Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Lord Jenkin of Roding Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friends on this amendment. It may well be that in her reply the Minister will refer to more than one of the five documents that she referred to in last week’s Committee sitting and kindly e-mailed to us the next day. I have now read them but they do not tell me a lot about the questions that we were asking. I hope that before we get to Report we will have the detail—I think that the Minister suggested that more would be forthcoming—of the relationship between a strategy, if there is to be one, a licence for this company, directions and guidance, articles, duties, governance and things such as that. However, in the case of this amendment, who is going to decide how much the staff of the new company are paid unless it is the Secretary of State?

As my noble friend said, it is beginning to look as though the only reason for making this change is so that the staff can be paid more than they are at the moment. It may be that the people who proposed this looked longingly at the remuneration and bonuses received by the senior staff at Network Rail in recent years without seeing that that is changing quite dramatically to a lower figure. Of course, once Network Rail is fully owned by the state, it may change even further. It would be interesting to hear how we are going to know who is in charge of remuneration, management, financial arrangements and staffing if it is not the Secretary of State. Therefore, I think that this is a very good amendment and I fully support it.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding (Con)]

My Lords, I take this opportunity to thank my noble friend and her private office for the help that we were given after last week’s sitting with the supply of the documents to which she had referred and to which the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has also just referred. I am very grateful. I, too, have read them, and the draft licence in particular, with all the caveats surrounding it, which I totally understand, is a very helpful indication. It might have been helpful if I had known about it when we were discussing the purposes of setting up this body and what its objectives would be.

I would have expected a remuneration committee to be the sort of thing to be covered by the articles of association. Indeed, the paper that the Minister has circulated, entitled Strategic Highways Company: Approach to the Articles of Association, makes reference to the,

“Model Articles for a company limited by shares”.

Of course, this company cannot be the same as that because, in a sense, it is rather different with all the shares owned by the Secretary of State. However, I would have expected the whole question of a remuneration committee to be covered by the articles when they are finally drawn up and issued.

It is absolutely within the powers of a board of directors to decide how that is going to operate, but I think that it is not unreasonable that the Secretary of State should keep a very close eye on this issue. Some of the remuneration that has been paid—not only in the private sector, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, implied, but sometimes also in the public sector—has been a bit absurd and given rise to a good deal of criticism and uneasiness. I should have expected the Secretary of State to want to keep a close eye on what the company is doing. As I understand it, it will primarily be for the articles of association to spell out this sort of thing, and I would be most grateful if my noble friend would be willing to confirm that.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment because it raises wider issues. Although I do not want to go over much of what was said in our previous sitting, the Minister gave some unsatisfactory answers. Since then, like my noble friend Lord Berkeley, I have read the draft licence agreement, which does not answer most of my points or, indeed, the points regarding this amendment. Before we get to Report, we need to be clear—either through draft articles of association or through some greater management guidance for the proposed, hived-off company—about what the company can and cannot do.

On reading the impact assessment, it appears that the alleged benefits of this hiving-off arise almost entirely from the certainty of funding. They do not seem to arise significantly—the £3.8 billion over 10 years arises almost entirely from the certainty of funding on maintenance and schemes within that timescale. Very little of it seems to arise from better management, novel forms of contracts or technological improvements. If that is the case, all that the Treasury and Secretary of State need to do is ensure that there is firm funding from Parliament. Admittedly, a Parliament lasts only five years, and the aggregate period we are talking about is 10 years; but, nevertheless, the institutional change of itself does not seem to deliver a significant contribution to that alleged net benefit.

The questions on how the company runs its staffing, and how it recruits and pays the management, could have a bearing on that, but it is never explicit. It is certainly not explicit in the documents to which we have referred. The anxiety of the rest of the staff and the PCS union is that, although moving away from the Civil Service may mean that the Government can pay the senior management significantly more—if they are going to go the way of HS2 and pay the 23 senior managers, the chief executive or anyone else, more than the Prime Minister, that will be difficult for anyone to accept politically—the rest of the staff will face greater insecurity, as my noble friend has said, as well as the possibility of changes to all their terms and conditions.

Therefore, for the morale of the existing Highways Agency staff, unless we are explicit about what the advantages of better management and a better situation for the workforce will be, it will be difficult to envisage a wholehearted endorsement of this proposition from the staff. Unless there is a reflection of some improved management in terms of the benefits of the hiving-off, as distinct from the substantial assumptions about what the certainty of funding delivers, the case for going through all this change begins to look a bit thin.

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[Lord Berkeley]

I am going to confuse the Committee because my Amendment 42, which we will come on to shortly, suggests that the name should be the transport infrastructure and services council. However, after I tabled this amendment I had a discussion with the chief executive of the Rail Passengers’ Council, who said that a much better name than anything anyone has suggested before, including the Government, was the transport users’ council. I will just throw that into the ring and see what the Minister and other noble Lords think of it.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

It sounds a very good name. However, might there not be some confusion with another body with the same initials—the TUC?

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I think that this amendment deserves full-hearted support. What has raised a great deal of concern is that roads should become the exclusive prerogative of drivers and passengers. Of course, they are serving the wider community, or could serve the wider community. If we are taking the opportunity for more strategic thinking about the future in transport, it seems very unfortunate inadvertently to work against that objective by limiting imagination in titles like this. Amending the title in the way suggested would begin to open up the responsibility of those who are administering roads and those who are driving on roads—passengers who are using or riding in cars—to think of the wider community. From that standpoint, I am very glad that my noble friend has moved the amendment.

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[Baroness Kramer]

I should point out to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, that it is the Passengers’ Council today; that is its legal name. If we were to include a different name in the legislation now, it would not be clear to anybody which group of people it applied to. We are identifying the organisation. It might be appropriate for that organisation to make changes to either its name or its trading name to meet the new set of responsibilities that it will have. However, if I were to put in some other name today it would not be clear that it applied to the Passengers’ Council, a body for which everybody in your Lordships’ House has great respect.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

Would it be open to the body to change its own name for popular use? I cite the example of the body that I set up when I was Environment Secretary and which is now known as English Heritage. It had some very dreary bureaucratic name—the National Council for Historic Sites and Buildings—and I appointed the noble Lord, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, as its first chairman. At his first meeting he agreed with the entire council that the name should be changed to English Heritage. That has been a huge success as it describes precisely what that body does. I have always been enormously grateful to him because he really got that body off the ground and made it a popular institution that attracts the loyalty of many millions of people. Would the Passengers’ Council be entitled to do the same thing?

[Baroness Kramer]

The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, is exactly right. Passengers’ Council is the legal name of this body. It could be changed in secondary legislation but, as I said, it uses a trading name and calls itself Passenger Focus in the work that it does with the rail industry. It is perfectly able to choose what it considers an appropriate name. I have enormous respect for the Passengers’ Council, and for it to use its correct legal name. I am comfortable leaving it to decide on the appropriate trading name to use. I suggest that we communicate to the Passengers’ Council the various names that have been suggested today, but it seems to me that the council is best positioned to test the matter with various people to discover what the public think most clearly expresses the role that it wants to carry out, rather than for the Committee to come up with an appropriate trading name. Our skill, after all, is legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, provided an excellent example of a body understanding its role and coming up with a name that resonated strongly with the public by accurately describing its activities.

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[Lord Davies of Oldham]

My Lords, we have major doubts about whether the Passengers’ Council will provide an adequate forum for the public response, so we want to take the opportunity in this new legislation of not just renaming the body, but of widening its perspective. I have tabled two amendments which seek to ensure that the interests of cyclists and pedestrians would form part of the perspective of the strategic highways company, and that the needs of local communities are taken fully on board. Major road schemes clearly have an impact on all communities. However, both of my amendments can more than safely be withdrawn because they are overwhelmed by the more extensive and detailed series of amendments which have been put down by my noble friend Lord Berkeley, and typically my noble friend Lord Judd has backed the winning side. I will certainly not move my amendments when we come to them, and I have a great deal of sympathy with what my noble friend Lord Berkeley has said.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, with great interest, and I have been pondering for a few minutes whether in fact he is right. My mind goes back, if I am allowed to reminisce, to when the then Government were planning the motorway network. At one stage this involved taking the M11 motorway from London up towards Cambridge and then to join the A14, and it went slap bang through the middle of my constituency, Wanstead and Woodford. Initially my constituents were pretty horrified by this, as indeed was I. This urban area was proposed to have, in effect, a four-lane dual carriageway going from Hackney Wick towards Epping Forest.

The Minister of Transport at the time was my noble friend—as he now is—Lord Fowler, and his junior Minister was my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke. I persuaded the Minister that they should come and spend a morning with me in Wanstead, which was the part of my constituency that would be most dramatically affected. They came to the perfectly wise conclusion that that part of the road should go underground. It would involve a cut-and-cover operation, which eventually happened.

Once that announcement had been made, though, overwhelmingly my constituents said, “Well then, get on with it”. They did not want constant delay. However, and this is the point that I want to make to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, it was held up for nearly eight years by a series of demonstrations supported by precisely the environmental bodies that he mentioned, and others. Some of them were quite clearly anarchists. They rechristened the area of Wanstead Green “Wanstonia” and declared independence, and all that sort of nonsense. The courts became bogged down with a series of cases to try to get them out, which held up the process for years to the increasing fury of my constituents, virtually none of whom took part in those demonstrations. The demonstrators were all from outside and were the kind of people who live for demonstrating. That is what makes them tick; it is their new religion. I can tell the Committee that that caused enormous irritation in the area. Now, of course, if anyone drives up to Cambridge by that route they go through the cut-and-cover and it is entirely sensible, and people say, “But why couldn’t it be done before?”.

I question whether it is possible that the monitor should regard, as it were, the CPRE and bodies like that as within its remit. It is monitoring the transport system. It is for the planning system to determine whether or not the environmental consequences are acceptable. I do not believe that the monitor should have anything to do with it. There are already enough obstacles. We are debating in another Bill the question of judicial review, because that can also be a great obstacle to getting a transport system properly up and running because of local nimbys and so on. When one is dealing with road and rail—look at what is already happening with HS2—there are enough obstacles in the way already. What we should be arguing about here, in an infrastructure Bill, is ensuring that what we want to produce actually happens without undue delay.

I hope that we shall never see anything again remotely like what happened in my constituency and indeed in other areas around the country, as plenty of former Members of Parliament will be able to testify. That has been one of the biggest obstacles to getting a modern road and rail network, and it does not seem to me that the monitor can have anything to do with that at all.

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, if this Committee is doing nothing else, it is giving us a wonderful opportunity to hear a series of very real, illustrative and important anecdotes from the noble Lord about what actually happens and what happened in his direct experience. I find that valuable in our deliberations. However, I am a bit puzzled as to why he thinks that he and I are on different sides of the fence; we are not. Of course the monitor’s job is not to make decisions in this field. A monitor’s job is to ensure that the procedures have been properly followed. All that I am arguing is that the monitor should therefore have a responsibility in the Bill to ensure that the consultations have been as wide as they should have been.

The noble Lord gave a beautiful example of how, by using good sense, imagination and contacts, he was able to persuade the relevant Ministers to come to see the situation and why his constituents felt so strongly. Unless I misheard him, he went on to say that the Ministers agreed that that particular section of road should be put underground. All I want is a situation in which the monitor has a responsibility to ensure that that kind of consultation has taken place and that it is not just up to the personal relationships and contacts of certain Members of Parliament and certain Ministers.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

I do not want to prolong this, but is that not the function of the planning system rather than of a body that is monitoring the strategic highways company and the railways? There is a separate planning system, which is going through Parliament at the moment with regards to HS2 and which has nothing whatever to do with the Office of Rail Regulation. It is a planning system and I think that these two things should be kept entirely separate.

[Lord Davies of Oldham]

My Lords, I, too, have memories of motorways. The M25 went around the north of the constituency that I represented, in Enfield. The only tunnel constructed on the M25 was there, in order to protect the interests of my constituents. Subsequently there was an additional tunnel in order to protect a great deal of Epping Forest, which I also greatly supported. However, our negotiations and discussions were nothing to do with planning authorities; we had to deal with the Department of Transport and the excessive, terrifying costs of what is involved in tunnelling. That is why the M25 is a circular route 125 miles long but has only one tunnel, which is constructed as far as the immediate neighbourhood’s interests are concerned. It was nothing to do with planning; the Department of Transport had to answer.

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[Lord Bradshaw]

My Lords, I support all that the noble Lord opposite has said. I have been here for only 15 years, but I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, will vouch for the fact that I have raised this matter, as has the noble Lord opposite, on countless occasions. I have lost count of the excuses, all of which include the words “next year”. The latest one was the promise around three or four years ago of a quinquennial review. Although it is due, nothing has happened. This is a clear example of confusion and antipathy between two government departments: the Department for Transport, which owns, as it were, the British Transport Police, and the Home Office, which owns the rest of the police force, except in London.

The fact is that this absurd barrier between the areas where the police can and cannot go is not understood and leads to confusion. Almost every night at Reading station I see the constables of the BT police standing by the windows, and on a number of occasions I have seen fights and things happening in their view but they are not able to intervene. To the public, that is absolute nonsense.

I plead with the Minister this time to take the matter away and come back with a satisfactory solution. This is the result of jealousy over jurisdiction in the police service; I cannot think why. I remember going out with a Thames Valley police patrol one day—I was on the police authority for 13 years. We went out of the Thames Valley into Warwickshire, and they told me that they could not actually make an arrest until we had turned round and come back again. This situation is stupid, it is Victorian and it is not in keeping with modern society.

The reason why I believe this matter belongs in the Infrastructure Bill is that, when the public use railway premises, they expect the police to look after the bus stops, the car parks and the cycle racks. Some of those facilities are in private ownership and some in public ownership, but the journey that the person makes is door-to-door. At present it is being expostulated by the Department for Transport that it is doing a great deal for those journeys, but many people who use public transport but feel unsafe when doing so would be much reassured if they knew that the bus stops around railway stations and other facilities were patrolled by officers who were competent to deal with whatever happened to arise. I strongly support the amendment.

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, I have to say that this is the first time that I have heard the argument advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, and my noble friend Lord Bradshaw. My noble friend Lord Bradshaw told us that he has done this many times before; I have obviously been doing other things at those times. I have listened to both noble Lords with care, and I have to say to the Minister that I think they have made an incontrovertible case. I will listen with very great interest when she replies, but she will require some extremely powerful, cogent and convincing arguments if she does not respond in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, has suggested and take this away, perhaps coming back on Report with an amendment that meets what seem to me to be totally absurd anomalies.