Spending Review 2020

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I want to talk about the Green Book, which was published at the same time as the spending review. It contains very welcome reference to

“Non-market Valuation and Unmonetisable Values”.

To translate that into English, it takes into account things such as effect on air quality, noise, waste, landscape, water resources and climate change. I want to ask the Minister about something that is a Treasury responsibility. In the past, most infrastructure investment in this country has been dominated by savings in the values of time of people using mostly new roads, sometimes new railways. Now, we are moving to a new, different system of appraisal. Are we going to stop the very expensive process of calculating values of time, which are the present means of justification? How much of the investment will be guided by these other important things? The value of time that is often projected in an infrastructure proposal melts away as you have traffic congestion, which almost always rises to a point where the so-called savings materialise into nothing at all. I would like to believe that, this time, the Treasury will come forward with an alternative method that really values the many, many things that people think are better and more worth while.