Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 18th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I have probably been the victim of more reorganisations than many of your Lordships. All of them have promised large economies and they have always promised a better future, but they have usually resulted in more expenditure and another reorganisation. So the idea that reorganising things is necessarily going to produce a revolution is wrong.

I am also concerned about the idea that this government-owned company will somehow take the influence of the ministry out of the equation. I am confirmed in that by the fact that at Reading station, where huge infrastructure work is being progressed by Network Rail, signs on the wall have just appeared saying “Department for Transport” to show that the ministry is really still in control. It is a sort of sinister creeping of bureaucracy into that company, and I think that the same may be the case with a road company.

Another thing that I would like to touch on is the way that this company is being presented as an analogy to Network Rail. It is not really an analogy. Network Rail has responsibility for the whole of the railway infrastructure as well as safety, whereas this company will have responsibility for the busiest 2% of the road network. However, there is no commitment to deal with the other 98% of the road network.

I am in favour of necessary road building where there is a strategic and a safety case for it, as there is with the A1 north of Newcastle going up into Scotland, as I have said before. However, we have to recognise that the local road network, including a lot of trunk roads, is in a sore condition. It needs substantial structural maintenance. I am not sure how much of the money promised for the proposed new highways company will in fact find its way into capital expenditure, because we have been told that a large part of the network will be resurfaced in the next few years. Most of us think that resurfacing networks is not new building; it is probably catching up following neglect of the past rather than looking to the future.

I very much endorse the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, that it is important to distinguish clearly between capital and revenue. It is also quite reasonable to borrow for proper capital expenditure, which should have a rate of return.

I want to look for a moment at local authorities, whose road expenditure is discretionary. It is expenditure that gets raided whenever schools or other local authority services, such as social services, need more money. I believe that local authorities need proper guidance on how they should repair their highways, and of course they need to be brought within the consultation machinery for any investment strategy. I also believe that the utilities do enormous damage to our highways network. They push their way in, often without regard for the motorist or the lorry driver. They declare states of emergency where I believe that such emergencies do not exist. The sanctions they suffer as a result of overruns and so on are quite ineffective in bringing any discipline. I hope that the Minister will say something about how the utilities can be brought within a reasonable discipline in their access to the highway, because they cause enormous damage.

I am concerned about the justification for new road building or for any roadworks. I believe that the benefits are much wider than the present system tends to show. Millions of small but unpredictable and imperceptible time savings are one of the major inputs to the economic appraisal of our road network. A better way is necessary to probe the economic value of improvements, which might be in housing, employment or land values, rather than the funny money used to justify it now. Is any work being done to bring the present system up to date?

Is the Minister satisfied with the present system of looking at the way in which roads are destroyed by heavy lorries, to which reference has already been made? It was probably about 30 to 40 years ago that it was decided that the damage inflicted by a heavy lorry on a road surface was the fourth power of the axle load. Cars inflict virtually no damage, which is the case with the M6 toll road, and lorries inflict huge damage, which is shown by what goes on on the M6. It is time that that also is revisited so that we are satisfied that we are apportioning the cost of roads fairly between the motorist and the heavy goods vehicle.

I was very pleased to hear the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, and the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, put in a good work for road pricing. I believe that it is the best way to ration any scarce resource. It has been maligned in the press, which gives the impression that everyone will pay more. Vast numbers of people in rural and far-flung areas will pay very much less. The busy parts of the roads cause the problems, to which a proper pricing policy should be applied. I am a veteran of driving over the bridge from Copenhagen to Malmo and Stockholm, which is financed in that way. It is a painless system which works. People who say that it does not work are wrong.

Finally, I endorse the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about level crossings. In my view, the next major railway accident will be on a level crossing. It will probably be followed by a judicial review, which will take another X number of years to come up with the recommendations that the Government already have before them. I ask them to look closely at whether the Bill can be amended in any useful way to deal with that problem.