North of England: Transport

Lord Clark of Windermere Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Snape speaks with such authority on transport matters, and I have heard him do so over the past 30 or 40 years. Every time I learn something, and the House learns something as well. I feel a strong empathy not only with his view on transport but with his commitment to the north of England.

I have spent almost 70 years living in the north of England in various places, from Cumbria to Manchester, Yorkshire, and the north-east of England. Even today I travel around by public transport across the three regions of the north of England. I might have some contributions to make that might not have been seen by the civil servants. They have produced a whole set of erudite documents that basically point us in the right direction, and I welcome that.

A number of us have been fighting for this rebalancing of the British economy for many years, so we welcome this. The Government are pushing at an open door, as they have already seen in the Manchester area. Manchester is an exemplary authority. When one gets off the train at Manchester Piccadilly, goes down to the Metrolink, gets on the tram and goes past the Roman walls and past the former cotton mills, which are now flats, meanders around the Manchester Ship Canal, goes down by the dockside, and sees MediaCity, one can see the transformation. It is the future. One can see industry, jobs, culture—with the Lowry and the Imperial War Museum North—and it is quite amazing. So the will is there in the north. I single out Manchester, but I could speak of Leeds, Hull or Liverpool, which are also vital to the north.

I see the north as a whole, and understand the modern industrial thrust of that “rugby league belt”, as some of us call it. However, the north is more than that. While I mention modern industry, the north cannot be seen without the north-east of England. This cannot be a patched-on bit of the northern plan, but I am afraid that many of us with links to the north-east of England believe that it is. I shall come back to that in a moment. The north is also a tourism area, with five national parks. There is huge earning potential and a huge potential for jobs.

At least two people here will know whom I am talking about when I mention my friend Eric Martlew, who, until he retired, was the excellent Member of Parliament for Carlisle. He told me that for many years there was a gap at the top of the M6, from the north of Carlisle for six or seven miles to the Scottish border where you met the M74. Eric was very keen that this stretch of road should be made into a motorway. He went to see the director of the Highways Agency for England, who said to him, “Well, Mr Martlew. I’m not sure why you are so worked up about this stretch of six miles. After all, it is a cul-de-sac”. It was said in jest but it makes a point. As the noble Lords, Lord Inglewood and Lord Jopling, reminded us, the north of England does not end at Manchester, Leeds, Hull or Liverpool, important though those cities are. I wonder what the citizens of the other big towns of the north—Preston, Lancaster, Carlisle, Bradford, which I know are cities—or Middlesbrough feel about being left out, because many of us feel that there is a danger that they are being.

I share the scepticism about HS2, popular though it might be. I am of the same view as my noble friend Lord Beecham. While it is going to be great for towns such as Manchester and Leeds which are linked directly to London, I do not think for one moment that many of the HS2 trains will stop between Manchester and London. Some of them might stop at Crewe but the timings are based on non-stop travel. The travelling time from London to Manchester is currently two hours and eight minutes, and HS2 will knock one hour off that. It is a big time saving. If we look at Liverpool, a city roughly the same distance from London—it is not quite the same size as Manchester but it is not far behind it—the time saved will be only half an hour. However, I believe that it will be much less than half an hour because it will involve a change at Crewe. If you have to change at Crewe, you will have to allow a sizeable time to make the connection.

What is true of Liverpool is even more true of Preston, Lancaster and Carlisle. At the moment there is an excellent fast service, which is non-stop after Warrington right through to London. If HS2 is implemented, the old west coast main line that we currently use will be dominated by stopping trains as you move further south, and we will lose the fast service to the south. That concerns many of us in the north.

I want to deal with one other point. Reference has been made to the roads and especially to the A69 and the A66. I do not demur greatly from what the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, said about the A66. I use it regularly. Long stretches of it are now dual carriageway, as they should be, and travelling on it is much easier. Equally, the A69 should be dualled, because the A69 between Carlisle and Newcastle is the link—I pause here just for a minute to make the point that not many people appreciate that Edinburgh is to the west of Carlisle. Once you start to realise that, the geography changes and the road changes. The great advantage of the A69 is that it is very rarely closed due to inclement weather such as snow or high winds, because there is not very much of a high area for it to go over above Greenhead. That is the one plus that it has.

I want to finish by returning to Cumbria. I declare an interest as a non-executive director of Sellafield. I want to raise the issue of transport and access on the west coast of Cumbria. Sellafield is the largest industrial site in Britain—it is probably the largest industrial site in Europe—with 12,000 people employed on the site. There is transport congestion for people trying to get there and get out in the morning and at shift changes. It is a real problem. But the problem is going to worsen dramatically. Hopefully, NuGen will get permission for the new nuclear power station, Moorside, immediately adjacent to Sellafield. Three reactors will be built and thousands of workers will have to travel there to build that plant, which will take many years. What plans does the Minister have to improve the A595, either north from the motorway or south from Carlisle? Something desperately needs to be done if we are going to make life tolerable and possible in that part of the world.

I very much welcome the Government’s conversion on this, but hope that they will understand my main point, which was really reiterating the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood. The north is a whole. We have a large tourist industry, especially in Cumbria and the Lake District—I declare another interest as chair of the Lake District National Park Partnership—which brings billions of pounds in earnings to the region and sustains tens of thousands of jobs. If we are to be sustainable in the face of climate change, we need a proper rail link with Manchester Airport, and possibly Newcastle Airport, and much more co-ordination. For example, I believe that if you fly into Manchester Airport after 9 am, you cannot get a through train to Windermere in the centre of the Lake District. That does not make sense and we ought to be getting our act together in that respect. So I wish the Government well but they should not forget to look at the north as a whole. I would particularly welcome—not now necessarily—the observations of the Minister on how we are going to tackle the transport problems around the Sellafield area.