National Infrastructure

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I think my noble friend Lord Adonis was right to put the proposal for a national infrastructure plan at the centre of his speech, and I think this debate has rather brought that out. We need a mechanism whereby we have an overall prioritisation; an overall allocation of resources; an effective form of scheduling, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said; a consistency of project assessment, as my noble friend Lord Hollick implied; and something therefore that investors of all sorts can have confidence in, so that they can avoid the tendency to short-termism and to knee-jerk political or financial reaction.

The investors include the Treasury, but they also include the corporate headquarters of multinational companies, the banking system, the finance markets and institutions such as the pension funds. At the moment they can have virtually no confidence. For those who say that a national infrastructure commission would simply be a bureaucracy and produce all sorts of favours, I refer to all the papers emanating from several different government departments and agencies that we should have read if we were to be properly informed on this debate, as recommended by the Library. We need an overall plan. The glossy that the Government produced on the national infrastructure plan in the past month is very helpful but incomplete; it does not give its basis or, in most regards, its timescale.

I shall concentrate my remarks on areas that are not in there: energy efficiency, which is hardly there apart from a brief reference to smart meters, and housing, which is hardly there at all. Had I had longer, I would have liked to have talked about transport and flood defence, but not in four minutes. However, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, if I may depart briefly from my bipartisan approach to this, that the areas that the Government cut when they came in were exactly those: housing, energy efficiency, roads and flood defence. That was a ridiculous short-term decision, but luckily the Government have recovered from it. I hope that therefore we have a basis for bipartisanship in future.

On energy efficiency, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has spelt out the need for investment in energy efficiency at the point of use, and I echo virtually all his remarks. There is also energy efficiency in the system itself. We lose the bulk of our energy before it gets to the point of use. We need to look at improving the transmission and distribution of energy, at decentralised energy, at CHP and at carbon capture and storage, which is mentioned there but only briefly. That should all be part of an investment and infrastructure plan, and should be assessed on the same basis as, if you like, the sexier parts of the agenda, which relate to big roads and big airports. At the moment the process of assessment of such projects is very differential and, if you like, politically and subjectively charged, depending on which area you are looking at.

The same applies to housing. In a sense, the noble Lord, Lord Horam, must be right that this is the biggest lack of infrastructure failure of successive Governments in the past 30 years. Housing for our people must be a central part of the infrastructure agenda. At the moment it is not in the December document, and it ought to be. I hope that we can rectify this as we go forward. I hope that we can do so on a consensual basis, but I think we also have to recognise that we need new structures in order to be able to do so. Sir John Armitt’s report is a very good basis for starting.