Transport Infrastructure

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, that has rather spoilt my opening lines. I was of course going to thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, and also to suggest that if it were not for the conventions of the House I could congratulate her, knowing that there would be a natural instinct to follow that with a round of applause. The trouble is, there was actually a round of applause. I am afraid that my response will be nothing like as entertaining.

[Noble Lords]

Oh.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

No, it is an impossible bar. Perhaps the noble Baroness would consider writing for the Spectator.

I welcome the Statement—not for what it says, which I will go through with some care—but for what it does not say, because the essence of this Statement is that it does not say “HS2 is cancelled”. That is, frankly, the only substantial point it makes. I want to make it very clear—to avoid all doubt—that Labour supports HS2, Labour supports northern rail and Labour supports the whole concept of a fully integrated, nationally owned railway system owned by the public and operated for the whole nation.

I will try to point out where the hard commitments are in this Statement—so it will not be a very long speech. I was involved in the improvements at London Transport and subsequently TfL, from the King’s Cross tragedy in 1987 until today. I am very proud of my involvement in that and of the people who worked with me. I did not expect to be praised by the Prime Minister in a Statement about northern rail, but I thank him very much. As one who has spent most waking moments over the past 12 years trying to screw more money out of the Government, I am very pleased that the Prime Minister has not forgotten his London roots and ends up saying not only how wonderful the mass transit system is but that there is more to do in London. Can I take that as a commitment for more money and, if so, how much and when? I find no other possible interpretation given the general speech.

The next commitment is, like most of the commitments in the Statement, pretty fluffy. The Prime Minister goes on to say that we are

“being held back by our inadequate infrastructure and so in the next few weeks this government will be setting out more details of a transport revolution”

When is the “next few weeks”? I thought about that phrase. A few weeks is sooner than a few months and more than a few days. Could we settle, say, on the end of March? Can the Minister give us a commitment on when this will happen? We know in this House that Ministers sometimes slip from commitments unless they are very clear, so I hope that she will be able to give us a date.

The first spending commitment is the record-breaking £5 billion of new investment in buses and bicycles. Can the Minister indicate a timeframe for that? It could be anything from a year to 50 years; it has to be set against the fact that, since 2010, the Government have inflicted cuts of £645 million a year in real terms on bus services, with 3,300 routes cut or withdrawn and fares soaring by two and a half times average wages. Just how immediate a commitment is this? Is it over 10 years? Is it over five years? Is it over an even shorter time?

I then ploughed on to see whether there was anything of substance and found nothing more until I got to page 5 of the printed version of the Statement, at which point the Prime Minister said that

“that £5 billion is just the start”.

I love these phrases: “just the start” means there is more. Does the Minister agree that that means that there is more than £5 billion? Will this be set out in the Budget?

The Statement then goes into a whole series of road improvements—you will notice that there is no commitment to any particular project; there is no money; there is no deadline. On the next page, it talks about

“new investments in the rail network across the North”

and then repeats three schemes which have already been announced, once again with no deadlines and no budget. The paragraph concludes with one of the singular commitments in the Statement:

“I can today announce that we will be upgrading the Bristol East junction”.


What a delight that that is picked out to be in the midst of this splendid speech.

I could not find anything of substance on pages 7 or 8, but then I got to page 9. There, the Prime Minister slags off the management of HS2:

“Speaking as an MP whose constituency is on the route I cannot say that the company has distinguished itself in its handling of local communities. The cost forecasts have exploded. But the poor management to date has not detracted from the fundamental value of the project.”


What is he going to do about the management? At no point in the speech that I read does he make any recommendations about that.

Page 10, once again, contains absolutely nothing in terms of commitments. When we get to page 11, we are beginning to creep up to a commitment. It starts in the middle of the page:

“The Infrastructure and Projects Authority considers that this first phase can be delivered for its current projected cost of £35 billion to £45 billion in today’s prices … if we start now, services could be running by the end of the decade.”


Then, on the next page, he says:

“So I am giving high speed rail the green signal.”


That might reasonably be interpreted as a commitment to deliver the first phase, for between £35 billion and £45 billion, by 2030. Will the Minister please confirm that that is a hard commitment?

Further on, on page 12, we now know what the decisive action is going to be to bring this project to boot: we are going to appoint a Minister. Let us hope that he or she is a near relative of the Almighty. There will be a

“Ministerial oversight group … tasked with taking strategic decisions”.


At least we will know who to blame if it all goes wrong.

The Statement goes on to say:

“There will be changes in the way HS2 Ltd is managed”,


and from page 13 we know what these are: the company will be divided in two—at least that is what I think it says. It says,

“so that the company can focus solely on getting phases 1 and 2A built on something approaching on time and on budget, I will be creating new delivery arrangements for both the grossly behind-schedule Euston terminus, and phase 2B of the wider project.”

Am I right in assuming that HS2 Ltd will be divided in two?

Now we come on to the really important question: are these hints and words an equal commitment for the whole project? Is this Statement a commitment for the whole project—phase 1, phase 2 and the northern rail? There is a little hint at the end of page 13 where the Prime Minister says,

“Northern Powerhouse Rail between Leeds and Manchester, which I committed to supporting during my first days in office.”


Once again I ask: is this Statement a commitment to all of HS2 and the northern rail project?

The Statement often says very little, except that,

“we will … explore options for creating a new delivery vehicle for Northern Powerhouse Rail. And we will start treating HS2”—

At that point, I think that the Statement changed things slightly from what has been said previously. I think it suggested that the two halves of HS2, north and south, phase a and phase b, have been divided into two but will now be in one company called High Speed North. I hope that the Minister is capable of working out how that is going to streamline the project and deliver it.

The next two pages are blank of comment. Then the Statement ends with:

“This government will deliver a new anatomy of British transport”.


But what do they actually commit to? Five billion pounds for buses and bicycles, with no programme or timetable; a commitment to build phases 1 and 2a at between £35 billion and £45 billion by 2030; at best an implied promise to do phase 2 and northern rail, with no figures, no timescale and no detail; and upgrading Bristol East junction. This is the most vacuous Statement I have ever heard repeated in this House. To thrive, the north needs a hard, measurable commitment; this Statement does not meet that test.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I feel sorry for the Minister, having to repeat all that. But what the Statement boasted in juvenile, rhetorical flourishes it lacked in detail on all fronts. It reminded me of one of those exercises that teachers give primary school children to expand their vocabulary. But it lacked detail, and transport is all about detail.

Like the noble Lord, I went through the Statement carefully and was struck by the fact that the first thing this Government apparently committed to was net zero by 2050, and the first thing they are going to do is build lots of new roads. Everyone who knows about transport knows that if you build a road, it gets full of cars immediately. We will still have cars from today on the roads in 20 years’ time. The electric vehicle revolution will not come that quickly and we cannot reach net zero if we go on with large-scale road-building projects.

What was said about east-west rail links is good, but it needs to go way beyond the few examples here. There is a lack of detail on buses beyond a nice big, shiny figure. I ask the Minister to provide us with more detail on the buses, because we can have the bus revolution a great deal more quickly than we can have the railway revolution. We could revolutionise our buses within a couple of years if we had the money and the legislative framework to do it.

I was very pleased, of course, to hear that HS2 is not going to be cancelled, but again disappointed and really frustrated by the fact that there are just a few hints of how this will go ahead in the future—a couple of avenues have been closed off, but there is no detail on how it will work or how the future will be better than the past. “We are going to change it, we are going to have a Minister”—with all due respect, it is not ministerial control that has been lacking, but good, solid day-to-day project management. However, we will obviously have to wait patiently for some time still to get the detail that we need.

I say to the Minister that this is a very grandiose series of visions but, in reality, people need certainty and consistency. They need to know the details of what will happen and, given the scale of the ambition in this announcement, it is way beyond the capacity of the Department for Transport to deal with. Work will have to be done across government. I will give just one example of what needs thinking about. If you are to have all these new buses—one hopes they will be electric or hydrogen, but in the short term we are probably talking about electric—we will need to totally reinvent the electricity grid to cope in certain parts of the country. The Minister looks doubtful: I have just come from a lunchtime event where experts in the field confirmed that we need a massive increase in our electricity capacity in parts of the country. There are lots of questions for her to answer.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

My Lords, I have four minutes to answer as many of those questions as possible.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

If the Minister consults the Companion she will see that she can extend the 20 minutes as necessary to reply fully.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

With the leave of the House, I will certainly do that to answer the questions as fully as I can at this stage. I was slightly disappointed that the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, felt that there were not enough hard commitments: I felt that the Statement was full of very hard commitments. The commitment to HS2 draws a line in the sand and removes any doubt about whether the project will go ahead. It means that phase 1 can continue at pace and that the Bill for phase 2a can come back to your Lordships’ House, because I know there is work to be done on it. We will be pushing the western leg towards Manchester and look at the eastern leg and other northern areas, where we are looking at connections into Northern Powerhouse Rail too. A very quick infrastructure plan for rail in the north will be carried out to make sure that that entire structure works well together. If it does not, clearly HS2 will not be as beneficial as it would otherwise be.

I shall stay with HS2 and then move on to buses in due course. The noble Lord mentioned governance and accountability. That is key to the way we approach HS2 and the way we interact with HS2 Ltd in future. This is not necessarily to denigrate the current management of HS2 Ltd: over successive managements there have been a series of failings, as I am sure a number of noble Lords will agree. We want to draw a line under this and start a new relationship between it and the department, representing the taxpayer to make sure that we get the best result.

This new Minister—poor thing—will have an incredibly important role to play. They will hold HS2 to account and report to Parliament every six months on its progress. Furthermore, we will encourage a culture of transparency and accountability, as stated by the Secretary of State some time ago. That is particularly important. There will be members on the board of HS2 Ltd from both the DfT and the Treasury to make sure that taxpayers’ money is spent as effectively as it possibly can be. We will also ask the IPA to report on progress every year. There will be a step change in the governance of HS2 going forward.

I apologise if I did not explain the delivery arrangements well enough. HS2 Ltd will continue as currently on phases 1 and 2a and there will be separate delivery arrangements for Euston and phase 2b. The schedule for phase 1 is 2029 to 2033; the ambition is to get trains on the track by the end of the decade.

Beyond HS2, there is the issue of buses. I have a personal love of buses. Being the Buses Minister, I obviously welcome this funding of £5 billion over five years. Noble Lords have said that there is no detail. There is a reason for that: we wanted to show local authorities and bus operators the scale of our ambition for buses. Historically, buses have known roughly what they were going to get, but this is a step change in ambition. We wanted to get that message across so that our national bus strategy, which we will develop at pace over the coming months, will set out how this investment can best be spent. There will be investment in capital and in revenue but until we have the national bus strategy I cannot say for certain exactly where all this money will go.

Another reason I cannot say this for certain is that, as we look at integrated transport systems going forward, the most important thing to think about is place-based funding. Often funding based on places is not single-modal. There might be some bus funding from one pot and some cycling funding from another pot, but a certain place will bid and, rather like with the TCF, it will offer a cohesive and integrated plan for improving local transport. We cannot just say, “Here you go, Barnsley, have an extra £1 million.” It must be more thought through than that. That will come out of how we look at the framework for the national bus strategy and how we integrate the strategy with getting local authorities to step up in partnership with their bus operators, which is essential, to make the best use of the money.

I wanted to talk about this very important issue and that same partnership. We do not need new legislation to do this. We already have the Bus Services Act, which has partnerships in it. Where partnerships exist, the ridership of buses goes up significantly. Bristol has seen amazing gains, as has South Gloucestershire, because the local authority has a really good partnership with the bus operator. The local authority puts in place bus priority measures, steps up and says, “I will give you your buses and services.” That will come to fruition over the coming months. We will work closely, as we have already started to do, with local authorities and bus operators to make sure that they are ready to seize this level of ambition. It must be collaborative.

Cycling is at a very similar stage to the bus strategy in that we need to consider the means by which we can get it to the most needed places, alongside other funding, if that makes sense.

I think I have answered all the questions. If not, I will write.