be very many on the Opposition Benches, for his remarks and observations.