Transport and Local Infrastructure
John Healey Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
What an extraordinary waste of time! I counted 42 announcements in the Queen’s Speech and only four had not been announced before yesterday. This is a Queen’s Speech that risks being a waste of the Queen’s time, the people’s time and Parliament’s time. I cannot recall in 19 years in this House seeing a Queen’s Speech debate in which the speeches from the Government Back Benches numbered two and ran out before we got a third of the way into the debate, and those Benches were entirely empty for the rest of the debate.
Headline measures in legislation for this year are little more than a middle manager’s task list for the next month: more control over budgets for prison governors; stop radical preachers from taking jobs in elderly care homes; longer school days; more NHS charging for non-EU citizens; money for school sport from a levy on fizzy drinks. I ask you, Mr Deputy Speaker! This is the “So what?” Queen’s Speech—minimal, managerial, marking time; minor policy changes hugely overblown and hugely over-briefed to the Minister.
What was not a waste of time was the speech from the shadow Transport Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), and many of the speeches made this afternoon by hon. Members on both sides. My hon. Friend warned the Secretary of State for Transport, who is again not in his place on the Treasury Bench, about the gap between what this Government do and what this Government say. She welcomed the buses Bill, which has received wide support in the House this afternoon, including from the hon. Member for Bath (Ben Howlett), my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—who also referred to this as the sci-fi Queen’s Speech.
My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) also talked about how valuable the buses Bill is, and I think the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (William Wragg), who is no longer here, might have said that, too. Although they welcomed the Bill, my hon. Friends the Member for Nottingham South and for Denton and Reddish both questioned why it was only for areas with elected mayors. We want other mayors to get the same powers in the same way as the Bill goes through this House.
My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South took the Government to task for the lack of response to the Law Commission’s report and the lack of a taxi licensing Bill. We want the system to be tightened up so that drivers who are rightly and properly rejected for a licence in their own area cannot sidestep the bar by getting a licence in another area. Above all, my hon. Friend took the Secretary of State to task for the continuing delay regarding any decision on airport expansion, particularly on the runway at Heathrow.
My hon. Friend was strongly backed by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), with the authority that she brings as the Chair of the Transport Committee, by the hon. Members for Bath, for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) and for Strangford, and by my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), who said that the big absence from the Queen’s Speech was any announcement on airports and on Heathrow. He described such an announcement as long overdue and rightly reminded the Government of all the groundwork done by the Labour Government—a White Paper on aviation in 2003 and the decision in 2008 on the expansion of Heathrow, but nothing since.
My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse went on to talk about housing and the damage that the Housing and Planning Act 2016, which has just reached the statute book, will bring—
John Healey
Let me finish my comments on my hon. Friend’s speech, then I will give way to him.
My hon. Friend went on to speak about leasehold reform. He is one of the champions of leasehold reform in the House. I was glad to hear that the Minister for Housing and Planning is now taking an interest. For too long, under Governments of both parties, leasehold reform has been put in the “too difficult to do” box. To the extent that the Minister is willing to act on leasehold reform, we are willing to support him where we can.
Jim Fitzpatrick
Because of time constraints, I was not able to point out our belief that the Government’s housing record is not very good. Notwithstanding the claim that they have a better house building record than we had when we were in power, they are taking credit for things that we paid for and put in the planning process before they even came to office.
John Healey
It will not surprise my hon. Friend to know that I will come on to that. He is right. We sometimes hear the Government say that they have built more social homes than we did, but 90% of the social homes built by this Government were commissioned by the Labour Government and largely funded by the Labour Government. I should know—I was the Minister who did it.
My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) made a strong case for lower tolls on the Humber bridge. Existing tolls, she said, were a barrier not just to work and to trade, but to leisure. I am pleased to see the Secretary of State for Transport on the Front Bench. My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby asked whether he would be prepared to meet her and other MPs from the area to discuss how the barriers that transport creates—especially barriers to leisure for young and older people, as well as to their work and trade—could be overcome. The Secretary of State is nodding, which is a good sign. I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend that that meeting will go ahead shortly.
One thing that my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish always brings to debate is passion and principle. I love the way he speaks. He rightly said that intentions were well and good, but it is on actions that people will judge this Government. It is fine to talk of social justice, increased life chances and reducing inequality, but we look to the actions for proof that the Government mean what they say and do as they say. As my hon. Friend said, when we look at the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance, the introduction of the bedroom tax, and the cutting of benefit support to disabled people and to people working hard on low incomes, all the signs from the past six years point in the opposite direction.
My hon. Friend described this Queen’s Speech as a missed opportunity. I thought he made an interesting argument, which he could perhaps take up with the Procedure Committee, about whether, as one of the consistent systematic checks that this House applies to any new legislation, we could assess its impact on national health and wellbeing.
Over the years that I have known her there has been no more consistent, forceful or better champion of older people than my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley). She gave the House the extraordinary statistic that one in three carers now has to wait six months to get an assessment of their needs, never mind get those needs met. As she rightly said, the £4.6 billion cuts to adult social care since 2010 are a big part of that story, and there is nothing in this Queen’s Speech to reassure people concerned about this that the essential funding is in place. She also noted that there is no pensions Bill to deal with the problems of the 2.6 million older women who have been hit so hard by the recent pension changes.
The hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin), who has left the Chamber, argued that it might be helpful to adopt the Scottish model—or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South pointed out, the London model—for concessionary travel.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) rightly reminded the House that business demands better infrastructure. A city as big as Bradford, as rich in business history and business innovation, as it now is, is being badly let down by the quality of the investment and transport infrastructure to support it. As she said, grand rhetoric is what we get from Government while real change, real investment and real improvement falls so far short of that, and people in her city, businesses and residents alike, will find little comfort in the Queen’s Speech announcements.
I liked the argument that my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) made when he reminded the House and Ministers that we require intellectual infrastructure as well as hard building and capital projects. He urged a training and certification programme for, for instance, engineers involved in the development of electric vehicles and in the electric infrastructure to support those vehicles. He expressed a fear shared by me and many colleagues in Yorkshire and Humber that HS2 will simply mean faster rail journeys between London and Birmingham, and the north-west will be left out. The Secretary of State said nothing to reassure the House about the plans or promises on HS2 being delivered in full.
The Secretary of State talked about UK infrastructure and, with a flourish, picked two dates, he said, at random—1997 and 2010. In 2010, Labour’s last year in government, public sector net investment—or infrastructure investment from Government—was 3.4% of GDP. One year later, in the first year of the previous Parliament, after the Chancellor made his cuts, it was down to 2.8%. By the end of that Parliament, it was 1.9% of GDP. This year, it is 1.9%. By the end of this Parliament, it will be 1.5%. That is the reality between the great rhetoric that my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South talked about and the actions, investment and long-term commitments we see from this Government. Housing investment—part of the picture—was slashed by 60% in 2010, the first year of the previous Government. In the same year, roads investment was slashed by £4 billion. The renewables obligation—Labour’s renewables obligation, which was creating the funding to invest in green energy—was removed entirely. That is the reality of what happens when the Government do, rather than talk about, infrastructure.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) spoke about why this sort of investment is so important—why it is more than simply figures and argy-bargy in this House. He talked about Hitachi in his constituency, and the huge number of jobs and a big boost to growth in that region because of the investment in our rail system and in the rolling stock required to upgrade it.
It is that sort of impact, on all parts of the country, that makes infrastructure investment more than simply a matter of political and policy debate. It has a real impact when we get it right in areas all across the country. Instead of that investment in Britain’s future, the Chancellor and Conservative Ministers have, from 2010 onwards, cut investment that would secure our place in the world, stronger long-term growth and the future welfare of our citizens.
The Transport Secretary told us at the beginning of the debate—I have checked this—that yesterday’s Queen’s Speech was “all about building a stronger, more resilient, more modern economy”. I have to say, however, that after six years of failure, it is clear that the Government are doing no such thing. It is clear that the Chancellor did not fix our economic foundations after the global crash. Any right wing, hard-line Finance Minister can cut public spending, but he is dodging the really tough decisions that he himself promised to take in 2010.
Rather than helping British businesses to sell to the world, our UK trade gap was a record £96 billion in the red last year, which is the biggest ever deficit since records began in 1948. Rather than reforming the finance sector and rebuilding our production base, the number of manufacturing jobs in this country is still almost 10% below that before the global crisis and crash. Rather than rebalancing the economy away from borrowing, debt and household consumption, it is now forecast that household debt will top pre-crash levels and reach 160% of income by the end of this Parliament.
The six years of failure on the economy will be unaffected by many of the measures in the Queen’s Speech. There have also been six years of failure on housing. After 2 million more homes were built and 1 million more households became homeowners under Labour, we have seen failure on all fronts since 2010. When this Queen’s Speech needed direction on housing and planning, we got more of the same.
The effects of six years of failure include 200,000 fewer homeowners in this country. A third of a million fewer under-35s—young people—are able to own their own home than when the Prime Minister took over in 2010. The number of families accepted as homeless has risen by a third in the past six years. Rough sleeping has doubled and is up by a third in the past year alone. Last year, as my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse said, fewer affordable homes were built than at any time in more than two decades, and the housing benefit bill rose by £2 billion in real terms over the course of the last Parliament.
My hon. Friend the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee took the Housing and Planning Minister to task over his target of 1 million homes. He made the strong argument—this was echoed by the hon. Member for Strangford—that social housing, new social housing and affordable housing to rent as well as to buy must be part of the picture. The hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown)—he is not in the Chamber, so I will not mention him again—made a similar point.
Yesterday the sovereign said in the other place:
“My Government will support aspiration and promote home ownership through its commitment to build a million new homes.”
The Housing and Planning Minister sometimes plays fast and loose with the figures. It is not possible to house people in planning permissions or to live in a start. It is building new homes that counts, and if he is to build 1 million new homes in this Parliament, he will have to do a great deal better than what we have seen over the past six years.
There were fewer new homes built in the last Parliament than under any peacetime Government since the 1920s. Even in the latest full year, 2015, the number of new homes built was still far below where it needs to be—a total of just 143,000. By the way, that is still 24% below the peak during Labour’s 13 years in office. Because growth in new house building has been so sluggish under this Government—astonishingly, it has been only 2% on average since 2010—if they do not improve that run rate, they will not hit their target until 2033.
Some of the best policies are bigger than party politics and capable of commanding a broad consensus, such as Bank of England independence, the national planning Act for major infrastructure projects and the localisation of council housing finance. Under the neighbourhood planning and infrastructure Bill, there is a welcome commitment to put the National Infrastructure Commission on a statutory footing. Like the commission itself, that was a recommendation made in Labour’s Armitt review in the previous Parliament, so we are pleased that the Government have taken it up. We look forward to seeing what further compulsory purchase powers the Government introduce in that Bill. Labour’s Lyons review in the previous Parliament recommended updating legislation on compulsory purchase orders to streamline and simplify the relevant powers and to enable CPOs to be secured at closer to existing use value. I hope that those suggestions will be in the Bill, because they will be among the tests that we use in considering it.
We will, however, oppose the privatisation of the public Land Registry, which will undermine the trust of homeowners, mortgage lenders and solicitors, and put at risk the essential neutrality, quality and transparency that the Land Registry offers. It will be a gift to tax evaders and avoiders. I remind the House that the Land Registry returned a profit of £100 million to the taxpayer in 2012-13 and has delivered a surplus to the taxpayer and the Treasury in 19 of the past 20 years. It is a public asset that makes money for the public purse, and we should keep it that way.
The deeper truth about this Queen’s Speech is a Conservative party riven over Europe and too divided to prepare a serious legislative programme that even tries to get to grips with the country’s problems. It is a Queen’s Speech for a quiet life in No. 10 Downing Street. It confirms a Prime Minister past his sell-by date. As the former Work and Pensions Secretary said when he walked out of the Government, policies are
“distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest.”
This is a Government who worry more about political message than policy substance, and who are more concerned to fix headlines than the housing crisis, the elderly care crisis, the crisis in wages for working people, or the crisis of low investment, productivity, skills and exports. Never mind one nation; this is a Government and a Queen’s Speech that are failing the nation.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
John Healey Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban) in his last speech to the House. Like you, Madam Deputy Speaker, I faced him through the long hours of many long Finance Bills when he was on the shadow Treasury Front Bench. His reflective and loyal speech this afternoon was characteristic of the way he has served his party and Government. It is a shame he is not on the Front Bench this afternoon, because perhaps then he would not be leaving the House come Dissolution.
However, the hon. Gentleman has a problem, because, as the Leader of the Opposition said, this is a Budget that cannot be believed. I shall pick just two things that the Chancellor said during his Budget statement. He said that living standards were higher than when they entered office and that our economy was fundamentally stronger than it was five years ago. The gap has never been greater between their rhetoric and the everyday reality of people’s lives. I want to pursue two arguments that expose some of the rhetoric we heard from the Chancellor and some of the reasons why their long-term economic plan is failing and why the structural and cyclical weakness of our economy remains five years after they entered office.
There are two principal arguments. First, the Government’s economic policy directly choked off the recovery under way at the last election in May 2010, leading to the slowest economic recovery from recession in this country for 100 years. Secondly, the economic recovery is unbalanced, unequal and unsustainable. The structural weaknesses are still there, despite the rhetoric from the Chancellor—the rabbits coming out of the hat—and the underlying failures of the long-term economic plan are unchanged by this Budget.
Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)
I am listening carefully to the right hon. Gentleman, as are many Members opposite. Would he at least acknowledge that running a deficit of more than 10% was unsustainable? It might have fuelled some growth in the short term, but in the long term running a deficit in excess of 10% was not sustainable, and something had to be done about it.
John Healey
There are not many Members opposite, as the hon. Gentleman says. [Interruption.] He will remember, however, that after 10 years of the last Labour Government, before the global financial crisis and recession hit, borrowing and debt were lower than when we entered office. We have a deficit to deal with because of how the Government intervened to pull the country through that deep recession, to keep people in their homes and jobs and to keep firms in business. Of course there is a deficit, and of course it needs to be dealt with. The difference between the parties is that we will deal with it in a more balanced way. There is a choice. We can do it with tax rises that are fair, spending cuts and efficiencies. We will do what we need to do in a more balanced way.
Mr Redwood
Is it not the case that the most significant change after 2008 was the plan, which Labour backed and which the coalition continued with for its first two years, of taking the RBS balance sheet down from £2.2 trillion to £1.5 trillion? Was that not what provided the mighty shock to the British economy? It was something that Labour wanted to do.
John Healey
The intervention in the collapsed and failing banking system was a necessary step that the last Labour Government took with support from others, and most of the RBS and other bank intervention is dealt with differently in the national accounts. I would have thought that the right hon. Gentleman would have realised that.
John Healey
My hon. Friend characteristically anticipates one of the points I was going to make. He will know, because he will have seen the papers published alongside the Budget, that those papers confirm that over this Parliament public sector capital investment has fallen by 44%. His point is spot on.
I want to turn to some other facts. When the Government took office, the economy was growing quarter on quarter at a 4% annualised rate. The combination of policies introduced in the emergency Budget in 2010, which the Chancellor reminded us of, meant that by the end of 2010 growth was zero and that over the years 2011 to 2014 the annual rate was just 1.7%, not the 2.4% we were told we would get when he made his Budget statement. They choked off growth because of the policies and cuts they introduced. This has been the slowest recovery from a recession in this country in 100 years.
On public finances, I remind the Government Front-Bench team of that 2010 Budget speech. The Chancellor claimed that
“fear about the sustainability of sovereign debt is the greatest risk to the recovery”.—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 166.]
National debt then stood at 62% of GDP. Today’s figures confirm that it will be about 80% next year. On the deficit, the Chancellor issued his binding formal mandate in 2010 that the books
“should be in balance in the final year of the five-year forecast period, which is 2015-16”.—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 167.]
The failure here is astonishing. Far from balance, the Budget figures tell us that we will be in deficit by £75.3 billion. The point of balance is not next year; it is at least three years later than that. It is a comprehensive failure of long-term fiscal and economic planning.
What has gone wrong? The OBR says that the severe cuts and the significant VAT hike—let us not forget that—resulted in a loss to GDP of 2% in those first two years. Other estimates put the figure at 3% to 5%, at least, over the Parliament. The most productive spending in a downturn is capital spending. That is why organisations from the International Monetary Fund to the OECD and the OBR itself have all said that reducing investment spending has the most serious effect on negative economic growth, yet that is exactly what the Chancellor did, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr Love) has just said. Over the Parliament, public capital investment has almost halved. When the Chancellor was faced with the choice either to spend money on, for example, short-term income tax cuts for millionaires or to invest in the infrastructure this country needs for the long-term future, he chose the tax cuts for the millionaires.
The unprecedented wage squeeze has come partly from the cuts in services, tax credits and benefits. It has come, too, because of the inherently weak demand for labour in this country. Before a Government Member jumps to their feet and asks, “What about the headline unemployment rate?” I would say that it is good that it is down, but the weak demand for labour has meant that people cannot get the hours or the wages to meet the bills that they are struggling to pay. Weak growth has been reflected in real declining wages. The area of South Yorkshire that I represent has seen the average full-time worker take home £2,500 less than in 2010.
Back in 2010, the Chancellor said he had a long-term economic plan. He said in that Budget statement:
“Our policy is to raise from the ruins of an economy built on debt a new, balanced economy, where we save, invest and export”.—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 167.]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Claire Perry)
Hear, hear!
John Healey
The Minister says, “Hear, hear”, so let me tell her that household debts increased over this Parliament and are set to rocket over the next five years. Ministers have halved public investment over this Parliament, despite a pledge to protect it; and on exports, the balance of payments gap at the end of 2014 stood at 6% of GDP—the biggest since records began in 1955.
At the same time, our country has grown further apart. After 10 years with Labour’s regional development agencies in England, when the poorer English regions were able to achieve almost the same rate of gross value added growth as the richest regions, the gap has grown every year since 2010. The income of the UK’s richest region is now over 10 times that of the poorest, and real output per head has shrunk since 2010 in the north-west, Yorkshire and the east of England.
Let me remind my Front-Bench team of what the Chancellor tried to claim. He tried to claim that the north had grown faster than the south and he was talking about last year, but if we talk about the five-year period of the Parliament, the north has grown by 6% on his watch, while the south has grown by 10%. This is a Budget that cannot be believed.
Finally, at the heart of the Government’s failure is the dogma of pursuing a small state. We have seen less investment despite the consequences for productivity and growth; cuts to benefits and tax credits to fund millionaires’ tax cuts, despite the consequences for living standards; no serious export or industrial strategy, despite the consequences for our balance of payments; and no serious plan for balanced regional growth, despite the consequences for the inequalities in our country.
This Budget provides a warning to people about what is to come in the next Parliament. This Budget tells us that if the Conservative party is re-elected on 7 May, we will have a continuation of an economy and country for the few from a Government of the few.
Mr Redwood
I have no fixation on inflation, but neither do I think that runaway inflation creates prosperity. It is necessary to manage inflation, and to manage growth, and to have an economy that can expand. I am very pleased that this Budget helps to create and preserve the expansion that is now under way in the United Kingdom. I think it is good news that it contains measures to promote more home ownership and saving, and I think it is good news that it contains measures that will help enterprise and business to promote more jobs, because what we want are more jobs and better-paid jobs.
I was pleased to hear the Chancellor say that most jobs now are full time, and that many are highly skilled. That is what the country needs: more skills, more opportunity, and the chance for individuals to train, work and educate themselves well so that they can get better-paid jobs. That is what we all want in the House. It is sometimes suggested that the Conservatives do not want it, and I find that regrettable. We want it as much as anyone else. We want more jobs, better-paid jobs, and more skilled jobs. We know that we have to earn our money, and we want to create opportunities for people to earn theirs.
The Budget contains some sensible judgments on how much the country can afford in increased public spending. I think that £60 billion is a perfectly good judgment of the amount of extra public spending that will be possible by the end of the next Parliament. It also contains a judgment on how we can finally get rid of the deficit and start to cut the debt. I find it a bit odd that Labour has been telling us that too much was cut in this Parliament, and is now saying that the deficit is too high. I have news for Labour. You have to cut if you want to lower a deficit; it does not just magic away. The question is, how do you get that judgment right?
John Healey
It is possible to deal with a deficit simply by cutting, which is largely what the right hon. Gentleman’s party has done, but it is also possible to deal with it in a more balanced way by cutting where cutting is needed, raising revenue where it is right to do so, and ensuring that there is enough growth to bring in the revenue. That was the fundamental problem with the policies that existed at the beginning of the current Parliament.
Mr Redwood
The right hon. Gentleman has just described the policy of this Government. They put some taxes up, they went for growth—which is now coming through, and is helping to tackle the deficit problem—and they reduced the over-optimistic spending plans of the outgoing Government.
We have been told that it was wrong to cut capital spending. Well, I seem to recall that the only bit of spending that the Labour Government cut in detail before leaving office was the capital budget. They made massive cuts in capital. The Chancellor has restored some of those cuts, but because of the parlous state of the overall finances, he could not restore all of them.
The Budget presents a good package. There is good news on home ownership, good news on employment and good news on growth. A great many myths need to be put back into the dark room, because they are not going to con the British public.
Mr Newmark
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. In introducing things such as the increased investment allowance—it was £25,000 and went up to £250,000—the Government have done a lot to help to turbo-charge investment. I shall come to the rate of investment and investment growth a little later in my speech.
The important thing was that we dealt with the deficit up front and brought it down by more than 50%. It is now trailing at around 5%. Do we have further to go? Absolutely, but bringing it down from 10.2% was very important.
The important thing about bringing down the deficit and dealing with the structural deficit was bringing back market confidence. Doing so allowed us to maintain low interest rates. Confidence means low interest rates. It is not just a matter of the Bank of England’s confidence in setting them—there is a worldwide market out there. Low interest rates mean low mortgage rates and low business rates for small businesses. All those things were important in helping to create growth in the UK.
John Healey
When the hon. Gentleman intervened during my speech, I made it clear that the deficit was caused after the global financial crisis by the Government stepping in to help the country through. That is what Governments can do. I said clearly that that caused the deficit and we had to deal with it. Any Government would have done so. What counts is how they deal with it. Will he remind us what Labour’s plan in the 2010 election was, as set out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), the Chancellor at the time? Our plan would have reduced the deficit faster and further than the Chancellor has managed in the past five years.
Mr Newmark
I do not want to use the expression ceteris paribus—all things being equal—but the Chancellor at that time was probably right. Unfortunately, he too would have faced a euro crisis, and things would have been very different from what he originally projected, just as things were different for my right hon. Friend the Chancellor when he made his original prediction.
Local Bus Services
John Healey Excerpts(10 years ago)
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John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
It is good to follow the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), but I have to tell him that people in our part of South Yorkshire simply will not recognise the picture he draws with selective facts and figures—and it is the same with the picture portrayed by the Secretary of State about bus services in our part of the world and most parts of the country.
Local buses are the main form of public transport in Rotherham. We have no tram, and we have two train stations in a borough with nearly 250,000 people. In Barnsley, we have no tram and a small handful of small stations to serve a borough with 220,000 people. Many people rely on buses—to get to work, to college, to hospitals, to shops and to see family and friends. Many older and disabled people are totally dependent on buses to get out and about and to avoid isolation. It is, of course, the poorest who require and need bus services most.
One of the things I am most proud of during 13 years of the Labour Government is playing a big part in the Treasury in the introduction of free bus travel for all pensioners. We did that in 2006-07, and last year it was worth £37 million to pensioners across South Yorkshire, although that was £3 million less than in the last year of the last Labour Government.
Graham Stringer
My right hon. Friend should be congratulated on introducing free bus passes and concessionary fares. Does he agree with me that the boasting we have heard from Government Members about the lack of decline in bus passengers over the last four or five years is mainly down to the introduction of the free pass?
John Healey
Indeed. My hon. Friend is something of an expert on transport matters. I know he immediately saw through —he told me as the Secretary of State was providing these figures—the bogus and partial picture that was painted by those statistics. Buses matter a great deal in areas such as ours. When routes are cut or changed, or services are cut and bus users complain and sometimes campaign to see the services restored.
It is always a battle in this deregulated system with the bus companies saying on the one hand that “this service is not commercially profitable”, with the local authorities or passenger transport authorities rightly saying on the other hand, “the money has been cut; we simply cannot afford to subsidise or support these services.” Too often, those with no other way of getting around—the youngest, the poorest, the oldest—lose out. I say “too often”, but not “always”.
I want to recognise how our regional director of Stagecoach, Paul Lynch, was ready to meet me to review some, although not all, of the decisions he took on the South Yorkshire routes. He was ready to change the route of the 229 in Wath and to supplement it with a rerunning of the 222 in response to a petition of 150 local residents and the campaigning of local Councillors Atkin and Gosling. He was willing to recognise that changes to the 109 and 108 were required for Rawmarsh and Manor Farm, because people were unable to get to the shops, school, the doctor’s or whatever. That service now runs again on its original route, not least because of the campaigning efforts of Christine Eyre and the Manor Farm tenants and residents association group, as well as those of Councillors Jane and Neil Hamilton.
I want to mention the regional director of FirstGroup, Mr Ben Gilligan who was good enough to meet me at the end of September about the removal of the regular service required between Ravenfield and Wickersley. He has promised to look at the case for restoring that route by flexing the other routes and timetables in the area. I urge him to be as good as his word and do just that. Residents in Ravenfield and I look forward to hearing from him shortly.
Public transport is in part a public service and it does require some public support and subsidy. My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) said that support for bus services had been cut by 17% in the last three years in real terms. No wonder 1,300 routes have gone as a result. The House of Commons Library gave me figures that showed that, in the last year we have figures for, the Government were prepared to give bus services only £810 million of support in total, not including concessionary travel—and £500 million of that goes to London. To put that into perspective, Mr Deputy Speaker, and you follow these things closely, this year the cost of the tax cut for top-rate taxpayers is £3.3 billion, over four times more than what the Government are prepared to spend to support bus services in England.
I pay tribute to Rotherham council, the bus companies and the passenger transport authority for their efforts to put together a quality partnership in Rotherham, but that cannot guarantee services, reward bus companies that run good services, penalise those that do not, bring in a simple, single through-ticket system such as the Oyster card in our area, or ensure that buses are fully integrated with other forms of public transport. I know the bus companies’ case and counter-argument, but I say to them and to the House that services in south Yorkshire are not good enough at present. That is why I back, for Rotherham and Barnsley, the plan that my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield has announced to legislate for city regions such as South Yorkshire and county regions elsewhere to have greater control over local bus services, and powers to determine routes, to set fares and to integrate public transport properly. The motion says that London-style powers and a London-style service are required elsewhere. That is exactly what we need in South Yorkshire.