Infrastructure Bill [Lords]

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for those few brief words of introduction to the Bill, and I look forward to debating its contents with him. If he will forgive me, I will not quote Disraeli quite so extensively as he did. I might not even quote “Alice in Wonderland” quite so extensively, although he might like to think about his own party’s performance as I remind him of another quote from the book, in which a character says that when he uses a word,

“it means just what I choose it to mean”.

That seems to typify the Government’s flip-flopping on infrastructure up to now.

The Minister has had criticism for Opposition Members today. Interestingly, he has also had some veiled criticism for his predecessors from those on the Government Benches, which surprised many of us. Perhaps that shows that infrastructure policy was not really in shape until he came along. Also, I could not help but notice that he kept referring to “my Department”. The Secretary of State for Transport, who is sitting alongside him, might need to be a bit careful about who is after his job.

This is a complex and wide-ranging Bill. It contains extensive provisions covering a whole range of Departments, which is why I am pleased to be joined on the Opposition Front Bench today by the shadow Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Michael Dugher), as well as by my hon. Friends the Members for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Tom Greatrex) and for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods). The Library briefing on the Bill describes it as a “portmanteau” Bill, and we are pleased to welcome the Minister and his portmanteau to the House today.

The Bill comes nowhere near to meeting the challenges faced by transport, energy and housing, despite all that the Minister has said today. There is cross-party consensus on the importance of infrastructure to our economy. Economic and population growth and the need to decarbonise our economy will all add further strain to an infrastructure that is already creaking. There seem to be different views about that. I imagine that, while we might disagree on a number of aspects of the Bill, hon. Members on both sides of the House will have raised an eyebrow on hearing the leader of UKIP explaining that the problems with infrastructure were all down to immigration, but I guess that that is a matter for him.

The Minister said that the Bill proved the Government’s commitment to investing in infrastructure. We have heard a lot of talk from the Government on infrastructure over the past week or so. We have heard the re-announcement of a £15 billion road programme—two thirds of which, surprisingly, has been earmarked for coalition Members’ constituencies—yet this is happening after the Government scrapped £4 billion-worth of strategic roads investment on entering office. We have also heard another garden city announcement, yet Ministers have presided over the lowest peacetime level of house building since the 1920s. And we have had yet another infrastructure plan update, promising yet more schemes, when the reality is that less that a fifth of the projects are in construction and infrastructure output is down more than 10% since 2010.

Let me give the House an example of one of the supposed achievements of the plan that the Government have published. The Dartford crossing is a major bottleneck, with serious congestion. One of the achievements of the Government’s infrastructure plan is—wait for it!—to narrow down three options for improving one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the country to two.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

Since the hon. Gentleman is critical of this Government for narrowing down the options to two, will he advise the House which option he would choose?

[Richard Burden]

I have a feeling that in this debate Conservative hon. Member after Conservative hon. Member will stand up and ask me about this scheme or that scheme, and will say, “Come on. Will Labour go ahead with this or not?” We are not in the business of cutting long-term investment in our roads infrastructure in the way that the present Government cut long-term investment in infrastructure. But if we are looking through individual scheme after individual scheme, we are going to scrutinise them. We are going to see if they are all they are cracked up to be.

Let me give other examples. In many cases the Government’s figures do not add up. In some announcements there is £3.5 billion-worth of investment for 20 new schemes; in other announcements, that becomes £3.4 billion. In 2013 we read that £8.5 billion had been set aside for 26 schemes; that now appears to be £6 billion. In some announcements there has been £15.1 billion for 2015 to 2021, but in answer to a parliamentary question that I asked the Minister last week, the figure was £15.2 billion, and it is still unclear whether this is entirely Government money or whether the Department for Transport is still waiting for third-party contributions to make up the total. I shall not be able to give answers on individual schemes because as far as I can tell, those individual schemes do not add up, but we will scrutinise them. We will ask the difficult questions, because those are the questions that the public expect us to ask.