National Infrastructure

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I have agreed with almost every speech that I have heard today. I resented the petty, demeaning, partisan comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, but they were the exception.

I tore up my notes and will use as an aid the Chamber of Commerce note that we all had because I agree with all the points it raises. When I visited an infrastructure project recently—the oldest railway tunnel in the world in daily use, a couple of miles down the road—I thought: what would Brunel think about us today, with our lethargy on infrastructure?

The message I took from the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, was crucial: the need for sequential planning to ensure that you can smooth things out and do not have all the cranes at once and then nothing for months afterwards. I think that is really important.

Let’s face it: until this Government came along, the last person to order a nuclear power station in this country was the late Tony Benn. The previous Government missed the post—we know that—with the disastrous 2003 energy White Paper. Between the start of HS2 under the previous Government and it being fully supported by this one, there was a hiatus for about a year when there was a bit of backsliding within my own party, which we had to correct in this House by making it clear that we were fully in support and wanted to buy into it.

That brings me to the point. I do not know too much about the plan for the commission and building it all together, but what is clearly needed is a grand coalition on infrastructure that goes across Parliaments. We cannot go on saying that no Parliament can bind itself; by definition, it has to bind itself on infrastructure planning, otherwise we waste a fortune in money, crash hopes, destroy industry and end up not doing anything. So it requires more than what probably is planned. We need to tie ourselves down. The consensus we have here today shows that that can be done.

On motorways, years ago I was amazed when the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, as Transport Secretary, published a paper showing how small a proportion of the population actually regularly used a motorway—in other words, those who use them should pay for them or pay a contribution. I agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, that it is not too late to do that. Energy storage was on the list as well. Our gas storage is woefully inadequate and I do not think we have done much about it in the past decade. We are heading for trouble.

The Government own enough land to build 1.5 million houses. Most of it is brownfield, as my noble friend Lord Rogers said. Why are we not using it as a master plan within the Government? I do not worship the green belt like everybody else—most of it is rubbish land. It is not areas of outstanding natural beauty and it is not the national parks—they are quite separate. It is the urban collar around the big cities where the infrastructure is already there to have houses added to. That is the key point: we do not have to go for big greenfield new towns any more. It is not necessary. We can use the land we have. As I say, the Government own enough land to build 1.5 million houses on, and basically they ought to get on with it.

I agree that infrastructure should stick with the Treasury. Whatever I might have said about the Treasury in the past, the long-term nature of the Treasury is crucial. The DWP is subcontracted to the Treasury. Every decision that it makes on pensions and benefits has a 30-year to 40-year consequential change, and it is crucial that the Treasury is four-square with that. With infrastructure, it is exactly the same. The Treasury does not have to take the detailed decisions, but rest assured that it has a bigger bite on it than it used to have.