Liverpool Port Access: Rimrose Valley

Mike Kane Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) on securing this debate after many months—in an honest fashion I am sure—on an issue that is so important to both him and his constituents, many of whom are here in the Public Gallery. I extend the common courtesies to welcome the Minister to his place. I hope that he has his phone on today; hopefully good news will come, and I look forward to seeing him across the Dispatch Box on many more occasions.

I cycled the trans-Pennine trail recently, and went to both Hornsea and Southport. I did not quite go through the Rimrose Valley, but I was in that neck of the woods. What a beautiful neck of the woods it is past the Liverpool loop line going north. It is a very nice bit of our country. The locals have campaigned for five years around this well-loved urban parkland, which they do not want to see tarmacked over to provide a new dual carriageway. It is a big landmark in their campaign today that their MP has secured this debate.

Liverpool is vital, not just for the city region of Merseyside or the north-west of England, but for the United Kingdom generally. Some 40% of all Irish sea trade comes through there—31 million tonnes. It is the fourth biggest port in the UK. We are facing west and, having left the European Union, its expansion looks secure in the years to come. We are talking about almost 12 km of port along that coastline.

Peel and the port of Liverpool are making some major investments that we welcome, particularly at my end—I will not say the better end—of the Manchester ship canal. I had the pleasure of visiting Port Salford recently to see the trimodal development there that will regenerate the west of Manchester, with the ship canal, new rail links and the M60 motorway.

We cannot look at this issue in isolation. There are other large developments in the Merseyside region. I had the pleasure of being at a Merseyside maritime conference recently. I took the famous ferry across the Mersey and saw the new Everton stadium going up, in addition to what the Liverpool city region Mayor, Steve Rotheram, and the councils, are doing there. They are really upping the pace of regeneration of the city region.

As shadow maritime Minister, my colleagues and I will always welcome efforts to improve infrastructure to support the economic growth of the maritime sector. However, in my view, these plans are not ambitious enough, particularly when measured against the Government’s own green agenda and that of National Highways.

Residents living near the port already have a low life expectancy. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle said, it is 12 years lower than the national average. South Sefton already experiences some of the worst air quality in the country. My constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East is divided down the middle by the M56, so I know the problems that poor air quality brings.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) said, the transport sector is the UK’s single biggest contributor of CO₂ emissions. It is also the only sector in which we have seen emissions go up, not down. In Greater Manchester, where the Government are forcing Mayor Burnham to reduce emissions, guess what? National Highways does not have to reduce its emissions as part of that plan. A new road being constructed would only increase port-related traffic, with HGVs being the worst polluters on our roads. There has to be a better way of doing this.

I have spoken with local elected representatives, who I believe are best placed to understand the unique issues associated with a port operating alongside their residential communities. It is a basic issue of subsidiarity. Government cannot just set up city regional Mayors in Greater Manchester, Sheffield, Doncaster and Liverpool and then ignore the powers they have given them. Local politicians and the people they represent are best placed to help fashion local policies and transport infrastructure.

I have heard from local Members about the community cohesion that comes from having this kind of space in a heavily industrialised and urban area of north Liverpool. I hear it provides opportunities for safe, clean and active travel, which is so important and is one of the things I commend the Government on—particularly the last Administration and the last Prime Minister, who was so keen on this and put investment in. I hear that it is a well-used commuter corridor and, in addition, it offers a vital habitat to many species. We must look at alternatives to the scheme, and listen to councillors, MPs, the Metro Mayor and local residents, but there is a more fundamental issue: building a road through a valued green space is a very 1980s answer to the issue of road congestion. It is a “one more lane will solve it” attitude, but we know that one more lane does not solve things because of the impact of induced demand; we know that if we build more roads, we will attract more traffic.

I have not checked with the House of Commons Library, but a news article recently stated that there are now 40 million licensed vehicles on our roads. We want the freedom to drive—that is important—but that figure has almost doubled in the last 30 years and it is not sustainable, because we see the solution as just building and building more roads. We need a Government who are committed to an integrated and innovative transport strategy, including investments in the railways and particularly east-west connectivity, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) said. We still do not have that connectivity.

There was a guy called Daniel Adamson from Manchester. He came up with the idea and built the ship canal. He coined the phrase “northern powerhouse” in the 1860s, describing an economic region from the Mersey basin to the Humber estuary that would be connected. If that were connected properly, it would be the 10th-biggest economic unit on the planet, but we do not have that connectivity, as we all know. I know that the Minister knows it, because he represents a constituency not far off that corridor.

The money allocated to this project could and should be spent on sustainable solutions to port access, such as rail freight capacity, not least because of the climate emergency that we are facing, the public health crisis associated with air pollution, and the substantial loss and degradation of green space. A new road is not the solution, when we can be creative, as we have been at the port of Liverpool, with a purpose-built rail terminal on the banks of the ship canal, allowing co-ordinated onward transport.

The campaigners are not seeking merely to shift the issue from Rimrose Valley, away from the A5036 and on to another borough or area. They are keen to find the right solutions, the best technology, the right route and the right location. It is my view that we should support them and my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle in doing so.