Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Wednesday 18th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill, though in part I wonder why some of it is necessary. I declare interests as president of the National Association of Local Councils, chairman of the Rights of Way Review Committee, a vice-president of the LGA, a landowner and a practising charter surveyor. I will stop there, as otherwise I shall use up all the time available.

Strategic thinking on infrastructure is at least partly a state of mind, although the collective mind of the state, if I may put it thus, may be rather a different issue if the construct of what we know as a silo mentality persists. In part, that needs to be broken down. I, too, regret that there is not rather more detail on some of what we have before us. That ought to be swiftly rectified, as other noble Lords have said, but it means that my comments are of necessity general rather than on the more specific issues that some noble Lords have concentrated on. A strategic focus on infrastructure is of course extremely welcome, but we have this issue with the prolonged timescales involved in public involvement in planning and environmental debate over infrastructure projects.

As an example of how damaging some of these are, noble Lords should look at the A27 through Sussex, once gazetted as the Folkestone to Honiton trunk road. A professional colleague of mine has bought and resold properties along its route on innumerable occasions, as first one compulsory purchase order acquisition and then the abandonment of the scheme and subsequent disposal of the properties acquired have been rolled out, only to be repeated a few years later. Still there are huge bottle-necks and still there are accidents on inadequate sections of road. The prosperity of several south-coast towns is prejudiced by this inertia. If the Bill affords a better way forward—I look forward to seeing the detail and hope it shows a better way forward—then I am all for it.

I was curious about the strategic highways companies, their total ownership by the Secretary of State, their obligations to adhere to guidance and directions of the Secretary of State and their propensity to be fined by the same Secretary of State if they do not adhere to those. This circularity left me a trifle bemused, so I tried it on my wife, who, incidentally, is Austrian. She immediately referred me to the tale recorded by Baron von Münchhausen about how he saved himself from drowning by pulling himself up by his own hair. Joking apart, assuming there will be fines, I would simply ask: to what purposes would this money be put? Is it simply a process of robbing Peter to pay Paul for the sake of demonstrating some near-commercial aspect, or is it something more important than that?

As other noble Lords have said, infrastructure takes many forms and at community level it is not just about access on to road systems to get householders to work or new housing serviced, but it is also about community assets, health and other facilities, amenity space, cycle and footpath routes, which have already been mentioned, multimodal travel options and, of course, freight, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. Of course, it might help if community entitlement also extended to a stake in the infrastructure itself, but we need a better and more holistic grasp of what infrastructure is and how to procure it—on which we seem to perform poorly—not forgetting the impact on work-travel patterns afforded by improving internet and broadband. I am unsure that the Bill’s proposals match this, but I hope the Minister will be able to reassure me. It is so much more than roads, and if Government are thinking that that is so, then I shall be very pleased.

On Part 2 of the Bill, I want to comment on the proliferation of Japanese knotweed. As a frequent traveller on trains south of London, I notice a good deal of this on railway embankments. It may be that Railtrack will claim it was chucked over by householders the bottom of whose gardens adjoin the embankment, but never mind; there seems to be a lot of it about. While we concentrate on the exotic weeds mentioned in, I believe, Schedule 9 to the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, we should not forget our very own home-grown noxious species, ragwort—the nodding yellow heads of which are only now beginning to appear—which is a serious contaminant of grazing land and grass forage.

On planning and land, I would only advocate a fair balance between community, private and national interests in any new arrangements, especially where land is already in some sort of public or amenity use. I hope there will be safeguards built into this.

I cannot help mentioning land registration, as I have a particular interest as chairman of the professional group in the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors that deals with title, land registration and things like that. I regard the consolidation as potentially beneficial, but I am concerned that the driving force behind maintaining the asset that is represented by the local register may be lost once the particular synergy with the normal activity of local authorities is removed and there is no longer any financial benefit to them in trying to assist in that maintenance. I wonder whether this will be replicated in the hands of the Land Registry. Otherwise, having a single registry seems to make a lot of sense.

On the subject of the electronic nature of registries, I ask that the Government pay special attention to the apparent ability that exists to generate fraudulent transfer documents, which are available on the web, and the abuse that can be made of the system thereby. This is absolutely not a criticism of HM Land Registry; it is a criticism, if criticism it be, of the lax protocols that surround electronic transfer, registration and certification, particularly when one does not have somebody one actually knows at the other end of the phone or a letter in hard copy—it is all electronically generated and it can all be falsified. It is a reflection, as far as HMLR is concerned, of the information that it is obliged to use in the land registration process.

On fracking, I will only say this as a Sussex resident: the typical yield decline in the output from a fracking well is phenomenally steep. For all the theoretical reserves that exist, typically about 10% or less may be recoverable—maybe that will improve. I do not believe that aquifers are an issue; they operate much nearer the surface than the shale gas and shale oil reserves. However, at the surface one gets roads, tanks, pipes, vehicle tracks and the vehicles themselves that are all associated with this, even after the initial well drillers have all packed up and gone home. These may be acceptable, but I think we need a better understanding of cost-benefit, and some of that goes for much of the rest of the Bill.