High Speed Rail (West Midlands–Crewe) Bill

Lord Birt Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I shall be echoing the enthusiasm for this project of the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson.

When I worked at Number 10, I led a year-long project for the then Prime Minister on our national transport infrastructure, working with a team of officials from the Department for Transport and the Cabinet Office. We identified clearly that the UK, a pioneer of transport infrastructure in the 19th and early 20th century, had fallen way behind. In the previous 50 years, we had invested a far lower share of GDP on our infrastructure than other leading countries. Our work demonstrated that, again and again, Governments of both major parties had cut back on planned capital spend whenever a national financial difficulty arose. As a result, the UK had by far the poorest road and rail infrastructure of any developed country. Few of our decision-makers have ever worked in the real economy, I am sorry to say, and they have scant understanding of modern business and of why fit-for-purpose, globally competitive infrastructure is so essential.

Today, business relies on people with advanced professional, specialist and technical skills: financial, strategic, digital, logistical, data science skills and many, many more. They often work for just a few months, on a project basis. Such skills are barely ever available locally in sufficient number. So many people at every level in modern business travel long distances to work, some daily and some weekly, up and out early on Monday, back late Thursday, home-working Friday. At the same time, goods, products and parts of every possible description are distributed urgently at every hour of the day, to every corner of the land. Strategic roads, lamentable though they are in the UK, are by far the most important part of our transport infrastructure. However, rail matters too, and our rail network has long been a disgrace.

We simply must create a long-term, 20 to 30-year plan, not only for effectively linking the huge metropolitan areas of the north to one another but also for linking them and the great Scottish cities to London. Beyond that, we must address lateral travel right across the UK. Manchester and Leeds are 40 miles apart, but it takes over an hour by rail to travel between them. Norwich is 206 miles from Liverpool; the train journey takes five and a half hours, travelling at a snail-rail pace of just 37 miles per hour. Someone leaving London on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner to New York at the same time that Norwich fans left for their opening match of the season against Liverpool just a few weeks ago would have arrived 17 minutes before them.

As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, France opened its first HSR link from Paris to Lyon almost 40 years ago. Japan, Spain and France all have advanced HSR networks now around 1,800 miles in length. China has built an incredible 11,000 miles of high-speed rail in the last six years alone. This, my Lords, is our global competition. Currently, the UK’s only high-speed rail link, from Folkestone to St Pancras, is a measly 67 miles long. How embarrassing for our nation is that?

If HS2 survives its current scrutiny, we will still lag far behind other countries, albeit with a less shaming 400-mile HSR network all of our own. Whatever the project, it must of course be run efficiently, at least possible cost and with real environmental sensitivity. We would all agree on that, but only those who have never themselves managed a large, complex project can barefacedly protest when unexpected difficulties arise or when honest attempts to identify the full cost of a project prove flawed. Beyond that, those selfsame critics often show no appreciation at all of the difference between revenue and capital spend—the latter an investment to have an impact over many decades, perhaps centuries. The Minister reminded us that the west coast line was started 200 years ago. What a return on investment that has proved; it has paid for itself over and over again.

HS2 is a vital foundation of our future rail infrastructure and should be supported wholeheartedly. We should run the project as efficiently and as cost-effectively as we can. But we should also hold our nerve and, Brexit or not, in respect of our national infrastructure we simply must regain Britain’s one-time boldness and ambition from centuries past.

Seaborne Freight

Lord Birt Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, as I said, the DfT is not party to the dredging work. I am not able to comment on the value of contracts held by entities other than my department. Dredging of the port is the responsibility of the relevant port authority and continues to form part of the ongoing discussions. As I said, the DfT will continue conversations with a number of stakeholders, including Thanet Council, over plans to re-establish the ferry service.

On the money paid around the Seaborne contract, the contract awarded to Seaborne was part of a broader procurement exercise to secure additional freight capacity after Brexit, and as part of that the three contracts were awarded. Extensive third-party due diligence was carried out on these so a cost would have been attached to the process even if we had never entered into an agreement with Seaborne.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister has told us that substantial commercial due diligence was done on this deal, yet the Secretary of State’s Statement says clearly says that Seaborne,

“was backed by Arklow shipping”.

It goes on to say that Arklow offered support for the proposition, and finally that Arklow,

“provided confidence in the viability of this deal”.

Will the Minister explain more clearly than she has so far what the backing was, what the support was and what the assurances were?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, I take this opportunity to remind the House that no taxpayer money has been transferred to the company and the Government stand by their robust due diligence carried out on Seaborne Freight. Perhaps it would be helpful if I read out some specific reassurances that Arklow provided to us. It said:

“Arklow Shipping has been working with Seaborne for twelve months in connection with Seaborne’s proposals to develop new freight services between the UK and continental Europe. Arklow Shipping is therefore familiar with Seaborne’s agreement with Her Majesty’s Government to provide additional freight capacity … In support of the current proposals to develop the shipping route … Arklow Shipping intends to provide equity finance for the purchase of both vessels and an equity stake within Seaborne which will be the operating entity of this project … Seaborne is a firm that brings together experienced and capable shipping professionals … I consider that Seaborne’s plans to deliver a new service to facilitate trade following from the UK’s departure from the EU are both viable and deliverable”.


That is from Arklow Shipping, which, as I said, is Ireland’s largest shipping provider and one of Europe’s biggest. That letter has now been published on the GOV.UK website.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Lord Birt Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 20th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who exhibited his normal entrepreneurial and visionary flair.

I have no doubt whatever that, one day, all vehicles will be electrically powered and autonomous and that, as a result, travel by road will be safer, faster and carbon-free. However, this Bill is but a modest, incremental step towards that very distant goal.

Electric vehicles are not new. In 1899, a Belgian electric vehicle, “La Jamais Contente”, which looked like a torpedo with a man perched uneasily on the top, was the very first vehicle of any kind, anywhere in the world, to break the 100 kilometres per hour speed barrier. All new cars in the UK will have to be electric by 2040—earlier in some countries. Anyone purchasing a car in or around 2030 will be wary of buying anything other than an EV, because the resale value of a carbon emitter will become so low. So, in a little over 10 years, the rush to buy EVs may well have begun.

Currently there are 37 million vehicles in the UK, of which only 140,000 are plug-in electric—and these EVs have access to only 15,000 charge points at the moment. Think how much energy is required to move nearly 40 million heavy metal objects across long distances—the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, gave us a very vivid illustration of that. Full electric mobility will exactly double our current demand for electricity. Moreover, at the very same time, to meet our carbon targets to which we have all agreed, gas and oil heating will itself be replaced by electric heating and overall demand for electricity will be triple what it is now. EVs will be by far the most power-hungry devices connected to the low-voltage grid, so a massive investment in the local grid will be needed to cope with the huge increase in domestic demand.

My first question is: when will the Government produce a plan for the transformation of the electricity generation and distribution system to accommodate this tripling of demand—a demand that must be served by non-carbon means? Furthermore, the Government’s thinking on a charging infrastructure for tens of millions of EVs appears to be in its infancy, as the Bill demonstrates. My second question is: when will the Government produce a strategy for charging to match the scale of the demand that will surely occur?

I turn to CAVs, connected and autonomous vehicles—a far less mature technology than EVs. The Secretary of State has said that we shall have,

“fully self-driving cars, without a human operator”,

on UK roads by 2021. This Bill provides a framework for authorising such vehicles. I have been heavily involved with organisations at the forefront of digital technology for 25 years, including leading global players. I have the most direct experience of the awesome power of these technologies and of their transformative impact. However, in every single organisation in which I have worked, digital technology has also often gone wrong. This is an embryonic, still nascent technology. For instance, we cannot get wi-fi to work reliably in the Palace of Westminster. On almost all technology platforms, one piece of software exposes bugs in another. Malign elements at home and abroad penetrate deep into our systems. The notion that we can reach level 5 autonomy by 2021—what the Secretary of State described—is a fantasy.

Toyota was the most innovative car maker in the second half of the 20th century. It invented lean manufacturing and produced reliable vehicles, thus ending the era—an unwelcome part of my youth—of push-starting cars in second gear on cold winter mornings. When the careful, measured CEO of Toyota’s research arm recently said that,

“we are not even close”,

to level 5, I found it all too easy to believe him. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, illustrated brilliantly, how can technology reliably master 100% of the extraordinary complexity of the driving experience, in all circumstances, overnight? In a Renault test, the sensors fogged up and the system tanked. I invite noble Lords to look at the BBC website to see the driverless Nissan in east London. It stops impressively at zebra crossings and traffic lights but it is completely thrown by the—admittedly unusual—sight of a broken-down emergency vehicle with fluorescent flashes being ferried on the back of a trailer with a big blue turn-right sign on the rear. It would have flummoxed me and it certainly flummoxed the driverless car.

There have been many crashes of autonomous vehicles in California, not least because the way CAVs currently move confuses human drivers and thus triggers human error. We must be extremely cautious about allowing CAVs on to our roads. It will certainly be a very long time indeed before I will be trying out a CAV on a crowded M6 on a stormy winter evening and risking meeting one of the double platoons of heavy goods vehicles described by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. So my third question to the Minister is: how will the licensing system for CAVs work? I simply do not understand it and I suspect other noble Lords do not, either. What criteria will be applied before these vehicles are allowed on our roads?

Finally, bold, unevidenced statements appear to be a growing feature of our modern politics on all sides. In recent times Ministers and officials have loudly proclaimed, “We will keep Britain at the forefront of CAV technology”, or, “We are at the front rank of electric vehicle technology”. There are many more such examples. My fourth question to the Minister is: what evidence is there to support these confident claims? I can find none. If you look at the sector analysis, the global leaders of these technologies are, unsurprisingly: GM; Ford, which acquired Argo AI, a collaboration between former Google and Uber executives; Honda, working with Alphabet’s Waymo; and Renault and its partners, including Microsoft. No British names appear in the global tech analysis.

I will offer some hard numbers. In the past few days I have looked at patent applications for CAV-related technologies to the end of 2016. US companies had 10 times, German five times and Japanese 4 times the number of patents applied for by UK-based companies. What evidence does the Minister have to persuade us that the Government’s rhetoric is justified and that we are leaders and not laggards in this important new technology? We must prepare for electric vehicles and we should be alert to the potential of autonomous vehicles, but we need a far bolder vision and plan for both than we have yet seen from the Government in this Bill.