West Yorkshire Combined Authority (Election of Mayor and Functions) Order 2021

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, the key issue that has come out of this debate is whether this new mayor and the combined authority will have the powers to make a fundamental difference. We all accept that we need it to be able to make a fundamental difference to level up and give the people of West Yorkshire the dynamic future that they need.

The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, put his finger on a key policy issue, to which we would welcome an answer from the Minister: why has the mayor not been given responsibility for strategic infrastructure? Given that the mayoral authorities are intended to be strategic and West Yorkshire needs a plan for the future, the absence of a power to plan strategic infrastructure is a gaping hole in this order.

That links directly to the point about HS2 made by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, and my noble friends Lord Blunkett and Lord Liddle. I suggest that HS2 is the single most important piece of infrastructure for the strategic future of West Yorkshire. If it happens, it will produce a transformation in connectivity, but there will be a real crisis from the comparative lack of connectivity if, as my noble friend Lord Blunkett said, HS2 goes to the north-west in the extension from Birmingham to Crewe and Manchester but does not go to the east Midlands and on to Sheffield and Leeds and continue into the north-east. That is hugely important for the area about which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has spoken.

I am sure that the Minister, whom we hold in high regard, will repeat the words that have been repeated many times in both Houses about the eastern leg of HS2: that the Government are in principle committed to it, that they wish to see the benefits of HS2 shared with Yorkshire and the north-east, and that the integrated rail plan will be coming soon. We have heard all that before. The problem is that those things do not commit the Government to producing and progressing with the eastern leg of HS2 at all—because it could be delayed indefinitely—let alone on the same timescale as proposed for Crewe and Manchester.

Therefore, rather than get another recital of the brief, perhaps I may ask the Minister to take two specific points back to his right honourable friends the Chancellor and the Prime Minister, who will be the key decision-makers in this respect. The first is that the Government have now said that, because of delays due to Covid and logjams in the Department for Transport, the legislation to extend HS2 from Crewe to Manchester will be introduced not this year but next year. That means that there is now an opportunity to revert to the original plan for phase 2b of HS2 and put the whole of the eastern leg in it.

Secondly, will the Minister take back to the Chancellor and the Prime Minister the strong view of all local authority leaders in the east Midlands and Yorkshire, as well as Members of Parliament and of this House, that if we are going to have a high-speed line, 21st-century technology, for the western part of the country but leave the eastern part of the country still subject to Victorian technology, it would be the equivalent of our great Victorian forebears building the railways to go up to Birmingham and Manchester but leaving canals to serve Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield and Leeds? As a strategic future for the country, that would be a disaster.