Draft Timber and Timber Products and FLEGT (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 General Committees

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard, and it is very good to see the Minister in his place. I commend him on his very full introduction and I pass my good wishes to his colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), who we look forward to seeing tomorrow to continue discussions.

This all sounds very straightforward, as of course we are all in favour of reducing illegal logging. It is perhaps worth starting with the European Timber Regulations 995/2010, which the UK was at the forefront of helping to create. It says in its introduction:

“Illegal logging is a pervasive problem of major international concern. It poses a significant threat to forests as it contributes to the process of deforestation and forest degradation, which is responsible for about 20 % of global CO₂ emissions, threatens biodiversity, and undermines sustainable forest management and development including the commercial viability of operators acting in accordance with applicable legislation. It also contributes to desertification and soil erosion and can exacerbate extreme weather events and flooding. In addition, it has social, political and economic implications, often undermining progress towards good governance and threatening the livelihood of local forest-dependent communities, and it can be linked to armed conflicts.”

This is a big, important issue, although it may seem at first sight to be a fairly dry one. We also commend the Government for taking further steps to tackle illegal logging abroad by consulting on due diligence on forest risk commodities. Although the Government may be doing well on that, I gently point out that they are not doing quite so well at home, either on meeting the tree planting targets or on environmental protections, which are being decimated by the Environment Bill.

Once again, we are noticing errors and deficiencies in these SIs. I have huge sympathy for those who draft them, because they are very complicated, but it would be useful to know whether the Department is tracking the number of errors that we have to deal with. I should point out that I do not expect the Minister to have all the answers to my questions this afternoon—I quite understand the situation.

I take issue slightly with some of the points about there being no need for consultations because the instrument does not alter existing policy and has no impact on business. We hear those points in a succession—if we track back, the same was said for the previous instrument, which this one amends—and frankly, out in the real world, that seems absolutely laughable. For those involved in the trade, everything to do with this whole area has led to more bureaucracy, more duplication, more complexity and inevitably more cost.

David Hopkins, chief executive of the Timber Trade Federation, told me that he supports the introduction of UK timber regulation:

“However this will increase bureaucracy for members (on top of many other layers of increased bureaucracy). At present, any goods originating from or being imported into the EU are subject to due diligence by the “First placer”, i.e the company that first places the goods on the market. The goods can then be traded freely among the other members of the Single Market.”

He provided an example:

“If hardwood from West Africa is imported to a warehouse in Belgium, the Belgian importer would conduct due diligence for this. That Belgian company could then sell it to a UK importer without the UK importer having to conduct further due diligence. This is because the EUTR sees the whole of Europe as having “one” (or the same) risk profile.

Now, under the UKTR, we will no longer be able to trade freely. This will mean having to conduct due diligence on ALL imports from Europe where currently there is none. Secondly, it will mean treating different countries as having different risk profiles (e.g. rather than seeing Sweden and Poland as both being “part of Europe” we will have to separately evaluate the risks inherent in each. It is another layer of bureaucracy most business could do without! It is also a doubling up of efforts which have already been conducted within the EU and now repeated in the UK on the same goods.”

Minister, please, let us have some real-world analysis of the harm that these changes do; just saying “there is no impact” is not good enough.

Sadly, that is not the end of the harm being done, because the voluntary partnership agreement negotiated by the European Union with tropical countries, particularly in the Congo basin, has been crucial to forest preservation. Again, the Timber Trade Federation has said:

“We are very saddened and angry that the UK will lose its decision making voice within the EU about this important area of climate and forest protection. The UK was a leading advocate and really pioneered this ground-breaking approach. Right now, the UK should be showing leadership, not walking away from the table where decisions are made.”

The changes do not just mean more bureaucracy and more cost, they mean no influence. Will the Minister tell us just how the UK plans to work with those VPAs? Are we to set up parallel agreements? How much will that cost? Will we need duplicate monitoring systems, and again, at what cost? What will we do through the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation to regain lost ground?

The Northern Ireland issue is a detail that the SI tries to address. The Timber Trade Federation described the situation as “an enormous headache”, as Northern Ireland businesses will face having to do due diligence on goods coming in from Great Britain, opening up a potential weak spot for smuggling, and because there will be widespread confusion about goods that used to be marked with the longstanding CE designation will have to be marked UKCA—UK conformity assessed. Who knew that this would be so complicated?

I do not expect the Minister to have all the answers, but the regulations were discussed the other day in the House of Lords, where some questions were raised, so let us try some of those. The Liberal Democrat spokesperson queried whether NI companies could use only monitoring organisations on the approved EU list. The rather elliptical reply from the Minister in the other place was:

“officials are not yet able to provide a forensic answer”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 27 October 2020; Vol. 807, c. 180.]

I love that. I ask, one week on, whether the officials any closer? In fact, a July 2020 note from the European Commissioner throws some light on that issue, and I am grateful to Clotilde Henriot of ClientEarth for drawing my attention to it.

My Labour colleague in the Lords pressed the Minster there on the voluntary partnership agreements, and I echo her questions, including on the key matter of divergence. If the EU makes new or improved agreements, will we mirror them, do we follow them, do we have any influence on them, and what are the follow-on impacts on Northern Ireland? The Minister in the Lords revealed that a further instrument will be introduced in January 2021, relating to the FLEGT scheme in Indonesia. My understanding is that the UK already has a VPA with Indonesia that dates from April 2019. If the regulations need amending because of Brexit, what happens between 1 January and the date that the instrument takes effect?

What of the other VPAs that the EU already has in place with Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ghana, Indonesia, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Vietnam, as well as those that have already been initiated with Guyana and Honduras, and those under negotiation with Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Laos, Malaysia and Thailand? When my colleague queried the impact on Northern Ireland if the UK and EU diverge on VPAs, the Minister in the Lords cheerily admitted:

“There are questions that remain unanswered”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 27 October 2020; Vol. 807, c. 181.]

Frankly, that really is not good enough, some three or four weeks out.

In his opening statement, the Minister gave us some explanation of how some of this might be resolved. Paragraph 7.3 of the explanatory memorandum states:

“In order to ensure unfettered market access between Northern Ireland and GB, through the avoidance of new checks, the definition of the internal market has been retained as the United Kingdom.”

When I read the detail of the instrument, I was not entirely sure how that was put into effect. I have read those lines many times. It seems that the Government are saying that, for those purposes, the GB-NI divide that has been created is somehow wished away and we are treated as one. I am not quite sure how that will be achieved, and although I recognise that the Minister might not have an immediate answer, I would be grateful for a written explanation, not least because the matter is one of the major conundrums that we face, and it cannot just be wished away.

[James Morris]

I thank the shadow Minister for his characteristically detailed contribution. He asked how the UK intends to work with voluntary partnership agreements. I will write to him on that. He also raised a number of issues to do with the Northern Ireland protocol. Again, I will write to him with an explanation of how the instrument operates with the protocol, if that is satisfactory to him.

[Daniel Zeichner]

Of course.

[James Morris]

The instrument would make no change to the existing policy to tackle the trade in illegally harvested timber. The Government’s 25-year environment plan sets out our continued commitment to protecting and restoring the world’s forests and to supporting sustainable agriculture. The instrument would ensure that we have the operable regulations that we need to address that.

As I have outlined, all the changes that the instrument would introduce are technical operability amendments to ensure that we can continue to operate the regulations and protect global forest resources after the end of the transition period. I commend the regulations to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is the underlying principle behind furlough—to enable the labour market to bounce back, with jobs in businesses that were viable before the pandemic being able to recover quickly. It is also part of the three-phase strategy that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has set out. The second phase is to concentrate on skills to create jobs, protect jobs and support jobs, and to enable those workers to come back into the economy and for the economy therefore to recover quicker.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

  The Government will be aware of the significance of the sale of Cambridge-based ARM to American chip maker Nvidia. Will the Government intervene both to secure the headquartering and jobs in Cambridge, but perhaps more significantly, to get an exemption from the American CFIUS—Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States—rules, which give the American Government such leverage? Why on earth would we want to throw away such a bargaining chip in advance of trade negotiations?

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)]

The hon. Gentleman is right to raise ARM, which is obviously a key employer in his constituency. The Government are taking a very close interest in this transaction. It was pleasing to see yesterday that parties close to the transaction said that the headquarters would remain in Cambridge. It is a matter we are engaging very closely on, and I am very happy to engage with him personally on any questions arising from that.

Economic Update

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

It is not just loans; it is loans and grants and tax relief on business rates, as well as deferral of tax payments through time to pay and reimbursement for statutory sick pay. Across the piece, it is a series of different interventions, all of which will be effective at doing one fundamental thing: improving the cash flow in the short term of businesses to help them bridge through what will be a temporary dislocation, so that they can emerge on the other side and we do not lose for the long term that productive capacity and lose those jobs.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

Making announcements is one thing, but, to use the Chancellor’s words, operationalising at speed is quite another, so can he be more precise about the resources available for the civil service and local councils? A simple example—a Canadian nurse phoned my office today so frustrated that she cannot help the NHS because we cannot sort out the equivalent qualifications. It will be the same for many others, particularly Bangladeshi nurses working in the care sector.

[Rishi Sunak]

I am happy to take on board the suggestion from the hon. Gentleman. I will raise it with the Health Secretary, who I know is actively looking at ways to bring extra people into the NHS to help respond to this crisis. There is a range of options and flexibilities we should consider. I will make sure that I raise that one with him as well.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 1st October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

On cancer treatments, I am delighted that survival rates are at the highest they have ever been. On diagnostic treatments, the recent announcement of £200 million to upgrade diagnostic equipment up and down the country will make an enormous difference to early screening and testing. On funding in general, we are in the first year of a record five-year investment in the NHS—£34 billion more promised by this Government.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

10. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Education on raising the per student rate of 16 to 19 funding.

[The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sajid Javid)]

Treasury Ministers regularly engage with Secretaries of State on all aspects of public funding, including 16 to 19 education funding. At the spending round, we chose to invest £400 million more in the sector next year, which will mean that the base rate of funding will rise to £4,188 and be growing at a faster rate than core school funding.

[Daniel Zeichner]

Away from the fantasy figures being peddled in Manchester this week, college heads and principals are struggling to work out whether to continue to raise their class sizes or to restrict subject choice. Will the Chancellor therefore tell Cambridge Regional College and the excellent sixth forms and sixth-form colleges in Cambridge whether they are going to be getting the extra £760 that the Raise the Rate campaign has calculated is necessary or the meagre £188 per pupil per year he is offering?

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman might call these fantasy figures, but this is the biggest increase in funding for 16 to 19-year-olds in a decade, and it has been hugely welcomed by the sector. It includes £212 million of targeted interventions, on the courses that are the most costly to deliver, such as engineering and construction. I would have thought he would have welcomed that.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

10. What assessment the Government have made of the environmental effect of freezing fuel duty since 2010.

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Robert Jenrick)]

The price of fuel has only a marginal effect on how much fuel people purchase. That means that fuel duty freezes have a limited effect on emissions. Fuel costs, however, are a major expenditure for both households and businesses, which is why this Government have chosen to freeze fuel duty for nine successive years.

[Daniel Zeichner]

That is not the view of most people who actually know about these things. This Government have gone from climate emergency to climate complacency in just three weeks. There is 4% extra traffic on the roads because of the scrapping of the fuel duty escalator. What fiscal mechanisms is the Treasury contemplating to deal with climate change?

[Robert Jenrick]

I take it from the hon. Gentleman that he supports increasing fuel duty. He asks who has that opinion. Actually, most economists agree that fuel consumption is highly price-inelastic, because working people do not always have the choice to use public transport or cycle. Not everybody lives in a city like Cambridge, with excellent public transport. We support the working men and women of this country, particularly in towns and rural areas, and we have saved them £1,000 a year on their fuel bills.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

From 2020, all English road tax will be spent on our roads via a dedicated national roads fund—that will be £28.8 billion between 2020 and 2025, including £25.3 billion for strategic roads. We have spent £120 million on the recently opened smart motorway between junctions 23a and 25 of the M1, which will reduce congestion, but we will, of course, continue to take into account the need for connectivity in planning future roads investment in the east midlands.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

The Chancellor says this needs to be balanced against the needs of the Exchequer, but what about the needs of the environment? What effects have we seen during the period of the freeze, with the failure to tackle emissions and with the road transport sector in particular failing compared with others?

[Mr Hammond]

We have an extremely good track record on decarbonising our economy. We have set extremely ambitious targets, and we are ahead of all our significant competitors in delivering them.

ONS Decisions: Student Loans

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

As I have said, the Government no longer mark their own homework on these issues. It is down to the independent OBR to produce that forecast.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

The terms of reference for the Augar review say that

“its recommendations must be consistent with the Government’s fiscal policies to reduce the deficit and have debt falling as a percentage of GDP.”

Is it not absolutely clear that this ONS reclassification reduces the resources available to further and higher education?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I have been very clear that this decision, which is fundamentally an accounting decision, will not affect the outcome of the review.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hammond]

I have heard my hon. Friend’s representations on behalf of self-builders; twice in one sitting is probably a record. I will treat them as representations for the next fiscal event and will look at them accordingly.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

T8. Some 37 million packs of medicines are imported each month into the country from the EU, and people are rightly concerned about security of supply next year. The Government have advised the industry to stockpile. Will the Chancellor tell the House how much the Government are paying for that?

[Mr Hammond]

That is a matter for the Department of Health and Social Care, and I know that the Health Secretary is in discussion with the pharmaceutical industry. We are supporting the Department with allocations from the £3.5 billion I have allocated for Brexit preparations. We will ensure that adequate supplies of medicines are stockpiled if there is any risk of disruption at the channel ports.

A14 Cambridge-Huntingdon Upgrade

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to consider in the House the very important issue of the problems caused by the diversions implemented during the A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon upgrade. This really matters to my constituents. One has contacted me today to say they have moved house because of the upset, and another emailed me this morning promising to tune in to this debate from where they are hiking in the Arctic circle; I hope it does not disappoint.

This road upgrade is important and long overdue. It is managed by Highways England, which I was pleased to meet some weeks ago when I went on site to discuss these issues. Anyone driving along the A14 at the moment, albeit often in a queue, cannot fail to be impressed by the scale of the works. Given that regular users have often been in queues over many years, and that there have been too many accidents and delays, most are agreed that the works are essential, and that, despite the current misery being caused, there will be substantial benefits. Let me also say at the outset that at my meeting with Highways England I was impressed by the knowledge and dedication of the many people involved; it is a huge and complicated operation, and everyone wants it to go well.

The purpose of this debate, however, is to highlight the unintended consequences for many who are affected during the construction, and to question whether enough is being done to mitigate those consequences. In my view, my constituents are paying a very heavy price in terms of their current quality of life to possibly improve the lives of others in the future. That is not fair, and I trust the Minister will hear that message loud and clear, and offer not just sympathy and kind words—which I am sure she will—but real action to stop the misery currently being endured.

The existing A14 trunk road between Cambridge and Huntingdon is well known for congestion and delays, and around 85,000 vehicles use this stretch of the A14 every day, many more than the road was originally designed to take. Around a quarter of this traffic comprises heavy goods vehicles, well above the national average for this type of road, and this adds to the need for an upgrade. It is a key east-west freight route—freight which many of us believe would be better off on the railways, but that is a debate for another day.

I will start by running through the history of this upgrade. The A14 has a chequered history over the Cambridge to Huntingdon section, with plans to upgrade going through various announcements, cancellations and re-announcements. I pay tribute to John Bridge of the Cambridgeshire chambers of commerce, who has devoted years of his life to campaigning for these improvements; indeed, there probably should be a bridge named after him. And I will now give an abridged account of what has happened.

Proposals were first made to widen the A14 between Bar Hill and Huntingdon in the late 1980s and were reviewed in 1998 as part of the Cambridge to Huntingdon multi-modal study, or CHUMMS. For many years, CHUMMS became a part of many of our lives. In 2005, the Highways Agency, as it then was, unveiled plans for widening the road from Fen Drayton to Fen Ditton, with the route unveiled in March 2007. This was originally planned to be completed and in use by 2016—what a wonderful thought—and the cost at that time was between £690 million and £1.2 billion, a far cry from the £2 billion-plus that we are now having to pay. Around this time, the Labour Government of the day also approved the guided bus route, designed to relieve some of the pressure on the road. It was controversial, not least because it was only guided until it met city-centre congestion;. It is the longest guided busway in the world but has cost much more than anticipated, although it has taken some of the strain and is now very heavily used.

When the coalition Government came to power in 2010, the scheme was duly cancelled by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Administration. After much lobbying, we then had an interesting diversion when local councils were urged to make contributions from their declining funds, which the ever-helpful Liberal Democrat administration in Cambridge declined to do. David Cameron then famously told BBC “Look East”—I think he was speaking to Andrew Sinclair at the time—that the scheme would not be built unless the A14 became a toll road, but, like a number of things David Cameron said, it did not turn out quite as planned, as his suggestion provoked a furious backlash across eastern England.

There was further prevarication, before the scheme was officially cancelled—until a new version was developed the following year. In November 2012, the scheme was reported to be back in action, and it was mentioned in the June 2013 spending review. In May 2016, the then Transport Secretary, the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin), approved it, and it is now due for completion in March 2021, by which time the country might well look rather different.

Those were the funding sagas that we dealt with. At the same time, various planning objections were lodged, which added further delays, but the scheme is clearly essential, and the Huntingdon flyover is now in a serious state of disrepair, so it was clear that something had to be done. However, this means that it is now much more expensive than it would have been in 2010, and many more years of misery have been endured since then. It is clearly a relief that the scheme is finally under way, but it is unacceptable that people in Cambridge are being made to suffer because of problems with the diversion, particularly through this long hot summer. Of course, many people outside the city are also suffering, particularly in the surrounding villages, but I will focus my remarks on my constituents who have made their experiences and feelings very clear.

This upgrade, although necessary, is unrelenting, with Highways England telling me that overnight road closures will continue five nights a week until September. Highways England’s official overnight diversion strategy adds 30 or more miles to the journeys of those driving lorries across the country, taking them along a strategic diversion route that includes the M11, the A505 and the A11 back to junction 36 on the A14, so it is unsurprising that some drivers choose to short-cut through Cambridge, along Kings Hedges Road, Milton Road, Victoria Road, Newmarket Road, Histon Road and Huntingdon Road.

However, this short-cut is unacceptable as it disrupts the lives of my constituents—to whom I am grateful for making me aware of the situation—particularly tireless local campaigners such as Doug Whyte and Elaine Gristwood, who recently presented me with a petition from local residents who are affected. This involves virtually every house along the route, and I in turn presented the petition to Highways England. They and residents on other routes have explained the effects of the diversions on our communities. Heavy goods vehicles are driving through small streets that are profoundly unsuited to heavy loads, such as Victoria Road, and it cannot be right that my constituents cannot sleep with their windows open owing to the noise, that children have had trouble sleeping through the racket on the nights before their exams, or that constituents have reported health problems, including one who got in touch to say that the increased fumes along Kings Hedges Road had had health implications for her husband, leading to asthma attacks. I also want to pay tribute to local Labour county councillors Jocelynne Scutt and Claire Richards, who have worked tirelessly with residents to try to find solutions to this problem.

I want to quote a few pieces of correspondence that I have received from constituents. One woman has told me:

“Adequate amounts of sleep are impossible with lorries thundering past every minute, and this is severely affecting my quality of life, mood, and effectiveness at work. My whole flat shakes every time an HGV goes past. It’s like a miniature earthquake, and I’m worried the building is not designed to deal with this kind of strain.”

Another has told me:

“Before the A14 closures I had laid down a brand new driveway for my property; this included laying down concrete for it. Due to the HGVs going down the road it has created cracks in my brand new driveway, and with the lorries going down the road frequently it will just get worse. So on top of not being able to have a peaceful night sleep, the house shaking causing things to break in the house, the outside of our house is also cracking.”

It is clear that the situation cannot go on. We need stronger disincentives for the HGVs that ignore the official diversion and hurtle through the city’s streets. Of course, I have considerable sympathy for the drivers who have a maximum number of hours that they can drive before legally needing breaks, and I understand the time pressures on them and their employers and the extra costs that long diversions bring, but the improvements in future journey times and fewer delays will help those hauliers. They will benefit in a way that my currently suffering constituents will not. Many of my constituents were initially forgiving of the disruption, accepting that it was part of the A14 upgrade, which they appreciate is vital.

--- Later in debate ---

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Mims Davies.)

[Daniel Zeichner]

A lack of information from Highways England about when and for how long the disruptions would last created a great sense of frustration for them. Information communication has improved a little throughout the process, but it could have been got right from the outset.

When the works began, the original problem was that the signage for the diversion was widely felt to be inadequate, and it was argued that drivers were failing to divert because they just did not understand the signs. The signage has been improved, but it should have been better from the beginning. Now that it has improved, it seems that too many drivers are just ignoring it, and those who choose to ignore these signs should face consequences.

I have so far not been particularly critical of those involved in the project, but I have to question why, months after it started, we have only now been promised data on how effective or not the diversions are. Anecdotally, I am told that residents are counting over 100 HGVs an hour in the middle of the night, and Doug Whyte contacted me this morning to say that he was being kept awake last night by heavy trucks passing every few minutes. Why should residents be doing the counting? On a £2 billion project, will the Minister tell me why Highways England is not collecting that data and making it available? I am told by the county council that an HGV counter has been installed on one road but not others, yet we still do not have that data—despite repeated requests. Only with that data can we tell whether improved signage has or has not had any impact.

Frankly, Highways England should have been able to predict the problems that we are seeing and should have established base data before it started and then monitored it, and I hope the Minister will explain why it did not do that. If she cannot, I will offer her a cynical view that I am hearing: no one cares unless local people kick up enough fuss to force others into action. Will the Minister please guarantee counters on all the affected roads, and will she promise to publish the data on a weekly basis? Does she have any of that data this afternoon? How many HGVs does she expect to be using Kings Hedges Road, Milton Road, Huntingdon Road, Victoria Road and other roads this evening? I hope she has an answer, because expecting Doug and Elaine to stay up all night counting trucks is really not good enough.

What else could be done? The county council has considered temporary traffic orders, but considering them is not enough. It needs to get on and do it to at least give some of these areas relief. What of enforcement and the role of the police? We know, sadly, that traffic policing has virtually disappeared under this Government, and that is backed up by the fact that Highways England offered to pay for more policing for the diversion. Even with that offer, however, it seems that there simply are not enough officers to make it a possibility. Even if we could get the enforcement in place, are the fines sufficient to act as a disincentive to those taking shortcuts? Perhaps we need to name and shame the hauliers who consistently break the rules. There is a whole range of things that could be done but, as it sometimes seems with this Government, there is so little action.

Beyond all that, there is the wider issue of the complexity of local governance and the mix of authorities with responsibility for the project. Highways England is responsible for national roads and motorways, the Conservative-run Cambridgeshire County Council is responsible for local roads, and the Conservative Mayor and combined authority have strategic transport powers. My sense is that those at the combined authority do not think it has anything to do with them, and the county council does not have the resources necessary to give the project the attention it deserves.

Even more dispiriting is Highways England’s continuing failure to communicate properly. BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, in particular Dotty McLeod on the breakfast show, has kept residents informed and tried to explain what is happening, but Highways England consistently refuses to appear on the programme to respond. I pay tribute to journalists such as Jozef Hall and his colleagues for trying to pursue Highways England, but we have a problem when we have to resort to BBC journalists driving out in the middle of the night to find out what is going on because those responsible are refusing to answer questions.

The Minister will doubtless say that Highways England is an independent agency. Well, I say it was this Government who created that independence, and they did not absolve themselves of responsibility by so doing. It is public money, and there should be public accountability. I hope we can have an assurance from the Minister that, in future, Highways England will make itself available to answer questions on local media, just as local politicians have to.

My conclusion is that these problems could be resolved if there were the will and the resource to do it. I ask the Minister to intervene to end the misery. The suffering of the past few months cannot be undone, but it does not have to be extended. This project is in itself expensive, and, as I have said, it is more expensive now than it would have been if it had been completed years earlier, but for a fraction of the overall amount being spent the harm being done to my constituents could be mitigated. Signage, monitoring, TTOs, policing and proper governance are all key, and they should have been priorities from the start, but resourcing has made it all much more of a struggle.

I would like the Minister to commit now to properly resourcing a framework that means HGVs will follow the proper diversions. Drivers who do not, should be named, shamed and fined to protect the people of Cambridge who are currently left unprotected. I have been in conversation with Highways England for months, and it does not seem able to solve this problem. I have written to thousands of constituents to explain the situation and to ask for their views and experiences.

It is fundamentally unfair that our city’s roads will suffer damage and, more importantly, that the physical and mental health of my constituents will be affected owing to the Government’s neglecting to create the frameworks necessary to make sure that people follow the rules. I trust that the Minister will commit to sorting this out and that lessons will be learned from this sorry saga so that similar mistakes are not made on other schemes in the future.

Concessionary Bus Passes

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 8th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered concessionary bus passes.

It is a pleasure to serve when you are in the Chair, Ms Ryan. During my three years in Parliament, it has been noticeable that although most of our fellow citizens use buses, we rarely get to discuss bus issues in the House. I am delighted to see in the Chamber my good and hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), Chair of the Select Committee on Transport, who I am sure will be putting that right in the coming months and years. Today, I shall focus mainly on the concessionary fares scheme and highlight its value and how it could be extended, but I shall also make a few observations about the problems that arise when running such a scheme in parts of the country with unregulated bus systems, and draw out possible solutions.

The national concessionary fares scheme has been a huge success. It has really changed the way older people live their lives, by increasing their freedom and, in many cases, reducing loneliness and isolation. As I think hon. Members will be aware, the bus pass in England provides free bus travel for older and disabled people during off-peak times—from 9.30 am onwards. Ironically, should anyone have chosen to use their concessionary fares pass to get here this morning, they would have been late. I can see that some of my colleagues set out much earlier—not that I am suggesting they would qualify for a bus pass. I am very pleased that so many people have made such an effort to be here at what is quite an early hour for Parliament on its return from recess.

The age of eligibility for the concessionary fares scheme has become slightly flexible. If the eligible age had remained what it was when the scheme was first announced, I might almost have qualified by now, but it seems to be slipping into the distance; I hope one day to catch it up. I think it is now 66. I hope that, in the future, many more people will be able to benefit from the scheme.

The trigger for calling this debate was the 10-year anniversary of the scheme. I congratulate the National Pensioners Convention, which made a big effort to celebrate it, including by sending birthday cards to Downing Street; I joined members to go and hand those in. I have to say that I was hoping there might be slightly more enthusiasm from the Government for celebrating the anniversary. We did have a discussion at Transport questions, and the Minister, I am delighted to say, had removed the threat of ongoing review, but I was hoping for something slightly more celebratory—a bit more Jürgen Klopp, a bit more dancing up and down, celebrating the success of the bus scheme.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. He is a very long-standing supporter of buses. Will he also congratulate the TUC Midlands pensioners’ network? Its members marked the 10th anniversary of the concessionary bus pass by touring the midlands using their passes. My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that, when they came to Nottingham and we were talking to residents in Market Square, the overwhelming number of people did not avoid us; they came and spoke to us, and they expressed their great joy and made celebratory remarks about the bus pass for older people and disabled people, because they know what a lifeline it has been for so many people. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Daniel Zeichner]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. She is very prescient, because the TUC campaign was in the next paragraph of my speech; she has pre-empted it. She is right. Those of us who have done market square campaigning will know that we are not always a magnet for people to come and join us and enthuse, but I find that whenever we speak to older people, they are enthusiastic. I echo my hon. Friend’s congratulations to not only the east midlands TUC but Richard Worrall, who, when the scheme was initiated, set off on a tour of the country and was able to demonstrate that, using his bus pass, he could get round the whole country, which was very exciting. I am told that he is going to do that again, and certainly if he comes through Cambridgeshire I shall be very pleased to join him, although I shall be paying the extortionate fares that we suffer in rural Cambridgeshire—should we be lucky enough to find a bus. I say that because the enthusiasm to which I have referred is tempered by the fact that, in far too many areas, the Government seem to be managing decline rather than celebrating new routes. I will say a little about how that might be addressed, but first I would like to go back to the history of this scheme.

As I look around the Chamber, I see that some of us are old enough to remember that in the ’80s and ’90s pensioner campaigning was central to everything we did. I remember that, as a parliamentary candidate, I was summoned to many vibrant meetings—the pensioners’ organisations had a long list of demands at the time. That was because they compared, strangely enough, our situation in the UK with that in many other European countries and found that our European neighbours often enjoyed a whole series of things that pensioners in our country did not. One success of the post-1997 Labour Government was that they addressed pensioner poverty. I am thinking of measures such as free eye tests, the winter fuel payment and so on, and the bus pass was of course a key part of that.

However, there was not a particularly smooth path to that. We started with quite a panoply of schemes. Some places, such as London, had long had better schemes. Some of the urban areas—I have to say that they were almost always Labour-run areas—had been much more generous in the past. However, in the shires, it was much more of a battle. A kind of halfway house was introduced back in the Transport Act 2000, which gave pensioners half-price fares. That led to quite a lot of even more vexed campaigning.

I remember going to a Labour policy forum in 2004 with colleagues from adjoining counties in the rural east of England—I particularly remember the then leader of Norfolk County Council, Celia Cameron, and Bryony Rudkin from Suffolk. We sat with the then Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling—this was long before he realised he was to become Chancellor of the Exchequer—and explained to him why we thought that a concessionary fares scheme of this type would be not only equitable and fair but hugely popular. I remember the look on Alistair’s face: he said, “Do you know how much that would cost?” That was actually quite a good question because, as I shall explain in a minute, the question of costs has never been properly tied down. His point, of course, was that it would be quite a costly commitment. We went away, having established the idea in principle, but with no great hope that it would necessarily be adopted, so it was with huge joy that we greeted the development a year later. I am not suggesting that it was just we who achieved this; it was a wide range of campaigners, but in the 2005 Labour manifesto a full scheme was suggested, and it was finally implemented in 2006.

The issue of funding is important because, right from the beginning, it has proved to be complicated and difficult. When I was a parliamentary candidate, I spent many a happy hour trying to work out, with my local county councillors and district councillors, who was paying for what and how much it was really costing, and, frankly, coming to the conclusion that probably no one was entirely sure.

We are told that, overall, this scheme now costs £1.17 billion per annum. Not surprisingly, the cost has increased since the scheme was introduced. We are told that, in 2013-14, 9.73 million concessionary travel passes were issued across the country; that puts the average cost at £120 per person. When the scheme was first introduced, the Government provided an extra £350 million for 2006-07 through the formula grant system to fund the cost to local authorities as they then saw it. Between 2008 and 2011, the Department for Transport provided a special grant, totalling just over £650 million, to local authorities to pay for the statutory concession.

Since 2011, however, it is the formula grant that funds the bus pass; money is no longer ring-fenced. Of course, it is a familiar sleight of hand by central Government to apparently put money into the local government grant and tell local government that it has to do this. As the years go by, it becomes less and less clear what the money is for. There is a strong suspicion that it is a sleight of hand, and particularly when councils are being so heavily squeezed, it is asking a lot of them.

Therefore, my first question to the Minister is whether she would like to have a word with the Treasury about looking again at providing proper, ring-fenced funding for the scheme to local authorities. It is not entirely clear to me that the current system of local government finance, particularly with the move away from central Government funding and, supposedly, to business rates retention, actually provides a good, sustainable model for supporting a scheme such as this.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Surely a proper cost-benefit analysis ought to be part of that assessment. In many rural areas, the benefit is that people in smaller, local towns can access services. Most significantly, the benefit is to the health budget, by keeping so many of our pensioners active and engaged. There are lots of studies now on the impact of loneliness on older people. This scheme helps to get people out and about, and maintains their health for much longer.

[Daniel Zeichner]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to the social and environmental benefits in a minute. This partly shows us how complicated it is to assess the long-term benefits.

Returning to the relationship between central Government and local government, local authorities were charged with coming up with a reimbursement system that left the operator no better or worse off, but they are in a difficult place, and I will come on to the reimbursement system in a minute. The Local Government Association estimates the cost to local authorities at around £760 million a year, with a funding shortfall of £200 million. I suspect that that pressure will only get worse.

The operators are not keen on the system at all. I frequently hear complaints. It is difficult to prove what it costs to carry passengers for free, in a way that observes that reimbursement rule. Putting some extra people on half-empty buses does not necessarily cost more. If there are too many extra people, however, extra services are required.

I understand that the prime task of the bus operators—the big five and many smaller operators—is to return a profit to their shareholders. That is right and proper; that is what they do. They will inevitably claim that this costs rather a lot. In the early days—this was my experience in Cambridgeshire—the bus operators did quite well, because the reimbursement cost they extracted from the county council was rather high. Over time that seems to have settled. As has been said in questions to Ministers, the number of appeals has settled down, which suggests that there is a kind of settlement in all this. I think there is a wider question, however, of how and whether the reimbursement system works.

There is a comparison to be made between London, which has a regulated system, and the rest of the country. Thanks to the Bus Services Act 2017, we hope that some of the new mayoral authorities will adopt franchising. I hope my own in Cambridgeshire does. In London, where you have gross cost franchising, it is much simpler for Transport for London to make decisions about the public good. It decides the fares and the frequency, and then it pays the operator to deliver the service. In a way, the operator has much less to worry about, provided it does not drive up usage and extra costs too far. For London, which groups pay and which do not, and how much is made up by the fare box and how much is raised in others ways, are political choices.

In the rest of the country, it is much less clear. It could be suggested that operators have a perverse incentive to put up fares, because if they know that many of their passengers will be concessionary fare holders, they will be reimbursed for that. We will see whether that gets any response from the operators. The choice over discounts and whether young people should qualify for similar fare schemes is essentially market driven; it is not a choice around social need or the social good. There is a huge opportunity, if we shift to franchising, to move to a much clearer and more efficient model. It may reduce operators’ profits, but if it provides lower fares and space for social choices for the social good, it is worth them paying that price.

I pay tribute to the work being done by the Transport for Quality of Life team, including Lynn Sloman and Ian Taylor, who have begun to look at European systems where, effectively, transport is provided for free across an urban area—it is predominately urban areas at the moment. That is not a novel or unprecedented idea, because many people take the view that public transport—like health, education, policing, parks and museums—is an essential public service that contributes to the fabric of local life. The organisation’s work—often commissioned by my trade union, Unite—shows that this is already happening in 100 towns and cities worldwide, including more than 30 in the United States and 20 in France. Dunkirk, with a population of 200,000, will apparently become fare-free in September. The largest city in the world to have made its public transport free is Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, with a population of 440,000. Free transport was introduced to residents in 2013. It has cost the city €12 million, but it believes that that has been offset by a €14 million increase in municipal revenues, as many more people have moved there, increasing the tax base.

That links to some of the work being done by my colleagues on the Transport Committee about mobility as a service. We are looking at a whole new range of ways of getting around cities. My vision is what I see when I visit an airport. Some airports are like small cities. There are travellators, lifts, shuttle metros and shuttle buses. The noticeable thing is that we do not pay to get on each of them, because it is in the interests of that community to get people where they want to go quickly and efficiently. I argue that is in the interest of all of us, in all our cities and smaller towns, to ensure that people can get around quickly and efficiently.

That is my vision for the future, but to return to the present, extending franchising beyond the mayoralty areas would allow local authorities much more control over services in their areas. It would put them in a much stronger position to maintain stability in funding the national concessionary travel bus scheme. The additional flexibility could also be extended to the community transport sector. That is sometimes a controversial issue, but it is being raised by people in the sector. If we are looking for a flexible mix of transport solutions, particularly in rural areas, I think it should be considered.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar) has already raised the social issues involved. Very good work has been done on that by Claire Haigh at Greener Journeys. She demonstrated, in research done a few years ago, that each pound spent on a bus pass generates at least £2.87 in benefits to bus pass users and the wider economy.

[Lilian Greenwood]

Like my hon. Friend, I am very familiar with “Bus2020: The Case for the Bus Pass”, produced by Greener Journeys. I noted that in responding to the Government’s decision to confirm the bus pass, Claire Haigh produced an updated figure. Greener Journeys’ research has now shown that every pound spent on a bus pass delivers at least £3.79 in wider benefits for society. That updates the case made in 2014, when Greener Journeys first published that research.

[Daniel Zeichner]

That shows why my hon. Friend is Chair of the Transport Committee—I should keep up. That is an even bigger benefit. I know it is always difficult for Government when such figures are put forward, but in straitened times, understanding the wider cost-benefits is one of the challenges. How many of us have sat on councils where we have talked about trying to pool budgets and make things work more efficiently? It is a challenge, but one worth pursuing.

As we have heard, there are also savings for social services. The social benefit is intangible, but some interesting recent research by Transport Focus has shown that the social benefit of the bus—people talking to one another as opposed to taking separate taxi journeys—has a real value. We must not underestimate these social benefits. The bus absolutely contributes to the wider social good.

[Lilian Greenwood]

My hon. Friend is being generous with his time. Does he agree that the value of the bus is not only in its social benefits, but in the opportunities for the Government to realise some of their other policy goals, such as tackling poor air quality and congestion in our cities? Does he share my concern that the Government’s figures on congestion and traffic rises indicate that by 2040 there will be a 55% rise in traffic and an 86% rise in congestion? That is why it is in all our interests for the Government to adequately support bus travel.

[Daniel Zeichner]

Once again, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. The environmental benefits are really important. I was pleased to see the Minister announce at the UK bus summit the retrofitting proposals, which I was happy to see in the Labour party manifesto last year. It is always good to see the Government adopt such things, and I will have some more suggestions for the Minister in a minute. Alongside that proposal are the very good hydrogen buses that are being developed. I suspect that other Members, like me, have been happy to go and see them. All those things add to my point that the bus is one of the important ways forward in improving the quality of life in our cities, towns and villages.

One extremely good way of promoting buses is by looking at the younger generation, who we are reading about this morning.

[John Spellar]

Just before my hon. Friend moves on, I want to make a point that may lead on to the next part of his speech. Does he share my concern about the Resolution Foundation’s report today that calls for increased taxes and charges on pensioners? It once again raises the concern that many pensioners have that their use of or access to bus passes will be rationed or restricted. I hope he would say that that certainly should not happen, and perhaps give the Minister an opportunity to make it clear on behalf of the Government that they will definitely not be taking any action to change the availability of bus passes for pensioners.

[Daniel Zeichner]

My right hon. Friend is an experienced and skilled operator, and I am sure the Minister will have heard his challenge, which echoed the challenge I laid down at Transport questions the other day. Older generations may have done better—as I indicated, only 20 years ago pensioner poverty was a very real and terrible thing, and because of policy changes it is only recently that people have been less likely to be poor when they are older—but we have to get the balance between generations right. We do not do that by punishing another generation; we do that by finding the resources from other places.

Turning to younger people, who now need to benefit, I want to reiterate something about the scheme in general. Claire Walters, the chief executive of Bus Users UK, recently said:

“Far more people rely on bus services than trains in this country. They are as vital to many people’s lives as gas, electricity and water”.

For many young people, particularly those in rural counties such as mine, getting to college or work is a real challenge. We are not talking about home-school transport today, but the Government would do well to consider that at some point, because there are rumblings in the shires, as they may have noticed last Thursday. Part of the challenge for young people is the cost of travel, including home-school transport.

As my right hon. Friend has just mentioned, the Resolution Foundation report showed the immense squeeze on the younger generation. They have experienced the tightest squeeze on household spending we have known since 2000, and they now consume 15% less than older working-age people on items other than housing. As we know all too well, home ownership is now out of sight for many people who are working, particularly in cities like mine. At the other end of the spectrum, those under 25 face significant restrictions on the amount of benefits they can claim.

I was absolutely delighted by the announcement by Front-Bench hon. Friends a few weeks ago that in future Labour would provide free bus travel in some parts of the country to those under 25. That would reduce the barriers to accessing work and education that so many young people face. The proposal could benefit up to 13 million young people, helping them save up to £1,000 a year. My hon. Friends have suggested that money ring-fenced from vehicle excise duty could be used. In addition to my earlier argument about franchising, with much greater control from local authorities there could well be extra headroom within local funds to help fund such an extension of the scheme.

I can anticipate the reaction from the bus operators. My local Stagecoach bus manager, with whom I have had many detailed conversations about bus franchising over the years, is not shy in coming forward to warn me of the perils of such an approach. I say gently to the operators that while their books remain closed and their finances opaque, it is not unreasonable for those of us interested in the wider public good to wonder whether more savings could not be made. We are told it is an unregulated market, but it is a funny kind of free market when public money accounts for more than 40% of bus operator revenues through local authority contracts, the bus service operators grant, reimbursement for trips made under the concessionary passholders scheme and grants. We therefore have a responsibility to ask whether we are making best use of that public money.

There is a lot of public money going into the bus system. Can we make it work better? I welcome the announcement that the concessionary fare scheme is no longer under review, but as I intimated earlier, I would like a slightly warmer endorsement of the underlying principles and a true enthusiasm for universally available mass public transport systems. Let’s hear it for the bus! Where older people have led the way, let us open the door for young people too. As we do not know when the next general election is coming—it could be a little while yet—will the Minister consider meeting me and the shadow Minister responsible for buses to discuss adopting yet another of Labour’s excellent bus policies? Young people would be as happy with their new bus pass as millions of older citizens have been with theirs over the last decade.

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Zeichner]

I thank all hon. Members for the positive and constructive tone of the debate. I commend the Minister for her enthusiasm for the national concessionary fares scheme, which I hope will take it out of the political arena in future. For many older people, it has been a cause for concern but, if I understand what she is saying, we no longer need to have any concern about it.

A couple of points came out of the debate, such as universalism and means testing, as raised by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). It is fair to say that that debate ran through the Labour Government years. I think it has shifted in favour of universalism, and I hope it continues to, for all the reasons that hon. Members mentioned, such as bringing society together. There is an old adage that services for the poor produce poor services, but if they are universal services, they will be better services. That case has been particularly well made in terms of transport.

In the wise words of the Chair of the Transport Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), the concern is the declining availability of buses in too many areas. Having a bus pass without a bus is no use to anybody. In some of my wider reflections about how we could make better use of the public money that is spent, I was trying to suggest how to reverse what has seemed to many of us to be a sad decline. We all want my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (John Grogan) to enjoy the view from the front of his bus, but I suspect that if many more young people were on that bus, whether they were sitting at the front or the back, there would be more chance of having it. I commend Labour’s policies to the Minister and I suspect, over time, that we may well see progress.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered concessionary bus passes.