Queen’s Speech

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support the gracious Speech and the two Bills that provide the focus for me tonight, the modern transport Bill and the neighbourhood planning and infrastructure Bill, as well as the links between them and the environmental issues that they both raise. It is good to see the forward-looking policies in the modern transport Bill, with everything from Cornish space stations to driverless cars. The latter are sure to spawn a huge new raft of debate about where responsibilities lie, in particular for accidents. I am sure my learned friends are up to the job of helping us on that as this interesting new line of business comes along for them. The legal minefield we are entering is obvious. Who will be held responsible—the operator or the driver long range, the owner or the designer? It is clear that machines are unlikely to be summoned in courts, although I think that eventually there will be fewer machine than human errors on our roads.

So good luck to the Department for Transport with its futurology, which I support strongly. However, I trust it will not mind if I raise also the fact that the very phrase “modern transport Bill” may ring hollow to some users of, for example, mainline trains into stations such as Waterloo from 100 miles or more around who, in the 2010s, travel still some part of the time on single-line tracks, as is the case for much of the journey from Exeter up through Yeovil as far as Salisbury on the way to London. For people who travel that way, this is a thoroughly unmodern experience, with all the delays and pauses at passing loops as though in some developing country as people go to and fro what is rapidly becoming a self-generated south-western technological and growing powerhouse—all of its own endeavours, with little direct help. I applaud what is happening in the south-west.

I know how much store the Government rightly set by infrastructure and I applaud their plans to put the National Infrastructure Commission on a statutory footing in the related neighbourhood planning and infrastructure Bill. In the meantime, always looking for fresh information, I innocently asked how many stretches of such single-line track into mainline stations there are within 120 miles of London. I was told in a Written Answer on 11 May that this information was not available. Indeed, it was a matter not for HMG but for Network Rail. That struck me as a bit peculiar. Is not mainline rail part of the critical national infrastructure? Is it not vital for national resilience and thus of great concern to HMG? Does the Department for Transport not have this stuff in its records? If not, the new National Infrastructure Commission will have to start from scratch and work anew on some Domesday Book of essential infrastructure information. For how long will the Government tolerate such thoroughly unmodern parts of infrastructure as single-line railway tracks in our present century?

Secondly, I also support the need to build new housing as part of our critical modern social and economic infrastructure, supporting as I do the drive to build more, even though it saddens us all to see even grade 4 agricultural land taken out of use and built on. I recognise that sometimes that simply must happen. The Government—local government in particular—must also recognise that once land is built on, that is an irrevocable change. Once the first turf is cut or the first tree or hedgerow cut down to expedite, say, an edge of town or village development, large or small, that is an irrevocable landscape step with no turning back. It is critical that the Government take a lead in encouraging and persuading councils to do all that they can to make such new housebuilding more acceptable to locals, as much in the interests of the incoming new occupiers as the maybe disappointed nimbys who do not much want to see the development in the first place.

Too often, it seems that local councils are satisfied that they have done their bit by their local responsibilities in extracting from housing developers chunks of money for road improvement, a new school or a better health centre. They say, “Look what we delivered”, without giving anything like adequate attention to planning for and enforcement of the low-cost environmental enhancements that make new housing developments all the more acceptable. There is the planting of deep shelterbelts with trees and hedging that make an impact in years, not decades, to soften the often raw edges of new housing developments, as well as helping to reduce flood risk through diminishing run-off, as tree-planting does. There is the use of the best possible road sound- deadening materials or, just like noise-proofing, night sky protection by getting the best possible low-reflective lighting installed. These are low-cost ways of ensuring the growing acceptability of new development and they are vital for getting such new development to happen.

This a matter of encouragement and of setting the framework. I welcome the gracious Speech in particular because it does not make that traditional government or politician’s mistake in the past of saying, in verbiage, that they can create things and make things happen. All Governments can do is create frameworks in which individuals and people can economically and socially flourish. That is why I disagree strongly with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, in her opening speech. She clearly wanted a gracious Speech rammed full of telling people what to do. That is not something that this Government ever wish to do.