National Infrastructure

Lord Sassoon Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon (Con)]

My Lords, as the former Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has initiated this debate on infrastructure today. I should note that I am currently the chairman of the China-Britain Business Council.

This is the first infrastructure debate in which I have spoken from the Back Benches and I will start by congratulating my successor, my noble friend the Minister, on the expertise, the energy and the success with which he has driven forward the UK infrastructure agenda in the past two years.

No Government in recent UK history have better understood the case for improving investment in and planning for the United Kingdom’s national infrastructure. This Government have spent more and they have spent better than the last Government ever did.

Let us remember that note which was left by the last Government in the Treasury drawer in May 2012, saying:

“I’m afraid there is no money”.

That was the appalling background against which the easy thing to do would have been to cut infrastructure expenditure—but this Government did the difficult but correct thing of increasing capital spending, initially by up to £2.3 billion a year and then by switching a further £5 billion a year from revenue to capital spend.

Not only was it more expenditure, it was against a plan which the last Government never had: the first ever national infrastructure plan, to set out the challenge and to give transparency to infrastructure investors and contractors. That plan was and is at the heart of this Government’s pro-growth policies, and it is a plan against which the Government have regularly reported progress.

We also inherited a PFI programme which had been poorly executed by the last Government, with endless cases of inflated costs borne by taxpayers and excessive profits made by investors. This Government have attacked those excessive costs and, by the end of 2012, had exceeded their initial target of saving £1.5 billion.

This Government have not dodged the most difficult infrastructure challenges. As far back as 2003, the last Government published a White Paper on UK runway capacity, but for seven years they did not act on it. But this Government have set up the Davies commission to make a detailed study and recommendations on runways in the south-east. The last Government were frit. This Government have risen to the difficult challenges.

On the international front, the Government have put infrastructure at the heart of our commercial relationship with China—a relationship which had no such dimension under the previous Government. It has led to Chinese investment in our water and in our airport infrastructure, and that is to be welcomed. I would be interested to hear from my noble friend about the even more important prospects for Chinese investment in nuclear power and in high-speed rail.

Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred at some length to the proposal for a new infrastructure commission. The last thing we need is another quango, more paperwork and more layers of bureaucracy. I hope that my noble friend will assure the House that this is neither necessary nor something that the Government will entertain.

I have noted the recent work of the new UK Regulators Network. It seems an excellent example of how well this Government are taking forward the huge and difficult infrastructure challenge, and I commend my noble friend for that initiative.