Budget Resolutions

Bob Seely Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams). I wish I could say I disagreed with him over HS2, but let us not go there.

I congratulate the Government on their decision to back the Isle of Wight’s levelling-up bid last week and moving it up into tranche 1, accepting my arguments. I am most grateful for that. I want to say, because we are spending an awful lot of money, that it is going to be exceptionally well spent. That £6 million is going to buy quite a few things, but most importantly it will buy the capability to be able to lift 240-tonne ships out of the water at East Cowes. It will be a massive boost for jobs and for Wight shipyards and aluminium boats. With regard to shipbuilding, there is likely to be a significant contract for border patrol vessels, I hope. The Isle of Wight may well be putting in the only UK bid, and it will be a highly competitive one. Those boats have been made in Holland before. It would be nice to see them made in the UK and preferably on the Island, bringing that wealth to the Isle of Wight and also along the south coast.

I congratulate the Government on the universal credit decision. Out of all the excellent things in the Budget—my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary knows this as well as I do—the best is that we are enabling our constituents to make work worthwhile, getting work into families and giving them prosperity and hope. That may well be the most important thing that has come out of this Budget, and it may be influential for years to come.

I want put on record my thanks to Maggie Oldham at the Isle of Wight NHS Trust, who has taken the trust out of special measures. It is now rated as good. I am also grateful for the recent visit by the Education Ministry’s permanent secretary to Cowes Enterprise College to see an example of best practice in embedding careers into the curriculum. Getting people ready for work is clearly an important part of education.

I am delighted that the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts), is here, because I want to talk briefly about transport, just to have a bit of a moan within a positive framework. He and I have met quite often and talked about the Isle of Wight ferries and Isle of Wight transport. I wrote to him last week. I hope we are going to look at a series of issues, and I want to put them on the public record now.

The ferry services fall down too often. If this was a multi-constituency problem, the situation with Wightlink, Red Funnel and Hovertravel would not be accepted, yet unfortunately in this case it is accepted, for whatever reason. We need to challenge that and do better, because interconnectivity is important, as Ministers know. We need to improve our connectivity between the mainland and the Island.

First, following up on the letter that I wrote, can the Government take the power to oversee ferry timetables in the same way that the Rail Minister does with rail timetables? Secondly, especially because we have a Treasury Minister here, will the Treasury support a national infrastructure bid potentially by a new ferry operator—a free-market alternative—to get a new player into the market, especially if it is a community interest company that will keep a low debt level and a more affordable price structure for Islanders? Thirdly, will the Government look at other measures and potentially take other controls over ferry firms, for instance through looking at their debt level? I do not want to sound like the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) or the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis), but the privatisation of Wightlink did not work, and that company has been loaded up with debt by corporate sharks over the years. That debt gets paid for every time an Islander uses the ferry service, and it is frankly unfair. I also question whether it is right for public services, be they Wightlink or Southern Water, to be owned ultimately by companies based in offshore tax havens. It is not right and it is not good for us that that practice continues.

Fourthly, can we look at extending the EU261/UK261 regulations, which cover air travel, to cover the ferry firms? Fifthly, can we add public service obligations, either supported or unsupported by the taxpayer? Will the Government support the Isle of Wight Council or the Department for Transport taking a share in Wightlink or potentially Red Funnel? Will the Government also look at a cap on costs for those travelling to the mainland for health-related travel? Unlike the Isles of Scilly, we do not have the same beneficial arrangement, and those costs are sometimes higher than they are for other people.

I will leave it there, with one final point—I am looking to the Minister via the Speaker’s Chair. On the fair funding formula, negotiations are ongoing. The Government and the Chancellor accepted for the first time, after my pressing, that the Isle of Wight should be treated as an island and that there are additional costs in providing Government services and doing business caused by separation by sea. Those negotiations are at an advanced stage. I would be grateful, because the Government invested £50,000 to look at this with the Isle of Wight Council, if those negotiations came to a positive resolution. The amounts of money we are talking about are so small when it comes to overall budgets, but would mean a great deal to the Island. That would mean that the Isle of Wight’s additional costs caused by being an island would be recognised by Government for the first time in decades.