Watchdogs (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate and to congratulate my noble friend Lord Hollick and his committee on a most excellent report. I was not a member of the committee, but sometimes I felt I was a lone wolf in challenging HS2 and other things over their costs over the past 10 years because there was no regulator. What struck me was that, on page 5 of the report, near the bottom, there is an interesting paragraph which says:

“Ministers and Departments responsible for specific regulators should be subject to scrutiny … the Committee was disappointed by the Department for Business and Trade’s limited engagement”.


I think that is probably putting it mildly. It probably did not turn up at all. The same applies to the Department for Transport in my fights with it. I have come to the conclusion that there may be a difference between the way that regulators can regulate commercial companies and the way that they try, sometimes successfully, to regulate government departments.

In the time available, I shall concentrate on the Department for Transport. It has sat back and seen the capital cost of HS2 go up from £37 billion to £180 billion. That is quite a jump over 10 years. When you try to challenge it, it all gets very difficult. I tried the PAC and the National Audit Office, and they were busy, as one might expect. So, I wrote to the Cabinet Secretary to ask him to investigate whether Ministers had complied with paragraph 1.3 of the Ministerial Code by failing to give an accurate and truthful account to Parliament, knowingly misleading Parliament and failing to be as open as possible with Parliament and the public. The answer to all of those was no. Simon Case, the then Cabinet Secretary, instead of doing what I asked him to do, asked the Permanent Secretary of the Department for Transport to respond. Unsurprisingly, she said everything was fine—but she would because was it her department I was challenging.

Then I was told by the Cabinet Secretary that he could do nothing unless the Prime Minister agreed. The Prime Minister at that stage was Boris Johnson, who liked HS2, so there was a circle of nobody doing anything at all and just letting this thing flounder until, finally, the Treasury was persuaded that my costs were likely to be closer to what was going to happen than those the Department for Transport was producing, and the Prime Minister then cancelled most of HS2.

Whether we think that is a good thing or bad thing does not really matter, but it demonstrates that there does not seem to be any way of challenging the Department for Transport unless it is through Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, said, that might be a good idea, but you have got to get Parliament to do it, and that is quite hard work. My preference would be for the House of Lords to be able to do it as well as the House of Commons because we have a bit more time.

This is a good report. I think there are many other bits of regulation that one could talk about—for example, nuclear power stations, the Office of Rail and Road, which does not look at road safety, and many things like that. I think an office of regulatory performance would be a very good start, and I hope that when my noble friend responds she will give it an amber, if not a green, light.