Investing in Britain’s Future

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

What a lot of hot air from the Chief Secretary. Haven’t we heard it all before? Plenty of empty promises. But I must ask: when will the Government pull their finger out and actually start to build some of these things?

The Chief Secretary to the Treasury has been sent out with this long-winded statement to talk and talk and talk about infrastructure investment, but all the evidence shows that the Government are failing to deliver. As John Cridland, the director general of the CBI said yesterday:

“While the Government talks a good game on infrastructure”—

and I think even that is a bit doubtful—

“we’ve seen too little delivery on the ground so far.”

It is no wonder that the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce has described the Government’s plans for infrastructure as

“hot air, a complete fiction”.

Should not the Chief Secretary be listening to his leader—not the Prime Minister, but the Deputy Prime Minister, who said this week:

“The gap between intention, announcement and delivery is quite significant”?

A little more action and a little less Tory from him would not go amiss. Why is the Chief Secretary neglecting the health of our flatlining economy, and why was there nothing—I repeat, nothing—in yesterday’s spending review to kick-start a strong and sustainable recovery?

Will the Chief Secretary confirm that this Tory-led Government have spent £5.6 billion less in capital investment over the last three years when compared with the plans they inherited from Labour? No wonder that their plans for construction and growth have been such a total flop. Is he not just a little embarrassed that the infrastructure activity in the British economy collapsed by a staggering 50%—it has halved—in the first three months of this year? Does he not realise that three years of economic stagnation means that this is the slowest recovery for over a century, with just 1% growth compared to the 6% that the Chancellor promised when he started his cuts programme?

The Treasury’s performance on capital infrastructure is lamentable. Just one project has been supported by the Government’s supposed emergency guarantees legislation, which should have underwritten up to £40 billion of infrastructure. Two years ago, the Chancellor told us—I do not know whether he remembers this—that a further £20 billion would be leveraged in from pension funds, yet in March he let slip that only £1 billion had been committed and that no investments had yet been made. Of the 576 projects in the Government’s existing infrastructure pipeline, just seven have been completed and 80% of them have not even started. All the while, the construction sector has lost 84,000 jobs since this Government came to power.

When the Prime Minister said, over 18 months ago, that he would go on

“an all-out mission to unblock the system and get projects underway”,

what happened? All that chillaxing has been at the expense of the recovery that should have been well under way years ago.

Let me ask the Chief Secretary about the detail of his statement. Will he confirm that the Government’s plans for housing construction are stagnant and that no Government have presided over such a low peacetime level of new housing completions since the 1920s? Will he confirm, too, that the local government capital budget, which includes housing, is being cut by over a third—35%—in yesterday’s spending round announcements for 2015. Will he confirm that particular figure? It looks, from the Chancellor’s face, that that is in fact the case. What action is he taking to tackle the lengthening time for both major and minor planning applications to be decided, despite his promise two years ago that they would improve on the 13-week time scale? What happened to that?

On transport, will the Chief Secretary now tell us when he is going to publish the three long-awaited national policy statements on ports, transport networks and aviation? I hope that somebody is keeping an eye on the High Speed 2 budget, which seems to have leapt overnight by £8 billion. It was good that he gave the go-ahead to the Mersey Gateway bridge—again. In fact, he also re-announced the A14 funding, which I think the Chancellor announced two years ago in the November 2011 autumn statement—and in exactly the same words.

On energy and carbon reduction, is not the Renewable Energy Association right to describe the decision to undermine the feed-in tariff rates as “a horrendous strategic mistake”? On shale gas, would it not be sensible to be led by the evidence rather than by political antipathy to renewables? If the Chief Secretary really wants to encourage new investment in our energy infrastructure, should he not have a decarbonisation target to clean up our power supply by 2013?

On flooding, it was noticeable that the Chief Secretary said that the devil was in the detail and there is still a lot to be worked out, but will he stand up and confirm that these changes might need primary legislation? If so, when is that going to happen?

On schools, does the right hon. Gentleman not now regret scrapping Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme? On “Newsnight” last night, the Education Secretary did not seem to realise that his capital budget was being cut in real terms, perhaps because his so-called Priority School Building programme announced three years ago has so far seen construction start on only one school building.

Does the Chief Secretary not understand how dangerous it is to ignore the warnings from the International Monetary Fund, which says that Britain should bring forward capital infrastructure projects because we need a significant near-term stimulus now, in 2013, not several years away? Why does he not listen to the advice of the IMF? Why does he not come clean and admit that he is cutting the capital investment budget overall, in real terms, by 1.7% for 2015-16, as it says at the bottom of page 11, table 2 of yesterday’s spending review, should anyone care to look at the detail? Is it not the truth that there is no new money for infrastructure? He is spinning a line, rolling multiple years together to make the figure sound big, reheating old announcements in his microwave statement, which should have turned into action long ago.

The House can at least agree that the Government have been negligent with the health of our economy and that the deficit is not falling as a result. The scandal is that they are still ignoring the urgent need to kick-start growth when they should bring forward projects without delay. We are seeing no delivery for three years, no infrastructure brought forward and, for all the hype, real terms cuts to long-term infrastructure in 2015. Something has got to be done about this lot, because so far they are not capable of delivering the goods.

[Danny Alexander]

What a pathetic response to a very serious long-term and detailed plan for this country’s infrastructure. We heard no admission of Labour’s 13 woeful years of delivery of infrastructure. Given some of the hon. Gentleman’s questions, he obviously had not listened to my statement.

On borrowing, our deficit is falling as a share of GDP, which is the proper measure, but only the Labour party could claim that new figures showing that we borrowed less in previous years are bad news for the country—the Labour party is addicted to borrowing— and that is on the day when we learned that the hole that Labour left in our economy was even deeper than previously said. Today’s figures show that the 2008 recession shrunk our economy by 7.2%, not the 6.3% of previous estimates. As the first shadow Minister to respond since the new figures came out, the hon. Gentleman made no apology for the mess the Labour party made of the economy. We are clearing up its mess, and he ought to have shown a little humility on that point.

On delivery, let me give the hon. Gentleman the facts about this Government’s record. Since 2010, 30 major road schemes have been completed. Of the 24 major projects announced since 2010, eight are under construction, and eight more start this year. Of the 56 local road schemes announced, 28 have been completed or are under construction, and 15 more start this year. Some 150 stations have been upgraded across England and Wales, including Blackfriars and King’s Cross. Some 190,000 school places have been completed for the next school year, and 81 free schools have been built. Some 84,000 houses have been completed, and 59,000 houses have been protected from flooding. Crossrail is employing 8,000 workers with six boring machines—more than the Opposition Front Bench.

On investment, we have added £20 billion of investment at every fiscal event since the 2010 spending—