Transport: Zero-emission Vehicles, Drivers and HS2

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend. I note his reflections and, to be honest, I share his disappointment to some extent, but I accept the decision. He made some valid points about the challenges that still face the HS2 project as a whole, and I agree: there are no major infrastructure projects that do not have significant challenges. But it is heartening to know that the Government are beefing up the governance arrangements of HS2 Ltd. A new chief executive is being recruited, and Sir Jon Thompson, the new chair who took his place in February, is very much involved in the recruitment to make sure that we get the right person to take the project forward.

My noble friend mentioned that there is some switch from capital to revenue—that always makes a Transport Minister excited because we do get much revenue funding in transport—but it is still mostly capital, of course, because we are talking about capital spend. This is an opportunity to mention one other piece of good news that I have not been able to mention to date: the “Get Around for £2” bus fare cap has been extended to the end of December. Again, that is revenue spend, and it is being used by millions of users. It has been really well received, and I am very pleased that we have been able to extend it.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interest as chairman of the Great Western Railway stakeholder board. It is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, who in the view of many of us was the most outstanding and successful Secretary of State for Transport in the past 12 years. The very good sense with which he spoke in this debate is an indication of why he is regarded with such respect.

The noble Lord was absolutely right in all his points. I do not intend to repeat them, but I would like to address the Minister, for whom I feel enormous sympathy because she has defended High Speed 2 day after day from that Dispatch Box and has not been supported by everyone in the House—and certainly not by everyone on the Benches behind her. She has now come along to defend a decision that is, frankly, absolutely indefensible because of the damage it does to the future prospects of the great cities of this country, as the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, said.

I have one question, which occurred to me when I heard the Prime Minister’s statement and read the documents today: what has happened to Great British Railways? Has it now been completely junked? If so, would it not be honest of the Government to say so? It is not a question of waiting for parliamentary time or using other means of establishing Great British Railways, about which I have written to the Minister. Is it still the Government’s intention that there will be a guiding mind and that the decisions about the future of British railways will at last be taken by people who understand how they work?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I reassure the noble Lord that it is still the Government’s intention that there will be Great British Railways. As I have said previously, it will depend on parliamentary time, but an enormous amount of work is of course going on in the meantime to establish an interim guiding mind to get as many things as we can. There are matters to work through as we develop the guiding mind principle—industrial action obviously being one of them—to give the senior leadership the head space they need to make some significant changes to establish a guiding mind.