Transport and Local Infrastructure

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr McLoughlin]

I will come on to say more about the work we are doing on road infrastructure and devolution to local authorities. Salford should be in a strong position to take advantage of some of those measures.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

May I also pick two years out of thin air, namely 2010 to 2020, which will mark a decade of absolutely zero investment in the M56 in Chester? The Government are refusing not only to upgrade it to a smart motorway, but to install police and Highways Agency cameras so that we may know what the problems are. What can my constituents look forward to in respect of the M56 upgrade?

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[Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)]

I want to talk about the importance of rail manufacturing, and primarily about the importance of Hitachi to the local economy in my constituency. The Hitachi Rail Europe factory in Newton Aycliffe opened last year and is creating 730 jobs, with many more in the supply chain. The factory is a superb, modern facility. Costing £82 million, it is the largest private sector investment in the north-east of England since Nissan. The factory’s first task is to build the next generation of inter-city trains for the Great Western line, which will begin entering service next year. It will then build trains for the east coast main line from 2018. For those who use the service on a regular basis, that day cannot come too soon. The company has also won contracts for commuter trains in Scotland and on the trans-Pennine route.

Hitachi built the first bullet train in Japan in the 1960s, and I understand it is now on its seventh series of bullet trains. I want to see that technology brought to Britain and manufactured in Newton Aycliffe. Hitachi’s expertise means that it could manufacture the rolling stock for HS2 in Newton Aycliffe if it wins the contract. That would provide a great boost to manufacturing in the north-east and the rest of the UK. I see the 730 jobs that are already to be created as a minimum.

There are other areas of expansion. Hitachi Rail Europe has that name for a simple reason: it sees the UK and the north-east as its launch pad for exporting rolling stock into the European Union. That is one reason why our continued membership of the EU is vital. Hitachi has shown great confidence in UK manufacturing’s capabilities, and I can only endorse its faith in the workforce of Newton Aycliffe and the surrounding area. It has moved its global rail headquarters to London and opened a European rail research centre there, and for one primary reason: because the United Kingdom is part of the European Union. I worry about future investment in the Hitachi plant if we leave the EU.

What I am saying is not meant to be part of some “Project Fear”, but as the MP for Sedgefield, which includes Newton Aycliffe, I feel that it would be irresponsible of me not to express my deeply held worries about the future of Japanese investment if we leave the EU. Those worries find their source in statements made by the chairman of Hitachi, Mr Nakanishi. In an interview with the Financial Times on 12 October 2013, under the headline “Hitachi president warns UK against leaving the EU”, he said that he did not expect the UK to leave the EU, but that if it did,

“I would have to reconsider how to manage our railway business.”

In an article that he wrote for the Financial Times on 11 May this year, Mr Nakanishi stated:

“Britain is the centre for Hitachi’s two largest overseas infrastructure projects, in rail and new nuclear power. We invested in the country as the best base for access to the entire EU market. For our manufacturing and supplies we depend on skills and parts that come from within the UK and from Europe. Take away its EU membership, and the investment case looks very different.”

Some who want to see Britain leave the EU play mischief with major foreign investment and become cavalier with quotes and facts, picking only those that support the argument they wish to promote. For example, Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of Vote Leave, insinuated at the Treasury Committee’s public hearing on 9 May, through selective quoting, that nothing would change with Hitachi if the UK left the EU. The recent and consistent statements of the chair of Hitachi prove that there would be repercussions for further investment in the UK if we left.

As this speech is not part of a so-called “Project Fear”, I will say that if Britain votes to leave the EU on 23 June, it will not mean that the Hitachi factory in my constituency closes on 24 June. However, I am deeply concerned about its ability to generate more jobs and expand in the long term, and therefore to create economic growth both locally and nationally, if it does not have unfettered access to the EU marketplace. In a recent survey that I undertook of businesses in my constituency, more than 50% of respondents said that leaving the EU would have a negative effect on their investment plans for the future.

[Christian Matheson]

Is my hon. Friend aware that I made exactly the same point at a meeting of the all-party aerospace group about a large employer next to my constituency, Airbus? This is not simply about Hitachi, in his constituency; major manufacturers and their suppliers right across the UK have the same fears.

[Phil Wilson]

That is absolutely right. I made the specific point about Hitachi because it is based in my constituency, but it is fair to say that for a lot of foreign investors, our being part of the EU is key to their future plans.

I am disappointed that some Members are prepared to play fast and loose with the facts. The hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) was recently quoted in the Daily Mail as saying that big businesses

“agree with an open-border immigration policy because it means they don’t, for instance, have to worry too much about us getting local people. They think they can just get a steady supply of unskilled…labour from abroad”.

That is a slur on the good name of good employers such as Hitachi, which built its factory in the north-east because of the local people’s skills and application to their work. Some 95% of Hitachi’s workforce at Newton Aycliffe come from the north-east, and they are skilled and well paid.

Because of its commitment to the local people, Hitachi—along with Gestamp, the major employer in the town, employing 1,300 people—has sponsored a university technical college, built overlooking the Hitachi factory. UTC South Durham will have more than 60 young people passing through its doors once it opens in September, and that number will build up to 600 local teenagers, who will be equipped with the essential skills required for the world of work. That is all possible because of Hitachi, Gestamp and Sunderland University’s belief in local people, but also because we are part of the European Union.

Hitachi has written to its workforce outlining the company’s position on Europe, not to bully but to inform. It is what a responsible employer does. It has made it absolutely clear that the decision on 23 June is one for the British people, but that it would be remiss of it as a responsible employer not to state its position. Some of the text of the email that Hitachi has sent its employees reads:

“Like many other international companies we invested here because of the UK’s strong economic fundamentals and rich access to talent. We are also in the UK in order to have access to the entire EU and European market. In particular for our manufacturing and supplies we depend on skills and parts which come from within the UK and Europe at large.

We can understand that the EU is not perfect but the UK’s departure from the EU would create huge uncertainty for all Hitachi businesses in the UK in terms of economics, trade, skills and talent, and would affect the stability that the company needs for continued investment and long-term growth.

We also believe that it would have negative impact upon the UK economy and carry significant risks for the remainder of the EU. Therefore we believe that a strong and united Europe with the UK in a single, open market offers the best conditions for Europe’s prosperity, and for Hitachi’s business.”

The matter could not be made clearer.

Like a lot of people, I campaigned long and hard to ensure that the Government went ahead with the deal to bring Hitachi to the north-east, because of the jobs and investment that it would bring. I am not prepared to stand idly by and watch that new inward investment—not just Hitachi, but other major investors—be threatened by our leaving the EU, and that is why I will be campaigning for a remain vote on 23 June.

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[Barbara Keeley]

Absolutely. I fear that we will keep coming back to this until the Government realise it is unreasonable to expect these women, who were expecting a pension at 60 but had it taken away from them, to live on nothing. I have constituents trying to live on their savings.

[Christian Matheson]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the Government have made the cynical calculation that most of the women affected will have reached pensionable age come the next general election and that they are hoping the problem will simply go away, even if the injustice does not?

[Barbara Keeley]

They might have made that calculation, but they are wrong, because over the next 10 years, as the changes are made, 2.6 million women will be affected. I think the Government will find themselves with hundreds of thousands of very angry women, as well as their family members, husbands, sisters, children and so on. The numbers ought to make Ministers take this more seriously than they appear to be doing today.

I want to finish the detail because people are interested. One bridge pension was set at around £400 a month. That is better than forcing these women, who have worked all their lives and paid national insurance contributions for 40 years, on to the Work programme, employment and support allowance or jobseeker’s allowance at 62 or 63. It is disgraceful to treat women born in the 1950s that way. And while we are discussing transport and buses, I repeat what someone wrote on social media about the lack of concessionary travel in some parts of the country for people whose state pension age has changed. Why should there be concessionary travel at 60 in London but not in many other parts of the country? That brings further hardship.

I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) mentioned the all-party parliamentary group on WASPI, which I am delighted to say 120 hon. Members signed up to last week. It was formed to provide a cross-party forum in which we can hold the Government to account over the transitional arrangements to compensate the 1950s-born women affected by the changes to the state pension age and campaign on all the other issues around the state pension age. I look forward to helping the group pursue those aims and to making progress to help my constituents. I would be happy to work with Welsh Labour, too, if it is an important issue for it. I will campaign for the hundreds of thousands of 1950s-born women affected by this injustice.

I have raised issues of Government policy adversely affecting 2.6 million women in the UK and 7 million unpaid family carers. There was nothing in the Gracious Speech to help those nearly 10 million people, but I have talked about their issues. It is a pity there were no measures to help them, but we might have an opportunity to do so in the months ahead, when I hope to see extra measures.

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[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

I want briefly to comment on the words of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and I echo the sentiments he expressed about the visit of the President of Colombia. I pay tribute to Members from all parts of the Northern Ireland Assembly who have played a role in the Colombian peace process based on their own experience. Hon. Members in this House can be proud of the role that our colleagues from Northern Ireland have played in making the peace process as successful as it has been so far.

I welcome those parts of the Gracious Speech that we are able to support, particularly those that have been purloined so successfully from the manifesto on which I stood for election just one year ago. I am really pleased that the Government will be proceeding with the infrastructure commission. I am also pleased to welcome the measures in the buses Bill, although I was concerned to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) about the restrictions that the Government seem to be imposing.

The ability to regulate bus services will be extended only to those areas where the Government have decided that there will be an elected Mayor. Perhaps the Minister for Housing and Planning might convey my concerns to the Secretary of State and his fellow Ministers in the Department for Communities and Local Government about the fact that the Government say that they do not have a one-size-fits-all policy but proceed with one anyway. It would seem that they will require Cheshire West and Chester, Cheshire East and Warrington to adopt a mayoral structure in an area that, frankly, is not suitable for it. The requirement comes with a carrot and a stick, and there will be no carrot unless we take on an elected Mayor. That is wrong for the area I represent, and I ask the Minister to bear that point in mind and take it back to his colleagues.

I welcome the moves to improve the infrastructure for electric vehicles. Following a question asked by the hon. Member for Strangford a couple of weeks ago, I made the point that infrastructure includes knowledge infrastructure. Electric vehicles are entirely different from those that use petrol or diesel. I urge Transport Ministers to consider very carefully the proposals of the Institute of the Motor Industry about providing a training and certification programme for automotive engineers so that they are aware of the dangers that electric vehicles pose to those who work in the industry and are properly trained to deal with electric engines.

On transport infrastructure, Her Majesty said that the Government would continue to support the development of the so-called northern powerhouse. I suspect that the northern powerhouse is little more than a sham—a slogan to distract from the fact that the substance is entirely lacking. I congratulate the Government on their sloganising because it has got us all talking about the northern powerhouse, rather than examining its substance. The northern powerhouse has almost become an accepted reality, which displays their mastery of distraction.

London is getting Crossrail and will now get Crossrail 2, as well as another runway. I confess that I do not have a dog in the fight when it comes to where the new runway in the south-east should be, except that I suspect it should be at Heathrow, if only because that option is least far away from the rest of the country. However, I am concerned that infrastructure development is seen merely an as extension of London infrastructure. I have always supported HS2 and I would support HS3, HS4 and HS5, because I believe infrastructure investment should be just that: investment that brings a return in the shape of jobs and prosperity. I have to say that before I became a Member I always wanted HS2 to be built from the north to the south. I fear all we will get is a London to Birmingham fast railway line, which will do little to encourage growth north of Birmingham. If so, we in the north-west of England in particular will become part of a client region of London, feeding off the scraps of London’s economic growth, rather than developing our own.

I was very concerned to hear the Secretary of State for Transport talk about HSBC transferring jobs to Birmingham as though that was something to be proud of. That will not be good for the people in London, but, more importantly, it will detract from the whole point, which is that infrastructure development should generate economic growth of its own, not simply shift growth around or across the country.

As other hon. Members have said, the danger is that the Treasury is threatening to take over the HS2 project and to trim it back so that none of the benefits originally promised will be delivered for the north-west.

[Andrew Gwynne]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

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[Christian Matheson]

I would always give way to my good friend from Denton and Reddish.

[Andrew Gwynne]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. There is some suggestion that, in the trimming back process, the HS2 station at Manchester airport might be dropped. Does he agree that that would be incredibly short-sighted? This is about having a high-speed rail link to the airport running not just from north to south, but—with HS3—from east to west. The airport station ought to be a hub, which would provide new links not just from the north-east right through to Manchester airport, but to Chester and beyond in the other direction.

[Christian Matheson]

What an excellent point. We used to talk about an integrated transport policy with a few local buses and a couple of local railway services. My hon. Friend has identified an integrated transport policy that includes international transport as well, and he made that case very eloquently.

The Secretary of State talks about HS2 having an impact, as I am sure it is, but the danger is that, because of the uncertainty, it will be a negative impact. To some extent, we are seeing that in the north-west, where investment decisions have been delayed until we find out exactly what will be proposed. If the Government are really serious about the northern powerhouse, they should put a stop to the anonymous briefings and the newspaper speculation, and commit to HS2 in a way that benefits the whole of the north, along the lines described by my hon. Friend. I do not want to see HS2 simply as a new line painted on Harry Beck’s London underground map, making the midlands an extension of London. That means making a reality of Sir David Higgins’s vision of a true northern rail hub at Crewe, with at least seven HS2 trains an hour stopping there to provide the great connections to the rest of Cheshire, Warrington and beyond, and a commitment to run some trains direct from HS2 to Chester—of course—and north Wales, some of which could make up those seven trains. We need to make sure that it is not just people living close to the stations who benefit from the £40 billion that the Government will invest in HS2. Local roads and railways must be built that allow my constituents and those of all other right hon. and hon. Members in Cheshire and Warrington—including, of course, the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne)—to take advantage of the new services quickly and easily.

I understand that capacity is a fundamental driver of HS2, but so are reliability and speed. If HS2 above Birmingham is simply designed to link the centres of the major cities —London, Birmingham and Manchester, and perhaps not even Liverpool or Glasgow—it will do more damage than it saves, by sucking investment and economic growth out of areas, such as mine, seen as being on the periphery and preventing them from taking full advantage. They will lose out to the big cities. I warn Ministers that the Government risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by making the false and incorrect predictions of the doomsayers who opposed HS2 come true through their own myopia and the catastrophic mistake of allowing the Treasury to take over the project—not to achieve the careful cost management that we all know has to take place, but to slash and burn on investment in services to Chester and north Wales, such as cutting out the hub at Crewe and the Manchester airport option, as mentioned by my hon. Friend. All those options would generate the returns demanded by that investment. The Chester, west Cheshire and north Wales cross-border economic area is one of the fastest growing in the UK. If the Government want to pull the plug on that, it is easy: just cancel the northern HS2 hub at Crewe.

If I return briefly to the matter of road transport, the Minister will know exactly where I am going. The M56 in my area is desperately in need of an upgrade to deal with the impossible congestion that drivers experience on a daily basis, but the need for investment goes far beyond this. I remain desperately disappointed that no action is planned by the Government before 2020. I remind the Minister that this is a cross-party campaign. My next-door neighbour, the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), is leading the campaign and has support from across the parties because of the importance of the motorway for my area and as a principal artery into north Wales and parts of Merseyside. Unless the Government commit to that work now, they will stifle further economic growth in that area. If I were being cynical, I might predict that the Government will make a promise to upgrade the motorway just before the 2020 election, but such a promise will be taken with the same scepticism as befits any of their promises after the collapse of their £38 billion pledge to upgrade the railways immediately after the 2015 election.

The local authorities and the local enterprise partnership in my area are clear about where investment is needed if their ambitious plans to double the size of our economy are to be delivered, and the Government need to commit to supporting those. Transport infrastructure does not come cheap, and in calling for the electrification of the Crewe to Chester to north Wales line, to link up with a new HS2 hub at Crewe, and an upgrade of the M56, I am calling for cash spending which requires prioritisation. But investment must be considered as just that: investment to generate economic growth. It is not like sticking a pin in a bet on the grand national. My area has proved its ability to grow. The local enterprise partnership has proved its ability to work with local authorities across the political spectrum to deliver that growth and bring in businesses from across the sectors to work together to achieve that growth potential. If the Government are willing to waste £70 million on an unnecessary vanity garden bridge across the Thames in London, surely they can recognise that HS2, as a national project, must benefit the whole of the nation and allow the whole of the nation to grow under its own enterprise. They should not just consider London to be the sole driver of economic growth in the UK. For all the sloganising about a so-called northern powerhouse, without the correct infrastructure in place, it seems that crumbs from London’s table will be all that we can get.