King’s Speech

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

This was a fairly lightweight King’s Speech, and the elements of transport about which I shall speak are pretty light—although I welcome some legislation on self-driving vehicles; I am sure that we will have some fun debating that. I was very surprised to hear His Majesty say that he was going

“to deal with the scourge of unlicensed pedicabs”.

I do not know how many pedicabs he comes across in his horse and cart. That is a fairly strong word; I think that they are rather fun, but they obviously need some regulation.

I was concerned by the comment from the Minister, when he opened the debate, about the war on motorists. Is he substituting that with a war on pedestrians, cyclists and the environment? I think that we can all live together.

As my noble friend Lord Faulkner of Worcester mentioned, the biggest loss was the lack of any legislation for railways; it is very sad. He went into it in some detail, and he is absolutely right.

Many noble Lords have spoken about the need for investment, including my noble friend Lord Hain in particular detail, but it has to be a wise investment and the Government have to manage or facilitate it in a manner that is best value for money and need. They have to be honest and transparent about this to Parliament. If I have been seen as the only person in your Lordships’ House against HS2, it is not because I do not like railways—I love them—but because their work on HS2 was not followed up well. That was the model chosen by the Government, and while we can debate whether you need very high-speed rail, the costs and overspec meant that, eventually, the Prime Minister was right to cancel it.

What we have to do now is make sure that the Government, whichever Government, invest in any alternatives that many noble Lords have talked about. Is the Department for Transport capable managing this? I refer noble Lords to an interesting report that the National Audit Office put out on 6 November. It says:

“DfT is not able … to deliver all of its priorities”


or

“to deliver its major projects”.

The NAO has looked at the Department for Transport and it goes into some detail about the money that has been, and should have been, spent, and everything else like that. It gives various projects traffic lights: red, amber or green. There are one or two green projects in the Department for Transport, quite a lot of amber ones and the two bits of HS2 are of course red. I could list them all, but we do not have time for that now.

The key for me is that the NAO seems to be right in suggesting that the department seems to be incapable of managing projects or controlling costs. The HS2 case has been made worse by concealing the project costs and timescales from Parliament. I complained to Simon Case in the Cabinet Office a couple of years ago and asked him to investigate whether the DfT was breaking the Ministerial Code by misleading Parliament. He passed my letter to the Department for Transport for it to answer; that was not really the independent response I was looking for. Of course, many Lords committees and a few Commons committees have also complained about this, but, sadly, no one in government seems to have been listening to where this has got to.

I have been talking about railways, but this is about big projects; I suspect that things such as Hinkley Point C are in a similar situation, except we do not get told about it because it will all end up on our electricity bill in 10 years’ time, so maybe nobody minds. My question to the Minister is therefore: what will happen next? This has gone on for 15 years now, so is it not time for a proper independent public inquiry into what has gone wrong with the management, governance, costs and planning of HS2 to find out why nobody in the Department of Transport and the Cabinet generally, the House of Commons or the House of Lords has looked into this and demanded fully independent information on an ongoing basis? That might give some people pleasure, but the most important thing is a lesson for the future. Unless we have this, we will make the same mistakes on projects again and again, and that will not help the investment that many noble Lords have spoken about.