Business and Planning Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, this is my first opportunity in the House to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, and I do so very warmly. He comes to us with a wealth of experience from local government, which is in short supply, and he is therefore very well placed to serve.

I support strongly most of what is in the Bill, subject only to the concerns that have rightly been raised about anti-social behaviour, where it looks as if the Government might need to give more reserved powers to local authorities. The problem is not what is in the Bill. I would like, in the short time I have, to raise three issues with the Minister about early action needed in this crisis in respect of matters not in the Bill.

The first is schools. Amazingly, we are opening pubs nationwide before we open schools. The headline in today’s Evening Standard says it all:

“We are leaving a generation of children behind”.


The key requirement now is to ensure that all schools are open for all pupils in September and, where head teachers and governing bodies wish it, they should also have the power to be open for a week or two before the start of term, particularly for years 11 and 13, where pupils face public examinations and may have missed much, if not all, of this term. Legislation giving head teachers and governors the explicit power to open early before September and to require pupil attendance would, I believe, be highly appropriate in the crisis.

Secondly, there is public transport. It is still the case, as I know from using the Jubilee line every morning, that virtually no one is on public transport at the moment. I can assure the House that at 7.30 am this morning at Baker Street, coming into Westminster, I was the only person on the platform and there was only one other person in my carriage. To make public transport safe and to make it appear to be safe, particularly in London and in cities with major commuter flows, we need to go beyond the current mask provisions to introduce staggered working and trading times for the start and end of the working day and give Transport for London and other public authorities the power to enforce them so that people can be reassured that social distancing can be maintained. The problem at the moment is not that there are too many people on public transport but that most people who need to use it will not go near it because they have a perception that it is unsafe. Until we can break that, we will not be able to get back into a virtuous circle.

Thirdly, we need to give a big boost to walking and cycling to work. There are a lot of non-legislative ways that this can be promoted. I set out a dozen measures in an article about this in the Evening Standard last Thursday. I shall highlight two changes where legislation could be helpful: first, to give local authorities the ability to revoke on-street parking on major roads to convert the space into cycle routes and, secondly, to provide that reasonable walking, cycling and running time to work can, for an initial trial period, be counted as part of the working day to encourage people to use these means of getting to work. To do that in the private sector would require legislation, but the Government and, in particular, the NHS could lead by example as employers without legislation by simply saying that they would allow reasonable time for walking, cycling and running to work to be counted as part of the working day, which could be a huge incentive for people to use these means of getting to work. When the Minister replies to the thousands of speakers in this debate, will he say whether he will consider this?