Britain’s Railways
Debate between Grant Shapps and Baroness Keeley(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
We are honoured to be surrounded by successful former train Ministers in the House today, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend not only for having been a great train Minister but for knowing exactly how many passengers—1.8 billion—travelled in the last, most successful ever year for our railways, which was 2019, before covid. He will be pleased to hear that the entirety of the White Paper is written on the premise of putting the passenger first and working out what they need, which is not very complicated: trains that run on time, are comfortable—warm in winter, cooled in the summer—and have wi-fi available. And no more of those uncomfortable cardboard ironing board seats either! People want to find it easy and comfortable to get on, with tickets that are easily available and contactless, as other hon. Friends have mentioned. That is the way that we will take the numbers back to 1.8 billion and beyond.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
Some 50% of rail stations in Greater Manchester are inaccessible to people with a disability, and I hope that the Transport Secretary agrees that that is unacceptable. On the face of it, these plans are going to do little to improve accessibility, so can he confirm that he will be giving our regional mayor, Andy Burnham, the funding and powers he needs to control and improve stations, as they do in London?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Grant Shapps and Baroness Keeley(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. These powers have existed in London forever. They prevent, for example, box junctions from being blocked up, along with a number of other things. As he rightly says, we intend to extend the powers throughout the country and I will report back to the House on that shortly.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady is absolutely right about the impact on aviation, which has been enormous, but so has the support, and that is often not recognised. If I may detail it, there has been £1.8 billion of support through the Bank of England’s covid corporate financing facility, which easyJet and others have used; £283 million has come from the coronavirus job retention scheme; and 56,400 staff have been furloughed, with the salaries that have been paid worth well north of £1 billion. When those figures are added up, there has been an enormous amount of support for the sector. We are working with it every day and the best thing we can do is to open up the routes, which is dependent on the progress of the virus and the progress of technology to help us beat the virus.
Local Government Ombudsman (Amendment) Bill
Debate between Grant Shapps and Baroness Keeley
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend should be under no illusion that we are a fundamentally deregulatory coalition Government who are keen to sweep away burdens. We want to allow people to break free, particularly in their own communities, in order to put on street parties or to change their communities through things such as neighbourhood plans. The direct answer is that we will implement the recommendations in a variety of ways, including through the Localism Bill, which has been referred to. The Bill takes forward many of Lord Young’s ideas and concepts, including through neighbourhood plans, which will allow neighbourhoods to come together and describe the kind of place that they want to be. That cannot necessarily be blocked by the town hall. Suddenly, we will find that there is the flexibility to do many more things.
Barbara Keeley
I would not want this discussion to pass without saying something in defence of my local council. Hon. Members are very unfortunate in their experiences of local councils. Salford city council runs a lot of large community events, so it must be very different. It runs proms in the park, Christmas ice skating and many firework displays. We are obviously not as risk averse in my neck of the woods as those other places. I have found that the factor that does get in the way of events such as triathlons and charity fundraising runs, which I am very interested in, is clashes with TV football schedules, and I would be grateful if the Minister commented on that. If Manchester United are scheduled to be on TV at 3 pm, one can forget about a fun run. What is a council meant to do when the police say, “You can’t have your run and this football match”?
Grant Shapps
Again, the police and the local authority have a legitimate role in, for example, crowd management and in ensuring that events go off smoothly. The hon. Lady mentioned her authority, so I will take the liberty of mentioning mine. Welwyn Hatfield council generally does a superb job on this sort of thing. It allows fun runs and each year there is a festival called Kaleidoscope, which now attracts upwards of 10,000 people. It started as a small, grass-roots, neighbourhood festival and has grown into something much larger. I pay tribute to the many local authorities that get this right. Of course, they do have to make judgments, along with the police and other authorities, about the safety of each individual event.
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend again. His intervention demonstrates that there is quite a bit more work to be done before we all feel that sufficient procedures are in place and that the ombudsman would not overstep into a role of judgment on health and safety grounds, which I think would be taking things too far.
In the few minutes remaining, I wish to address some of the other comments that have been made. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South was interested to discover how we thought the Bill fitted with the idea of localism. I know that she has gained good experience—or at least experience—from the Localism Bill Committee, and that she has examined the matter carefully. We believe that localism can flourish only if we put a framework in place. If we say to people, “Just go and do whatever you want”, but there are no rules, no framework and no guidance—nothing in place at all, not even a skeleton—that is not a route to localism. The natural order would regain control and local authorities and central Government would revert to type.
We need to put limitations in place, and the Bill is in that spirit and is intended to do exactly that. It is intended to put in place a degree of control, with the possibility that citizens will have power over their local authorities rather than the other way around.
Barbara Keeley
I am fascinated to hear that the Minister thinks we should have frameworks. Perhaps he would like to tell me—it might be slightly out of context, but he has brought us on to this point—why we do not have a national planning policy framework when we do have legislation that will bring in neighbourhood plans. If neighbourhood plans can be linked to the Localism Bill, that will be important, but that Bill has almost reached Report without having a framework in it.
Grant Shapps
I do not want to try your patience by taking us too far off the subject of the local government ombudsman, Mr Deputy Speaker, but the simple answer is that we will have a national planning framework. It will be consulted on by the summer, and it will be put in place as precisely what Members are arguing for this afternoon—a framework within which everyone can operate fairly.
There is certainly a lot that is good about the Bill that we are discussing today. The intentions behind it are certainly in the right direction, but my concern is that we have not yet gone far enough for it. We have not had the opportunity to work out how the local government ombudsman would make the decisions set out in the Bill, particularly if it had a quasi-adjudicatory role, which I think it almost certainly would.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Grant Shapps and Baroness Keeley(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
As I have said from the Dispatch Box before, nobody says that this is going to be easy. The deficit—the size of the debt—left to the country by Labour makes these reductions inevitable. However, Liverpool is latterly doing something about it; the problem is that it did not plan for this far enough in advance. Had it done so, it would have been in the same position as Trafford and other local authorities that are carrying out these reductions without some of the pain now experienced in Liverpool.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
I used to be a councillor in Trafford, and I think the Minister should reflect on the fact that the deprivation there is nothing like it is in Liverpool, Manchester and Salford—there is no comparison. The areas I have mentioned have higher levels of poverty and unemployment and much greater inequalities in health than other areas. Despite that, Ministers have chosen to inflict the deepest, the most swingeing and front-loaded cuts on those deprived areas. Will the Minister comment on the letters from 131 Labour council leaders and 88 Liberal Democrat leaders, many from deprived areas, who are united in their anger at the unfairness of the cuts and at the constant political attacks on them by Ministers, which we have heard again today?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady refers to Trafford, where she used to be a councillor, but that council receives much less money from the Government than do other councils, including Liverpool. The idea that they are in the same position is untrue. In addition, the hon. Lady should know that we have protected the level of reduction for some of the most needy councils by having banded floors, which means far smaller reductions in the most needy areas, while the transition grant means that no area can be affected by more than 8.8%. A range of other measures, including an increase in the deprivation index from 73% to 83%, also apply.