Lord Berkeley
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Infrastructure Bill [HL]
Lord Berkeley Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)
My Lords, we start on quite a fundamental point, on which even the Minister on occasions has not been too secure in the position that she has adopted. When I was asked last night to prepare a short summation of this part of the Bill for wider circulation, I wanted to get things as accurate as I conceivably could, but I found myself wrestling with whether I was referring to one company or companies. Every time that I used the word “companies”, it looked singularly ill placed with the surrounding arguments as far as the Bill is concerned. Therefore, Amendment 1 asks the Minister to clarify what is, after all, a pretty fundamental point, and we would not want to continue our deliberations without having cleared it up.
At Second Reading, the Minister certainly said:
“Yes, it is the Government’s intention to set up just one company. It is standard template language in legislation, I understand, to create the option of further entities. It has no sinister meaning at all behind it. The intention is for a single company, but of course the lawyers always think about what-ifs in the most extraordinary way”—
she did not sound too convinced by the argument herself. However, she went on:
“I guess we did not really kick back against that but, yes, it is one company”.—[Official Report, 18/6/14; col. 896.]
I congratulate her on putting up a pretty stout defence of her position, but even in that stout defence there is a certain ambivalence, as there is in the Bill. That is why Amendment 5 in my name would remove a provision from Schedule 1 that makes rules for when two different strategic highways companies interact, which certainly suggests that the Government are planning for more than one strategic highways company.
It looks a fairly limited argument to say, “The lawyers guard against every development and therefore we may need more than one”. The debate about the Bill will be coloured very significantly indeed if we must take on board the fact that there may be two strategic highways companies. To make the most obvious point, we will want to know how they will interact, and we have amendments down that relate to that. If the Minister is able to clarify the issue and state that, as it is the Government’s intention to establish just one company, she will look at the Bill again to ensure that it is framed in that way, I am quite sure that that would set a lot of minds at rest and make for a much more straightforward discussion.
I assure the Minister that whether there is one or more than one strategic highways company has quite a conditional effect upon the legislation. Our concern is not just about one passing fancy of the lawyers but about something that may be of real substance. Some of my more prophetic colleagues say, “Why don’t you come to terms with the fact that this is all about setting up the strategic highways authority for privatisation? Of course, you will want more than one, and this will neatly fit in with privatisation plans in the not-so-distant future”. Well, I am not a cynical person and I accept what the Government put in the Bill at face value.
It is on that basis that I move this amendment, which would delete “one or more companies” and insert “a company”. In addition, as I said, Amendment 5 would delete sub-paragraph (3) in Schedule 1, which suggests that the existence of more than one potential strategic highways company is not a legal oddity caused by standard drafting—lawyers always make life so much more interesting for us all when they turn to drafting—but a scenario actively envisaged by the drafters of the Bill. It clearly makes provision for what should happen in the event that one strategic highways company should wish to build a bridge connecting to another. One and one still make two and therefore this problem could arise only if there is more than one strategic highways company.
There is understandable concern that the Government are considering a model where the SHC might be franchised out in some not-too-distant future. If that is the intention, it reinforces our many concerns about this measure, but I venture to suggest that this concern is as great as any. Therefore, I ask for reassurance from the Minister that, when I next write about the Bill and try to communicate intelligently with a wider audience, I am able to refer to one company in the singular the whole time and make some coherent sense out of this measure. I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment because there are already precedents for having a multiple infrastructure. One is the M6 toll road. I believe that the company running it was given a 90-year lease to maintain and operate it and charge whatever it liked as tolls for the next 90 years, or whatever it was. If, in the future, there is a plan for road tolling, as appears more likely with this Bill—I certainly welcome that and will be talking about it in later amendments—whatever tolling the Government of the day propose, the M6 toll road will not be part of it. Whether that will increase or decrease its traffic, I do not have a clue; it depends on what the charges are. It is a particularly bad example because most of the freight goes on the existing road and damages it quite dramatically—the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has an amendment down on road damage—but this is just one example of what can happen if there is no co-ordination over the whole country.
A second example is that, just after the last election, there were various plans and threats from the then Secretary of State that Network Rail would be broken up into other regions or zones because it was not performing properly. The idea presumably was that there would be competition between those zones for quality, capacity and charging, and for anything else that you come across. Luckily, that did not go ahead. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. The idea of having a different charge for whichever way you go between A and B would be just ridiculous; the business would not work.
The problem here is that, as the Bill stands, you could have more than one infrastructure company. Wales might well choose to be different. I do not think Scotland is part of this legislation, so the charges will be different there. Then there will be all the arguments about doing one thing one way and then leaving the rest of it and coming along and doing something else that is slightly different. There would also be the interfaces and the knock-on and consequential effects, which might be quite serious. I think that my noble friend is quite right in tabling this amendment and speaking so eloquently in favour of it. I do not know why we need more than one infrastructure company to run the trunk roads—there are not that many of them, actually—and why we cannot leave it as a singular company.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Kramer) (LD)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, said, I have emphasised before that we have no current plans for multiple strategic highways companies. This is not a sinister issue. We recognise that at some point there may be further companies, but the purpose of that might be, to give a good example, if one wanted a more regional structure for the equivalent of the strategic highways company. As noble Lords know, this Government are committed to devolution, so that is not something beyond the bounds of the imagination, but it is not anything currently contemplated. Our focus at the moment is a single highways company; there is nothing more sinister.
I also point out that one reason why I referred to the lawyers is that in this Bill we have sought clarity. The noble Lord will know from the number of Bills with which he has been associated over the years that it is quite common that a single phrase covers the plural. In fact, from the lawyers, I have this:
“Words in the singular include the plural, and words in the plural include the singular”.
It has been common practice in many Bills to allow for the fact that there may be more than one; it has simply been less explicit than we have been in this document. We thought that for the purposes of plain English this approach would be wise. There is no sinister context to any of this. We simply want to ensure sufficient flexibility for a future Government, so that if they decided that more than one company would be beneficial they would not have to go back and start legislation from scratch. In saying that, I am effectively responding to Amendments 1, 2 and 8, as well as Amendment 5, which as the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, said, is consequential to the other amendments.
I want to pick up on some of the issues mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Berkeley—that this is somehow some sinister mechanism for achieving privatisation. Nothing could be further from the reality of this Bill. The SHA is owned solely by the Secretary of State; if he were to cease to own it, it would lose all of its powers. There can be no way in which this company can be privatised. If the Secretary of State were to cease to be its owner, effectively it would cease to have any functions, powers or anything else. It would take a separate Act of Parliament to create a privatised entity. Everyone should be clear on that point.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, raised the possibility that this could be some mechanism that in some way affected tolling, or future tolling. I point out to him that specifically under this legislation, where we have existing toll trunk roads, such as at Dartford, the Severn crossing and the M6 toll, these concessions remain in the same relationship to the Secretary of State as they currently have. They do not develop a new relationship under the auspices of the strategic highways company. We expect the concessionaires will continue to exercise their existing rights and discharge their current obligations. Tolls and congestion charges would therefore be set by a combination of public authorities such as the UK Government, devolved Administrations and local authorities, as is the case today under existing contractual mechanisms. I hope that with those assurances the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise to the Minister and the Committee that I was not here for the previous bit; I am afraid that I am boxing and coxing with the Chamber at the moment, and have probably already offended the rules of the House by nipping out during the Minister’s reply to move this amendment. Some of this amendment is relevant to what noble Lords have just been discussing on the previous amendment. Indeed, the first part of my amendment is a consequence of trying to clarify that we are talking about only one company and not several. That confuses people, particularly in local Government, who anticipate a degree of regional structures down the line. I know that the Minister will have cleared up some of that.
My second point relates to the issue of privatisation, of which the Minister was speaking when I came into the Room. Clause 1(3) of the Bill as it stands is branded as the way in which privatisation is prevented by the Bill; namely, that the designation would terminate if the company were sold or otherwise disposed of. To me, that seems a funny way of doing it. You will have a company which employs all the people who are at the moment employed by the Highways Agency. If it were somehow to be bought, all its duties would be removed. Surely it is far easier to give some parliamentary control over this process. If we are moving to a hived-off company, structured under the Companies Act but owned wholly by the state, and if it is the intention of the Government to keep it that way, why do we not state baldly in the Bill that it cannot be privatised except by primary legislation? That is what is proposed in the second part of my amendment. It may not be ideal, but it is a good deal better and clearer than what is in the Bill.
There are clearly worries. The first thought of most people when they heard that the Government were going down the road of hiving off the Highways Agency was, “This is the first step to privatisation”. There was alarm at that. There might have been in some quarters—but not ones that I have come across—some joy at the prospect, particularly were it to be related to road pricing, which in principle I do not oppose but is politically rather difficult for any of us to support, particularly a few months off an election. It is easier to assert the will of Parliament and say, “This is not privatisation. If there is any prospect of that changing, you will need a new Act of Parliament”. That is what my amendment proposes. I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley
I support my noble friend’s amendment. I am glad that he is here, because I am not sure that any other of us could have moved it. He did it very well. I want to compare this situation with what is happening to Network Rail, of which I declare an interest as being a member.
I have just come from a meeting with Network Rail where we have been told what is going to happen by 1 September, when it comes under government ownership. That sounds as if it is going to be quite easy, apart from changing all the memoranda and articles and allowing the Secretary of State or the accounting officer in a department to make certain appointments and control things. However, that is being done without much, if any, parliamentary scrutiny, because I do not think that anybody is particularly worried about it. Network Rail has been in the private sector up to now, but it has had £4 billion or so a year from public funds. It has managed to work and not cause trouble; otherwise, this would probably have happened sooner. However, there still have to be changes. I worry about it going in the other direction. As my noble friend Lord Whitty said, the consequences need some public debate, because there might be many more people who are worried about it, not least the people who work for the new company while it is government owned. It is reasonable to have some parliamentary scrutiny of a change. Therefore, I support the amendment in his name.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I imagine that the Minister will have little difficulty in responding to this amendment. She is obviously going to continue to deny that privatisation is anywhere on the horizon as far as the Government are concerned—so that is one defence. Secondly, I hope that she recognises that there would need to be significant parliamentary action if privatisation of a significant company such as this were carried out. I am therefore anticipating the Minister quite enjoying responding to this amendment, which I am glad my noble friend has aired.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I support the proposal that Clause 1 should not stand part of the Bill, as it queries whether the clause—which is the whole proposition here—is sufficiently coherent and clear as to what it intends to do. As a Roads Minister, I was responsible for at least one of the proposals for the A303 and remember that we talked to everybody in the community, including several different sets of druids, and told them that the Stonehenge tunnel would be built. However, as I said at Second Reading, no sod has yet been turned and all they have done is close one road.
I understand the Government’s intention to create a steadier position through having a slightly more arm’s-length relationship, but this is half-baked. It is neither fish nor fowl. This will be a company that is wholly owned by the Government and which—to address the point that has just been made—cannot raise its own money. The Minister has made that clear to me, both in writing and in person. I thought the main advantage of having the hive-off would be that the body could raise its own funds, even if subject to broader controls from the Treasury, but the Minister makes it clear in her letter that its situation will be no different to the current one of the Highways Agency. That seems to undermine the main advantage of establishing an arm’s-length body. The Government’s proposal incurs all the costs, all the confusion and all this great legislation in the Bill and all the schedules attached to it, but it does not, of itself, provide the funding, the strategic intent or the independence from Government and, crucially, from the Treasury. It will not avoid what has been a stop-go process for the past 30 years.
If the Government were proposing a new corporation that was properly set up and run and which, although still owned by the Government, had its own structural basis and accountability, as well as the ability to finance its activities in various different ways, I could see that there would be a significant advantage. With this halfway house, which is not even a halfway house, I see very few advantages. Therefore, I think that the Government would be more sensible to leave the Highways Agency where it is, give the agency more money and give that over a longer period of time—if that is the Government’s priority—and, if necessary, think up a fuller, clearer, more comprehensive proposition for what kind of highways organisation we need in this land. The answer to that might well be in the territory that my noble friend Lord Davies referred to, because what we perhaps actually need is a transport infrastructure company rather than one that deals with simply 2% of our roads.
If we were to do that, we could start to deliver the investment required for a genuinely integrated transport policy, whereas the Bill, as I am afraid I have said before, seems to be about changing the names on the doors without changing much else.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, I would just like to ask the Minister where this figure of a £2.6 billion saving comes from. The two organisations Network Rail and the new strategic highways company will be quite similar, but one difference between them, which we will come on to in later amendments, relates to the role of the Office of Rail Regulation. Over the past 10 years, the Office of Rail Regulation has required Network Rail to make savings of about 60% of its turnover. That is quite a big saving, which has been achieved, while keeping the service going and the quality improving, because the regulator has very strong powers. If the savings are not made, or if the resulting performance of the network is bad, the regulator can fine Network Rail, as I believe it is planning to do next week.
The problem here is that the rail regulator will not have such powers over the highways authority but will simply monitor. You can sit monitoring things all your life, but you cannot incentivise or require an organisation to make the changes that it should. I am sure that there are changes to be made. I am sure that significant percentage savings could be made over quite short periods. On whether those would be the same as in the case of Network Rail, they probably could be, because Network Rail started off as a nationalised industry, which was probably pretty inefficient to some people. Although the Highways Agency has improved over the years, there is probably a long way further to go. However, unless we can get the ORR to have the same powers not just to monitor but to control and enforce cost reductions, I am not quite sure where we are with this.
Listening to other noble Lords, I am beginning to think that the only benefit from this that I have heard is the idea—which the Minister has, of course, denied—that the Bill is about getting the Highways Agency ready for privatisation.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, perhaps I should declare an interest in that I, too, am a regular user of the A303. When driving down there, one of the greatest moments for me is being able to see Stonehenge, but I know that the fact that I can do so is not necessarily good for the millions of people who go to visit it. More seriously, perhaps I could also declare my interests for the rest of the Committee stage of this Bill. I am a director of Wessex Investors, which would have an interest in the outcome of some of the planning implications of the Bill, although I do not intend to speak on those particularly. Wessex Investors could also potentially have an interest in some of the energy provisions, as it is starting to negotiate with an organisation on an energy project in the south-west. However, I do not think that any of those affect what I am going to talk about.
I, too, shall be interested in hearing answers to the questions on this asked by the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Davies, but I want to make the point that it is important politically that the Government are saying in the Bill that we have had enough of the stop-start, ad hoc investment plans for roads, and we need to move on to a much more mature and grown-up way of looking at infrastructure in the highways sector. Whether that is absolutely dependent on changing the name and function or legal entity of the Highways Agency, I am not absolutely sure, but I know that the Minister will come back on that when she answers the debate.
However, the good thing is that there is a real intention to start to mirror the situation that applies to rail. My understanding of this is imperfect and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, will know far more about it than me, but, as I see it, we have a good example from Network Rail, for which we now have a £38 billion programme over the next five years providing the investment needed to keep this country moving and to move things forward and modernise that network. That seems to be incredibly successful as regards usage and how that has worked over the past decade and into the future. If we can start to replicate that in the way we treat roads in this country, that would be positive.
I am not a great person for advocating huge investment in the strategic road network—apart from for the A303—but that clearly needs to be done in some areas, and on a programmed and predictable basis so that the Government, users and contractors know that it will be rolled out and actually happen rather than be subject to the next budget cut. I therefore welcome that, and hope that the Minister will be able to reply in such a way as to show that this change of the legal status of the Highways Agency will enable that to happen. Clearly, we need to do that.
Lord Berkeley
If I may just respond to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, let me say that I, too, congratulate the Minister on what has been announced today about the things happening in Cornwall. To go back to the noble Lord’s comment about the long-term finance, I certainly agree with him that if this change enables the longer-term finance that Network Rail has at the moment, it will be a major step forward. I worry that I do not see that in the Bill—maybe I cannot find it, and perhaps the Minister will be able to put me right. However, I worry further, that although Network Rail has it for the next five years, where is the commitment beyond that for the railways? If that does not happen for the railways, it probably will not happen for the roads. I was going to raise this later, but since the noble Lord raised it, let me ask: is there the opportunity to have a discussion before Report committing the financing of this new agency—the Highways Agency and maybe Network Rail—to a five-year programme? If that does not happen, it would need primary legislation to change it. That is probably a bit of a tall order, but it would be interesting to explore.
Baroness Maddock (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register, although I do not think that any of them have any particular relevance to what we are talking about today.
Following my noble friend Lord Teverson, of course we all have our favourite roads. Many people will be familiar with the A1 north of Newcastle and the issue of dualling it. Therefore, as I have lived with that, having now been married to the MP there for 13 years, I would be grateful to know how the Bill might help or hinder what has been a rather sorry tale of getting quite advanced on the dualling of that road, and then it all going backwards. It is now going forwards again, but I would be grateful for any information my noble friend can give me on that.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, Schedule 1 is 26 pages long. It is devoted almost entirely to inserting in the Highways Act the name of the company rather than the Secretary of State, or vice versa, and a lot of other administrative matters relating to assets, contracts and so forth. What it does not do—and I think it should—is to describe the responsibilities of the company and the scope of its activities, to which my next amendment relates.
This amendment is a shot at describing what I think will be the responsibilities of the company. This is Committee stage and, therefore, I hope that the department might accept the principle and draft a better description. However, essentially, somewhere in the Bill—I would prefer it to be in the body of the Bill rather than in a schedule, but the schedule is where the detail on the new company is spelt out at the moment—it should state what the functions and responsibilities of the company are.
The amendment refers to the obvious things: the construction, the maintenance and the improvement of the road system; traffic management for that system; and safety for that network. When I mention safety, on which I have amendments later on, I should inform the Committee that, since Second Reading, I have acquired an interest in this area in that I am now the chair, taking over from my noble friend Lord Dubs, of the Road Safety Foundation. Some noble Lords may recall that safety was a significant element when I was Roads Minister. Certainly, it is underplayed in this Bill and should be an important part of it, as are traffic management, speed controls, and so forth.
There is also the environmental dimension. There are problems about the construction and operation of roads. Somewhere in this Bill we need to say more clearly that the company, and not the Secretary of State any more, is now responsible for the environmental impact of the roads which are run by the Highways Agency. That includes the level of emissions which traffic management creates and whether that is going down and making a contribution to our carbon saving. It includes also the level of air pollution, which is largely proportionate to congestion and which, again, the Highways Agency network should be making a contribution to, as well as other things which are not perhaps so obvious, such as the run-off of water from highways, which has a significant effect on water systems—we have just passed a Water Act in which the quality of water is an important issue, including that of groundwater. Although most new schemes provide some better storage and diversion of water, from a lot of the old roads it still goes back into the ground or into the water system.
The amendment also refers to another responsibility, which is for research and development. I think that I am right in saying that the Highways Agency has its own R&D budget, but the Department for Transport also has a roads research budget. Is the whole of R&D on roads now to be the responsibility of this new company, which would probably be quite sensible? The Bill needs to be clear that the R&D on roads, traffic and the impact of roads is one of its responsibilities. A final dimension of the responsibilities that I am suggesting is the necessity to engage with road users and local communities, and the ability to enter into contracts with other providers. We will come later on to issues of co-operation with local authorities, and so forth. A key responsibility will be relations with road users themselves.
This amendment is my shot at this issue. I suspect that there could be a better one—but it is rather odd that a whole new nationalised infrastructure corporation should be established without the primary legislation saying anywhere what its responsibilities are. Therefore, I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, I support my noble friend in his Amendment 4, and I shall speak to the other amendments in this group. On Amendment 4, he is absolutely right. The strategic highways company needs to have responsibility for all the things that he has put in the amendment. I remind the Committee that there is very strong evidence that a month or two before the Olympics, when the air pollution on one or two of the trunk roads in London was reaching Chinese levels, the solution by the Mayor was to cover the monitoring points with plastic bags, which of course reduced the level of pollution inside the plastic bags but did not much help anybody else. But this needs to be done by the strategic highways company, and I would suggest that it needs to be supervised by somebody. That may be a role for the Office of Rail Regulation, or whatever it is to be called in future, because these are very important points.
My noble friend is right in his comment about research, but there needs to be some research into non-trunk roads, which are a very large part of the road network. I hope that that can be taken into account as well.
Amendments 6 and 7 relate to the 20 pages of consequential amendments to which my noble friend referred. It relates to something that may have got lost in the search for consequential amendments—the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the question of which body is responsible for collecting litter on different roads. These two amendments are designed to make sure that the strategic highways do not get left out of the wrapping up; otherwise, we will see them covered in litter from head to foot.
I shall not read out all the parts of my amendment, because everybody can read them, and it probably would not make much sense anyway—unless you put a wet towel on your head.
Finally, my noble friend did not mention Amendment 61, which follows on from Amendment 4 and is to do with the transfer of additional functions to the strategic highways company in Clause 13(2). It covers highways and planning, but I agree that it should cover road safety as well, because that is a terribly important part of it. We will talk about safety comparisons later, but it would be good to see road safety in there, or something like it.
Lord Bradshaw
The amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, with which I agree, mentions “speed control systems”. We are considering the Deregulation Bill on Monday, which makes specific provision for a lot of the enforcement of speed and other offences to be undertaken by people who go round with pads rather than the modern method of using cameras. Will the Minister cover that, or at least take it away and get sorted out the apparent contradictions between those two pieces of legislation?
Lord Berkeley
“Duties of Strategic Highways Company
(1) A strategic highways company has, in relation to areas for which it is appointed, duties to—
(a) plan, monitor and manage highways for which it is the highway authority in order to secure economic, social and environmental gains jointly and severally,(b) secure the fullest possible use of sustainable modes of transport, including by—(i) widening travel choices;(ii) unlocking development in locations that are sustainable or assisting in making them sustainable;(iii) encouraging highway users to make more efficient use of vehicles by increasing average occupancy and loading rates; and(iv) working in partnership with operators of passenger transport and freight services, as well as local authorities and those responsible for major trip generators.”
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, to some extent Amendment 13 follows on from my noble friend Lord Whitty’s Amendment 4 on responsibilities and scope. There is a strong, if not stronger, argument for having in the Bill a clause which sets out the duties of the strategic highways company, because there is already legislation which puts duties on the Secretary of State or the regulator as regards railways. Some noble Lords will recall the Railways Act 2005 and the Railways Act 1993, which was the basis of privatisation. The duties there included promoting,
“improvements in railway service performance … to protect the interests of users of railway services … to promote the use of the railway network in Great Britain for the carriage of passengers and goods”.
I was very pleased to see that goods got in there. The list of duties continues:
“to contribute to the development of an integrated system of transport … contribute to the achievement of sustainable development”.
I could go on reading out Section 4 of that Act. It very much mirrors what has been achieved by successive Governments and rail regulators such as the Office of Rail Regulation in succeeding years through putting those basic principles into effect. This is quite important, and we have the opportunity to put a similar range of duties on the strategic highways company—or companies, however many there are.
Looking at this amendment, it is important that we start to include the cross-modal issues that I and several other noble Lords spoke about at Second Reading. We should look at modes of transport such as highways and railways—probably cycling and walking as well, and maybe other things in the future—on a cross-modal basis, with the duties to secure something like, as I put in the amendment,
“the economic, social and environmental gains jointly and severally”.
I am sure Ministers could come back with a better version, but I hope this is a useful basis for suggesting what the duties of this strategic highways company should be. Unlocking development is important, as is encouraging occupancy and loading rates for passengers and freight and looking at the need to drive, the need to move around and, of course, its sustainability.
We shall be talking about some of these things in later amendments, but it is important for an organisation such as this one to have duties, which should be in the Bill just as they are for the railways. I have tried to mirror what is in the original Railways Act. It has changed over the years and is in a different format now, but the duties are still there, and if we had something like this for the strategic highways company, alongside the responsibilities that my noble friend Lord Whitty talked about, it would make us all feel a lot more comfortable. I beg to move.
Lord Bradshaw
I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has said, but will add something. You can argue for or against it, but having chosen to go down the route of rail regulation, there is one thing I really would like to be assured about. We know that the motorist—maybe “road user” is the right term—is to be represented by Passenger Focus. That of course covers the railway, bus and tram industries; it has seen incremental growth, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, had a good deal to do with its genesis. With railways, buses, trams and the other things for which it is responsible, it has a right to get information from the regulated party or from the party for which it is responsible. A train or bus company cannot refuse such a request. I would like to be assured that the strategic highways company, too, will not be able to refuse a request for information from Passenger Focus acting in pursuance of its duties to represent road users. I am quite happy that it should represent them, but I do want it not to be treated any differently from the way it is treated in other industries.
Lord Berkeley
I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and to the Minister for her response. I get the feeling that we are being directed towards this lovely, short licence document, or the longer one, as being the answer to everything. It is not clear to me—maybe because I do not understand it—when we will see the longer version, which will have as much detail in it as possible before Royal Assent, and whether we will be able to debate it. If we are not, it is pretty important that there is some reference to a strategy, such as a road investment strategy or, if the Minister prefers, a transport investment strategy, because there is none at the moment.
We do rail one way and roads another—we have debated that very often in the House. They have different criteria; they do not seem to talk to each other, and they have different forecasting methodologies. Is there to be some read-across between how the railways are operated and how it is intended that the strategic roads are operated? It may be that things have moved on since the Railways Act 1993, with the Railways Act 2005 and the high-level output specification used to specify what the railways should do, but there needs to be something in the Bill to set the strategy and perhaps the duties. We can debate whether it is to be the Secretary of State or the regulator, but to just dump all this into a licence that we may or may not see will lose us a big opportunity to consider before we get into the detail not just how roads are built and operated but how they fit into the environment, including the issue of emissions, along with local roads and all the other people that my noble friend Lord Whitty mentioned. I shall reflect on that and come back to it on Report. Perhaps we can have a meeting with the Minister before then, but in the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, in discussing the strategies and the length of time, my Amendments 23 and 24 go into more detail but I think they are trying to say the same thing. It is an interesting issue as to whether there should be a five-year period. It is a great deal better than having one year, which is what we used to have, but it may be better still to have a rolling one, if that were possible.
I heard some results from Network Rail this morning. It has a fixed five-year term, as noble Lords will know. I have been given the capital expenditure year by year over the past five-year period. In the first and final years, the expenditure was 50% higher than in the three middle years, which is very difficult to resource up and resource down for the contractors and suppliers dealing with it. I asked the people at Network Rail why, and they said, “Well, the first year we are catching up with what we should have done in the previous control period and did not get round to it, and the last one was because we had a lot more expenditure that we had to finish before the end of the control period”. That is quite normal. That will happen on roads as well as railways; it is much the same. But I know that the feeling at Network Rail is that, if it was possible to have a rolling capital expenditure programme, life would be much easier. I wonder which, if either, would get through the Treasury better and whether it would be possible to have a rolling one rather than a fixed one. That is just an example from Network Rail.
I have one other question for the Minister arising out of these amendments. I hope that the strategies and all the duties and everything else will include the interests of cyclists and pedestrians. People may say that pedestrians should not be on trunk roads and they should use footpaths if the road is high-speed, but it is terribly important that pedestrians and cyclists feel safe and use the roads, which is part of the environmental objectives that I put in my amendment. It would be good to have some confirmation from the Minister that this is all part of the strategic investment plan.
Lord Whitty
All the amendments in this group are mine. This relates to exactly the sort of thing that my noble friend Lord Davies was just referring to. The Highways Agency consists mainly of engineers—quite rightly, and very good engineers many of them are. In the fringes, there are traffic engineers, as well as highways engineers. When you ask them to build into their projects objectives other than those which relate to providing more, quicker or wider roads, there is a bit of barrier, on occasion. Between them, the amendments are an attempt to ensure that when we take decisions on road improvements or new roads, issues of safety and the environment are built into those decisions on the same basis as any improvement in travel time, the number of miles of road which are tarmacked, or whatever.
The Highways Agency contains within it people who take those things seriously, but the natural tendency, particularly when we put the foot on the accelerator of spending on roads, is to get as many roads built as fast as possible and not worry too much about the complications. One big complication has wider implications for the rest of the project: safety. Earlier, I declared my interest as the new chair of the Road Safety Foundation. Every year it produces a map of European standards and the state of Britain’s roads. I have the map here if anyone wants to look at it. Those are standards which have been worked up by various equivalent bodies across Europe. It is right to say that our motorway system, in particular, is one of the safest in the world and is the safest part of the British— English, in this case—road system. That, of course, is calculated on the basis of vehicle miles and comparing them. It is also true to say that 250 people a year are killed on Highways Agency roads every year, and 2,000-plus are killed or seriously injured on those roads. That is a significant safety issue. Just to put it in perspective, more people are killed on Highways Agency roads, which are only 2% of our network—a third of the casualties because of the density of traffic—than the number of people who are killed at work. There are health and safety issues at work, for which we have a whole organisation, the HSE, to ensure that such accidents do not happen or are minimised.
The Government need to have an answer to the question of who is liable for those accidents. There have been big improvements in road safety in the past 20 years. When I was Road Safety Minister we had a 10-year strategy and, by and large, that reduced deaths and serious injuries by about 30% over that period. That improvement has slowed down a bit since 2010, but we are nevertheless one of the best and safest in Europe and the world. However, there are still a significant number of deaths and injuries.
If you try to establish the causes of those accidents, there is an assumption that it is mainly driver error or driver behaviour—and there is some truth in that. Much of the improvement over the past 20 years has been in improved vehicle safety. The Euro NCAP programme has raised certainly new car safety features from what it regarded as 2-star to roughly 4-star—air bags and other aspects of car design—which has had a major impact.
It is also true to say that at least for most groups there has been some improvement in driver behaviour, but there has not necessarily been the same improvement in safety features in the physical design of roads, nor has the improvement been reflected in the objectives of road-building organisations—principally the Highways Agency, but also the local authorities. The reasons for this are partly because it is thought that if you build a better road, safety automatically improves. It does not necessarily do so, and certainly does not improve proportionately. It is partly because the system for appraising new projects—whether they are intersections, main road widening or whatever—includes safety elements that are but a small proportion of the total cost and benefit. Additional safety factors are therefore discouraged by the way in which the projects are appraised.
This group of amendments, which also relate to environmental issues, attempts to write safety issues into different points in the Bill. I imagine that the Minister will not accept the amendments as they stand but I advise her and her colleagues that road safety is underplayed in the Bill. At various points in the Bill, explicit reference to road safety and reducing accidents needs to be reflected, as well as in the licensing conditions and the standards and objectives that the Secretary of State accepts for the new company.
My worry about the transposition in this context is that if a road design issue causes or contributes to the cause of an accident, who is liable? We do not get many legal cases about the state of the roads, and I do not know why. Thirty years ago we did not get many legal cases about the performance of the National Health Service; now we get lots of them. We get quite a few about tripping over the pavement, which is the equivalent responsibility for the local authority. If you have an independent company, the question of liability to potential litigation needs to be taken into account as one of the risk factors. I am not saying that it is a determinant risk factor, but it is something that the Government will have to have an answer to, and at the moment I do not think they do. One way of ensuring that that happens, in terms of licence conditions and the other oversight that the Secretary of State will have to perform, is to write safety in at several points in the Bill.
With regard to the detail of the individual amendments, Amendment 18 relates to the standards that the Secretary of State can set for the company. One of those standards should be a reduction in the number of accidents and the number of people killed, and that should be,
“a central objective of the Road Investment Strategy”.
Amendment 22 makes the point that I was just referring to, that when you appraise schemes, the appraisal for safety benefits or otherwise needs to be a separate assessment and not be lost in the overall assessment, because the return you can get on safety measures is often much higher than the return you get on time-saving and other economic benefits. Amendment 22 also goes into other issues of reducing traffic and so on, which also have high returns. It is the same in the energy sector: saving energy is actually a far greater return than spending money on new power stations, although you have to do both—as you do here. But if you appraise the environmental element separately, the rate of return is significantly greater. Therefore, that should be done as a matter of course.
Likewise, in relation to the strategy in Clause 2, Amendment 33 says that the objectives should relate not just to road-building but to safety issues, and that in relation to guidance due consideration should be given to road safety and environmental outcomes. I would particularly emphasise the road safety dimension.
These amendments may not be the most appropriate place, but before the Bill leaves this House it would be sensible for the Government and the department to find the appropriate place to put, in lights, “road safety responsibilities of the new company”. If we let it leave this House without that being clear—in several different places, I suggest—there will be a tendency for the company to at least downgrade those and for the accountability of the company to be weaker because they have not been spelt out in the Bill.
These are quite important issues. Sometimes those who are keen on having new roads regard safety issues as a constraint rather than an objective of road design. We need to ensure they are an objective both at the individual project level and in the overall strategy. I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, I support my noble friend. He has raised some very interesting challenges. I do not think that safety gets taken into account nearly enough in the design of roads. In my earlier life, I designed quite a few of them.
It might be interesting to compare how the roads have developed and how the railways have developed. There were some horrendous accidents on the railways in Victorian times, starting off with a Member of Parliament who got crushed by one of the first trains because he was standing too close to it, or something. That led to the introduction of the Railway Inspectorate, whose job it was to ensure that the railways were safe, bringing in things such as brakes, which are quite useful. Things have moved on a bit since then. The Railway Inspectorate was originally staffed by retired Army officers, but more recently it has moved to the Office of Rail Regulation, which is the right place for it. I think that it does a very good job. We will be talking about some of the issues around that when we discuss a later amendment.
It seems to me a good idea to look at whether the ORR in its expanded role could take on some road safety issues. At present, the Highways Agency does that, and, in the absence of any other instructions, the new body will probably hold much the same views as that agency—namely, the desire to increase speeds so that people can get to their destinations faster and to increase capacity by having more roads. The strategy is designed round the concept of “a minute saved”. My noble friend is an expert on this. He may well be right that that body takes safety into account to some extent, but I am not sure that it does. It could certainly do so to a far greater extent.
The Office of Rail Regulation could be given responsibility for many of the safety issues that my noble friend raised, which cover a multitude of sins, and could be given a duty to look at the potential for modal shift. We talk about road to rail very frequently, but there is the issue of road to bicycle. As we have seen in London, road to bicycle is concerned largely with safety issues. A terrible number of cyclists have been killed in London in the past year or two. TfL talks about redesigning roundabouts but one of the key issues, which must be obvious to most people, is that if you give cyclists space, they are less likely to get run over. If the road traffic speed is set at 20 miles an hour, it is a great deal safer than 30 miles an hour, and you will get more people cycling and fewer people trying to drive. It would also reduce emissions and do all the other good things that we have been talking about. This is to do with modal shift. The journey time issue is equally important, whether you travel by bike, train, car or bus. Therefore, my noble friend’s amendments deserve careful consideration. I will discuss with him in more detail whether the Office of Rail Regulation should be involved in some of these issues. I think that body is capable of it as it has very capable people. Unlike the Highways Agency, it can stand back and take a different view and, if it does not like what is going on, it should be able to enforce and encourage change. These are important amendments and I look forward to further discussion on them.
Baroness Kramer
This set of amendments seeks to make the road investment strategy cover several specific areas, including carbon reduction, traffic volumes and environmental performance, and to place safety at its heart—the area where we have had most discussion, which has been fascinating. I reassure the Committee that the Government take all these issues very seriously. It seems to me that where we may differ is on whether or not these important values are enhanced in implementation by including them in the Bill rather than in the road investment strategy and in the licence. I am inclined to believe that the RIS and the licence are the most powerful documents to drive forward the behaviours that we are looking for, so I shall explain the role that those documents play.
We are concerned about ending up with a long list sitting in legislation and describing what the road investment strategy should look at, because, as everyone in this Room knows, there is always the problem of what happens with the item left off the list when that is significant. One can try to say that those that are not named are of equal significance and are equally elevated, and that one is not primary over the other, but that is not always an easy argument to make. I am concerned, particularly since we want this to be a long-lasting document, that there will be issues which we consider to be of equal importance to safety and the environment and that we would be in a difficult situation if we insisted on those additional significant priorities. I am therefore hesitant to go to the face of the Bill. It is helpful to have the information that we have on both the RIS and the licence, and the other documents.
Let me focus on safety, because it is a very important issue to the Government. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, our roads are pretty much the safest in the world, but we can never be complacent. The strategic highways company will have a responsibility for the safety of the road network, but, as I pointed out previously, there are key safety responsibilities—including driver licensing, training and education, the regulation of driving such as drink-driving and drug-driving policies, enforcement, dangerous and careless driving and, as the noble Lord underscored, the important issue of vehicle standards—that must stay with the Secretary of State and not transfer to the new company. That is to put the broad construct, which would not work effectively if those responsibilities were not kept with the Secretary of State.
As we go through these complex documents, it is worth noting that safety is already embedded in the strategic roads “system”. For example, the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges sets minimum standards for road safety, and safety is covered within the appraisal. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, asked whether the appraisal formulas were exactly as they should be. That is surely not something that we are going to address in primary legislation; it is a working issue that needs to be addressed at a much more practical level. In wide areas of appraisal—I have looked more at financial and cost-benefit appraisal issues—we are constantly trying to update the way in which we look at those issues. I cannot see that it can be driven through primary legislation; it is part of being responsible. The importance of safety is already included in the draft licence and will be a key consideration in the road investment strategy. For example, the RIS will require performance specifications that embed safety issues.
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred to legal liabilities. I think that it is clear that the SHC is responsible for the road but not the driver, but I do not think it would be right for me to try to speculate on legal liability.
Embedded in the amendments are important issues of environmental protection such as climate change and biodiversity. Again, they are well covered within the licence by broader existing legislation. Again, if we are looking at who is responsible for what, a lot of those issues refer to the vehicle fleet, and that must be with government rather than with the new company.
Therefore the view we take is that the issues that are raised are very important, but that they are carefully covered and encompassed by the language we have in both the primary legislation and supporting documents. Therefore once again, amendment is not necessary to achieve the goals which those sponsoring these amendments have in mind.
Lord Berkeley
The noble Baroness mentioned the performance specification. Giving something like the Highways Agency a performance specification means, “Make your road traffic go as fast as possible, make sure that the bikes are miles away, and put up lots of crash barriers so that if people do go off the road, they won’t kill anyone else”. I hope we have moved on—or will move on—from that.
Baroness Kramer
All I can say to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, on this, is that we have certainly moved on from that, have we not? That is one of the problems that happens when you try to put too much into primary legislation—we become more demanding as the years go by, not less demanding. It is important that we reflect that more demanding approach in the way we manage our network.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I have an amendment in this group. I agree entirely with my noble friend Lord Davies on how we get to the investment strategy. My amendment is at the end of this group, and it is about Parliament’s oversight of the process. We always ought to consider how Parliament both approves and monitors bodies and documents which are referred to in legislation.
I am proposing that, before the first strategy is implemented, it should be subject to a report of a Joint Committee of both Houses. I suspect that our colleagues in the House of Commons will say that it should be a DfT Select Committee. Nevertheless, some form of parliamentary accountability is necessary. It is nowhere in the Bill, and it should be. It should be a regular process; I am saying every five years because that is the period to which the money and strategy initially relate. Certainly, a regular review of the roads investment strategy ought to be built in at parliamentary level. That will complement the consultations that are required at the beginning of the process in my noble friend Lord Davies’s amendments.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, I have two amendments in this group. Amendment 26 is more about who should be consulted. I expect the Minister will say that she does not like lists and therefore we should not have them, but as my two noble friends have said, it is very important that the Secretary of State should consult organisations that are affected, including,
“Network Rail … local transport authorities … combined authorities … statutory environmental bodies”,
and anyone else that the Secretary of State thinks is important. It is very important that this should happen. If it is going to happen, that is fine, but it is very important that it does.
With regard to Amendment 31, on Part 2 of Schedule 2—“Varying a road investment strategy”—it seems more appropriate to make use of the Planning Act 2008 provisions and apply them to the road investment strategy as if it was a national policy statement. My amendment would bring it all together in a national policy statement structure rather than the one in the Bill. I do not think I need to explain it any further. I look forward to the Minister’s comments.
Baroness Kramer
My Lords, as we explained in the RIS explanatory document, Setting the Road Investment Strategy—another one of this cluster of documents that I hope people have found but if they have not, the Library has them—a key mechanism for public and stakeholder engagement in the development of future versions of the road investment strategy will be the route strategies. That is the point at which local authorities and all kinds of interested parties can look at the specifics and contribute greatly to the process. The outputs of the route strategies will be used to develop a strategic route network initial report, which will inform the Government’s proposals. One of those complex documents—I think that it is the one that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, was holding—provides a graphic pattern for how those pieces can work.
Of course, the Government will engage with key stakeholders when developing our proposals, but that is different from requiring a formal consultation. Obviously, it is the goal of the Government to ensure that we come forward with a very well informed document, and that engagement is inherently part of that process. Where we have looked at providing for consultation in this document is in relation to varying the RIS. The point that we have made is that where a strategy is being varied, because it has the downside of potentially weakening the value of the strategy as a long-term funding settlement, that is the part of the process where we want to bring in consultation in a more formal sense.
We would have no certainty that those variations would have had the stakeholder engagement that is required for building the route strategies in the first place, which, as I say, are the first step in the flow-through of information that informs and helps to structure the RIS itself. That is why we have a distinction from allowing the normal pattern of extensive stakeholder engagement when forming the RIS because it will have had that input through consultation on the route strategies. So we have the route strategies leading to the RIS. If the RIS is varied, that process will not have taken place so it is for variance of the RIS itself that we require consultation.
Lord Berkeley
The first strategy is put before Parliament but presumably the Secretary of State consults all the relevant people before he does that, or is he just going to put it before Parliament without consultation? That is the impression I am getting from the Minister.
Baroness Kramer
The Secretary of State and others are very heavily engaged with stakeholders. That is the way in which they expect to develop the RIS. The first one is always a bit odd because if you look at the rules, they require a to and fro between the Secretary of State and the strategic highways company, and of course the strategic highways company does not exist yet so there is a fairly unique arrangement for the first RIS, which we expect to be published—I cannot give dates—in the future.
Lord Berkeley
I will press the Minister once more. I see nothing in part 1 of Schedule 2 that says that the Secretary of State should consult anyone else apart from the strategic highways company. Maybe I have got it wrong but that does seem a bit odd.
Baroness Kramer
The point that underpins all this is that Ministers, rather than Parliament, have traditionally made decisions on infrastructure funding, and we are not seeking to overturn that. It would be rather unprecedented for the Government to put forward a funding and investment plan for debate. If that were to become the underlying principle, it would have a sweeping impact on many different aspects of government, so we are not proposing that. We also, frankly, recognise that it would slow down what is already not a brief process. We want to get to the point of getting infrastructure out into the ground.
For example, the rail investment strategy can be issued by the Government without being laid before the House and debated. That does not prevent Parliament from holding the Government and the rail sector to account, and that is the model that we are following here. We are behaving consistently with how these issues are already handled in government—we are not overturning that, other than to the extent of putting in a requirement for consultation should there be a variance in the RIS. As I said, that is because it has that sort of exception, or potential downside, of undermining the framework of long-term funding certainty that we are trying to create. I assure noble Lords that there will be extensive stakeholder engagement around the RIS. Indeed, the RIS will typically be built from the route strategies up, and there is extensive consultation at the route-strategy level. There is a place for consultation in all this, and the arrangements as a whole are very satisfactory for that purpose.
One of the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, lists a number of stakeholders that would have to be consulted during the preparation of the RIS. He is right about lists tending to be a problem for me. The practical reality is that the stakeholders know who they are and the Government know who the stakeholders are. There is constant engagement, and it is a fairly fluid group, so there would be no great advantage to including a list of them.
I want to make sure that I cover the full range of issues. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, suggested that Parliament should report on this. He said that he was not sure his amendment achieved what he intended, but we read it as requiring that Parliament approve each proposal in Part 1 of the Bill before it could come into force, and that Part 1 must be reviewed every five years. We are debating the Bill now, and I am sure his specific intent was not to require it to be reviewed as soon as it was enacted. We may just have some confusion around that issue. Perhaps he was trying to suggest that the RIS should be reviewed by Parliament—that is my understanding from the comments that he made.