Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 9th February 2015 Lords Chamber

Amendment 42 deals with the Bill as a whole and is the standard-form provision added on Third Reading in this House to avoid issues of privilege. Privilege issues would otherwise arise because the Bill authorises expenditure and the charges, which are set out in the Ways and Means resolution. In accordance with standard procedure, the privilege amendment was removed at Commons Committee stage. I beg to move.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome many of these amendments. There is a sense of déjà vu about today because we spent many hours debating this. I recall amendments put down by several of my noble friends and noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches proposing many of the changes now coming back from the Government. It is great that they have taken so much of our advice. I welcome it. Let us hope that this is a precedent for many future changes.

I am pleased that Amendment 1 starts to provide a link between Parliament, Government and the SHCs because that is very important. We talked about that. It may not be what we wanted but it is a start to getting there. I am also pleased that we have an amendment that says that the ORR can give advice to the Secretary of State on the effect of its guidance. That is good. I hope that the ORR will feel able to give advice on many more things than that. I am also pleased that the Secretary of State must lay a report before Parliament on this—it is all obvious but it needs to be said—and it is important that this happens and happens regularly.

Would it not have been much easier to have changed the name of the ORR during the passage of the Bill rather than with all these amendments? However, I do not really mind and it does not really matter. That is fine. It is a shame that we have not been able to persuade the Government that the ORR, in addition to its work monitoring the SHC, should have powers to take action and require efficiencies as it is able to do for Network Rail. I hope that that will come one day as the ORR will have the capability to do that and it is a logical thing to do. It would be much better for an independent regulator to do it than to try to have the Secretary of State do it. We saw some problems with that with regard to the railways last summer. I also hope that in future we may be able to persuade whoever wins and becomes the Government after May that it will be useful to have the ORR responsible for road safety on the highways network as well. We did not quite get that far, but we are getting there.

Finally, I did not understand what the noble Baroness said about Amendment 45. It rather seems that if the staff of the Highways Agency do not feel that they will be properly reimbursed in whatever changes come they will be told, “That’s tough. You’re not going to get any compensation”.

However, this is a good step forward. We enjoyed the debates in Committee, on Report and at Third Reading and it was obviously a good use of parliamentary time. It is very nice to think that the Government have accepted many of the principles of what we proposed.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I echo quite a lot of what my noble friend said. We have moved in the direction of a report to Parliament and the role of the Secretary of State vis-à-vis the strategic highways company. I accept, I think, although like my noble friend I find the wording a bit peculiar, that that reinforces the application of the equivalent TUPE in relation to the staff of the Highways Agency.

The one point I am disappointed by, which my noble friend also mentioned, was that neither the Commons nor the Government have seen fit to strengthen the reference to road safety in the terms of the duties of the new company. It is a very weak form of obligation. It is slightly stronger than it was originally. The road investment strategy says that the Secretary of State must “have regard in particular” to the effect of the strategy on the safety of users. Later on it says that the company should “have regard”—no longer “in particular” —to the effect of the exercise of those functions on the safety of users. The phrase “have regard to” is the weakest form of legislative obligation. I had hoped that during the passage of the Bill we would strengthen that wording so that it would be an objective of the company and of the investment strategy to improve the performance on road safety. We have not got that and we are now at quite a late stage during the passage of the Bill but I hope that the Government will keep that under review as we go forward and the company is created. I do need to point out that I am a chair of the Road Safety Foundation. The anxiety that safety should be part of the DNA of the new body is broader than just among those who have any vested interests and certainly I would have thought that the Government could have moved further. However, on the rest of it, I thank the Minister for having moved a bit in our direction.

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[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, my comments on these three amendments reflect my comments on the first group. I welcome them. Again, we spent a lot of time debating them, and it is really good that the Commons listened to the very strong pressure from the various cycling organisations and persuaded the Government that the new clause under Amendment 6 should go in. It covers everything that one could have asked for. It follows on, as the Minister said, from the delivery plan. A duty to deliver a strategy was needed, and what is in these amendments is very good. Subsection (9) even says what happens if the Secretary of State does not produce a strategy, which is very welcome. It would be nice if the Minister could give an indication as to when the first one might appear. Is it this year, next year or sometime never? I know it is always difficult for Ministers to commit themselves.

One thing occurred to me on reading this amendment. I read it as applying to all roads, not just trunk roads, but maybe the Minister will confirm that. I know that there are not many cyclists on trunk roads, as most find it much too dangerous, but trunk roads are useful highways, connecting towns, villages and cities that are a little further apart with a bit more capacity and higher speed. In the Netherlands, they are making high-speed cycle lanes where people are expected to go a bit faster.

However, it is a really good start. I congratulate the Government on listening to all the pressure that has come from the cycling organisations. I look forward to participating and taking this forward.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, from these Benches, I, too, very much welcome these amendments. As we discussed in Committee and on Report, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, we felt that this was an important bit that was missing from transport strategy. The Infrastructure Bill is an excellent opportunity to put that right. The early clauses sounded very woolly to me, but as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, pointed out, new subsection (9) makes it rather clear that this is expected to happen rather than being something that is optional. That is a major step forward. I assume and hope that this will go forward and that we will approve it as soon as possible.

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[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that these amendments do not do very much for the Bill. All these points were going to be covered anyway. I do not think that the process over the past two weeks has done politicians any good at all. It was a hurried amendment in the Commons and the Government, under Liberal pressure, gave way. We now have a cobbled together lot of amendments which did not give the other case a decent chance for discussion. If anybody reads last Monday’s Commons Hansard, it is not an impressive debate. We have not had a sensible opportunity here, although the whole framework of what we are discussing has been discussed ad nauseam in this House.

I would like to ask my noble friend, particularly about item 6 in column 1 regarding what will take place in other protected areas, how many miles of coal-mine tunnel are under protected areas in national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty? Of course, we must remember that these would not have been allowed under this amendment: the fracking pipeline is only about 6 to 9 inches, whereas a coal-mine tunnel is considerably more.

My noble friend Lord Framlingham has just mentioned ancient woodland. Will marine nature reserves will be classified as protected areas? How many more restrictions will there be on the industry? My noble friend the Minister was absolutely right when she said that health and safety risks can be managed with best practices. We need to show those best practices for the rest of Europe to follow.

Returning to point 6, is this a precedent for future development? If you are not allowed to drill a 6 to 9-inch pipeline a thousand feet down, presumably the Government will not build HS2 which will go smack through the middle of the Chilterns, an area of outstanding natural beauty. There will be 11 kilometres of tunnels there. It will do considerably more damage than any whipstocking under an AONB from a small well. Presumably we will not have any more development. The Liberal party has closed the door on development in national parks and closed the door on the opportunity of growth. I think that a lot of people will use item 6 as a precedent in order to stop any future development at all.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I follow the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, about geothermal plants. People may have read an article in the Times last week on 2 February about the Eden project, which is trying to develop the geothermal plant mentioned by the noble Lord, drilling several miles underground. It says in the article—it is quite surprising to me—that the water that will come out will eventually be 180 degrees centigrade, which is well above boiling point. That is wonderful. It would heat 4,000 homes and all the biomes of the Eden project. I hope that this geothermal drilling—which is purely water based, I think; there are no chemicals or anything else—will not be caught by these various amendments. To quote Michael Feliks, chairman of the Renewable Energy Association’s geothermal group:

“It would be a shame if geothermal energy ended up as collateral damage in a debate about shale gas fracking.”

It is a completely different thing. It is drilling, and it should be allowed under the normal planning procedures rather than coming into this Bill at all.

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions, but particularly to noble Lords who have supported the government amendments in lieu of the amendments that were made in another place.

A number of questions were raised. I want to make sure that I respond to all of them, but there will be one or two questions that I cannot commit to answering now and on which I will have to write to noble Lords, such as the question posed by my noble friend Lord Caithness about the number of miles of tunnels going underground. I do not think that information is at hand, unless of course the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has the answer.

I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, that our regulatory regime is robust. It will ensure that no hydraulic fracturing will be permitted where groundwater and drinking water supplies can be affected. We had a protracted debate not that long ago in which we made it very clear that this Government take very seriously that operations will take place only if all of the environmental impact assessments are met. I had hoped that I had laid out today very clearly in my detailed speaking notes our response to what the other House came up with on Report. We have bettered the amendments that the other place made, so that they will be able to stand up to legal challenge and to ensure that the safeguards that she and other noble Lords, such as the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, have asked for can actually be delivered.

It would be wrong to return to the detail of a debate that has been well practised in this Chamber. The industry is already voluntarily doing a lot of what was asked in the amendments put by the Opposition. I am pleased with the response from my noble friends about what we have taken on board. It is never about a U-turn for a Government, it is about listening carefully and then making sure legislation works. If the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, wants to make a political point out of it, that is entirely up to the noble Lord. I would say, however, that it is really important that responsible and sensible Governments look very closely at legislation and then respond. I think that the general consensus in the House has been that we have listened, responded and returned with a much better set of amendments, which answer exactly what noble Lords opposite and their colleagues down the corridor have asked for.