Unduly Lenient Sentences

Debate between Mike Penning and Geraint Davies

Wednesday 6th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Sir Mike Penning]

I am a great advocate of devolution—I was a Minister involved in devolution. This is a devolved matter; this is about English courts and Welsh courts. I do not really understand why, in the limited time we have for this debate, the hon. Gentleman is going to talk about what is going on in the Scottish courts. We can have a debate on that another day. This is about English and Welsh courts.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

Order. This is a matter for the Chair. The Scottish National party is entitled to respond to the debate. I invite Mr McDonald to continue.

Coastguard Modernisation

Debate between Mike Penning and Geraint Davies

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

Rather than just using the radio, the new centre has unbelievable communication. The state-of-the-art technology has been put into that building at huge cost to the taxpayer, and it is a real shame that I cannot use all the buildings around the country and can only use the one.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Minister in his statement when considering the pros and cons of Milford Haven and Swansea said that “there are no operational reasons for choosing one of these sites rather than the other”, and that the building in Swansea will remain operational. He said that Swansea was switched off in a planned way to enable Milford Haven to take over, but will he accept that on a number of occasions Milford Haven has closed down in an unplanned way, that Swansea is the second busiest coastguard, that the protest involved hundreds of thousands of people compared with a much smaller protest from Milford Haven, and that people locally will rightly see this as a cynical political, rather than operational, move that will affect the risk to Cardiff, Newport, Swansea and Devon?

[Mike Penning]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s disappointment. I went to Swansea and, after the driver drove through the picket, went back to speak with everyone on the picket line as well as all the staff. I fully admit that there was a planned shutdown during my visit, just as there was a planned shutdown while the refurbishment took place at Swansea, when Milford covered it for weeks and weeks. I am sorry that he was not fully informed about the number of closures that took place in the past. He is absolutely right that sometimes stations go down without warning, which is why we need a national resilience system, which we do not have today. That is the most important thing.

Swansea Coastguard

Debate between Mike Penning and Geraint Davies

Monday 12th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

We have eight minutes left, and I have taken many interventions. We would have been a lot further on had I not done so, but that would not have been fair to hon. Members.

The hon. Gentleman has made many points, and I will answer as many of them as I can. Many of them were made in the consultation process. Although I am unable to answer all the points today, when the consultation is over we will respond. All the points that the hon. Gentleman has made tonight will be part of the consultation.

I was trying to build a picture of the coastguard around the country and of the people who actually do the job. I have said to myself, and to Sir Alan Massey, the chief executive of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and to my chief coastguard as we have gone around the country, that the Government know that 18 is not the figure that should remain and that the figure should be around about eight or nine. That was put to us in submissions from around the country. In Belfast, it was put to me that there should be eight. I asked the Belfast coastguard, which works very closely with the Swansea coastguard co-ordination centre, why it had chosen in its submission to keep Swansea and not Milford Haven. Everybody who was there will know that Belfast said that its submission was based on the cost of closing Swansea compared with the cost of closing Milford Haven.

To answer one of the points made by the hon. Gentleman, I came back to London and asked for those costs to be analysed. I felt that if we were going to do this right around the country—hon. Members should remember that we had not come to our full conclusions on which stations should stay open and which should close, and whether or not that would mean having part-time, “day manning” stations, or 24-hour stations—I needed to make sure in my own mind, for when I stand before the House and others, that the MCA’s early cost analysis on the choice of Swansea or Milford Haven was right. When the figures came back, I was told that that analysis was not right. I was told that if we were to come out of Swansea completely, it would be a very close fiscal decision between Swansea and Milford Haven.

We then completed the process, Mr Deputy Speaker—

[Geraint Davies]

You’ve been demoted, Mr Speaker.

[Mike Penning]

Sorry, Mr Speaker. We have known each other for many years, and I am sure you will not take offence. Oh, dear.

We looked at the main concerns, which included 24-hour stations and local knowledge. In the Secretary of State’s statement, we accepted those two points. We felt that leaving the station open as what I, as an ex-fireman, would call a “day manning” station was not right and we had to come up with a formula that would allow us to come down to the numbers that we needed to come down to while having the national resilience that we were looking for and a maritime operations centre or headquarters that could feed out in major incidents. So we made two decisions. The first was to come down to the key 24-hour stations and to have one MOC, not two, which actually will give us enough money to keep stations open 24 hours a day.

The second decision was obvious. It was obvious to me when we were doing the work that, if we were worried about topography, as I call it, being an ex-fireman, and local knowledge, which was the general concern, we ought to look at the pairs—or the twins or whatever we want to call them—which cover for each other regularly. That is how they have been structured. We did not have national resilience, which is why the coastguard co-ordination centres were paired off. They covered for each other. Some were paired off quite arbitrarily. For instance, Belfast was paired with the Clyde. But they did it and it worked. We decided that, if those were the criteria for pairing, we would take one of the pairs away. They are in the consultation now because initially the proposals did not include Swansea. However, having decided to move one of the pairs, logically we had to consult on Swansea and Milford Haven, as well as Liverpool and Holyhead—Liverpool was in the consultation with Belfast and the plan had been to close Holyhead—the 24-hour centre in northern Scotland and the Western Isles and the single MOC. That was the basis of the consultation now.

Severn Crossings Toll

Debate between Mike Penning and Geraint Davies

Thursday 19th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Penning)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, in this ground-breaking debate. I wish I had been the first ground-breaker this afternoon, but the Under-Secretary of State for Wales got in first. It is a pleasure to be here, and to respond to the Select Committee’s genuinely excellent report. I had the honour and privilege to give evidence to it early in my time as a Minister.

When I looked at the history of Ministers in my Department, I wondered whether I would be here today. The average life expectancy of a Transport Minister is eight months, and I have been in the post for a year and a day. I am either doing something very wrong, or the Prime Minister has forgotten about me.

To be honest, I was pleased with the report in many ways, not least because it removed some of the myths to which my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies), the Committee Chairman, alluded. I will try as best I can to respond to the debate, instead of reading out a speech that was written for me, and I will do that as a Minister for the United Kingdom.

The two bridges are national assets, and owned by no one, except that the second one is temporarily owned by the company that was set up to facilitate it. The freehold land that it sits on is the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Transport, and the toll booths in Wales are also his responsibility. The analogy is interesting. I have a map that shows the boundary between England and Wales. The original bridge is solely in England, and the new bridge, as it is still called, is predominantly on English soil and water.

That is unimportant, because the bridges are national assets, and I fully respect the concern of the Welsh community, particularly in south Wales, about the importance of the bridge and its efficient working. I also respect the concern about the contract that was entered into when I was still a fireman; most of us here, although not me, were very young in the early days of the private finance initiative, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth alluded. With hindsight, would we be in such a position today? Of course we would not, whether or not the previous Government were still in place.

As colleagues who know me are aware, I am not hugely party political. Nevertheless, I could not help thinking that we had 13 years of a Labour Government and although 2015 is approaching, we are only one year along from when the previous Administration were in place; the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) alluded to that point from a sedentary position. What work did the previous Administration do to bring in some of the technology that I will talk about in a moment, and what is going to happen at a later date, possibly in 2017? I will touch on some of those points in a moment, but the issue depends on the funding that the users put into the bridge as we go forward.

The Chair of the Welsh Affairs Committee is a good friend of mine, but he alluded to a tax on Wales. In reality, it is a tax on anybody who uses the bridge. There is an extensive haulier community in my constituency, and I am the Minister responsible for roads, freight and so on. Hauliers from England, Scotland and Ireland, and those from continental Europe, who also pay the tolls, might take issue—although perhaps only fractionally —with the comments made by the Chair of the Welsh Affairs Committee. I understand, however, how emotive the subject is.

Let me touch on some of the points raised. I will not repeat the brilliant history lesson provided by my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth—again, I am praising the Chair of the Welsh Affairs Committee—because there is no point going over it again. We all know where we are, and many hon. Members know the situation better than I, despite what I have learned over the past year since taking this position. I, too, sat in queues at the tolls for many years when Wembley stadium was being rebuilt and the wonderful Cardiff stadium was used. I sat in that stadium on many occasions, supporting the England rugby team. I will leave the results for others to comment on.

For me the key questions are where we are now, what we can do in the short term and what is the long-term proposal for the bridge. I listened to earlier comments about technology. It is ludicrous that in the 21st century, technology is only just arriving at the toll booths on the crossing. However, some of the comments made during the debate about what can and cannot be used at the tolls were not factually correct; if my officials are wrong, I apologise. The hon. Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden)—I apologise if I pronounce some of the constituency names wrongly; my Welsh is not brilliant and as a cockney lad I was not taught it at school. I mean no offence. [Interruption.] I admit that I picked the easy name first.

A debit or credit can be used at a manned toll booth. It can be used at any time, but it depends on whether the booth is manned. The Chamber will be pleased to know that according to information that I received today, it will be possible in July to use non-PIN card technology at the booths. That is crucial because the use of PIN technology creates delays. I will come on to further technology later in the debate, but my information suggests that that will happen in July—I was told it would happen in the summer, and “July” is written in brackets after that.

The company has an agreement with the banks, but we have had to assist with that to obtain that sort of technology. As hon. Members will imagine, banks prefer PIN technology because of the risk of fraud. We have resolved that issue, however, although there was some surprise about that, not least because we had to get through European legislation. Nevertheless, we succeeded in doing so and in July people will be able to cross using non-PIN card technology, which will help enormously—I am sure hon. Members will hold me to that, and I will hold the company to account should it not happen.

The removal of the 30 seconds that would be added to a transaction through the use of a PIN will help speed through the just under 4,000 vehicles per hour the booths are capable of dealing with. Interestingly, the capacity of the M4 is greater than that when everything goes correctly. I hope that in five hours’ time when the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) makes that journey, the severe tailbacks that were reported to me earlier will have gone—I am joking; as I understand it, the road is clear although information comes in regularly.

The other day, I was pleased to announce a huge investment of £100 million in the M4/M5 managed motorway network. That money comes from the central fund, and will dramatically change the traffic situation on that side of the bridge. As hon. Members know, my background is in the fire service, and I was very sceptical about managed motorways when I first looked at the technology; to me, hard shoulders are dangerous areas that were designed for a reason.

Nevertheless, when the managed motorways system was piloted on the M42 under the previous Administration, it was massively over-engineered at the time, but it worked. We have since moved the engineering down, and rolled the system out around the country. A £100 million investment is being provided in difficult times to the M4 and M5 around the Bristol area. Colleagues will know how difficult the bottleneck on those two major arteries can be, and that will be alleviated once the roadworks are finished. That is always a problem—it is no pain, no gain when it comes to roadworks.

While we are talking about pain, most colleagues will receive a letter from me tomorrow stating that we intend to start work on the road surface of the new bridge. Work will start—I can give the exact date—on 9 June and run until 14 July on the eastbound carriageways, and between 6 September and 11 October on the westbound carriageways. That is due mostly to the fact that the inside lane in both directions is severely worn and will have to be completely replaced.

We looked carefully at how to manage the obvious disruption that will take place. Options included a contraflow system and shutting the bridge while work is carried out. The option that we went for will extend the work—overall it will take about five weeks to put a new waterproof membrane on the bridge and surface the road—but it will leave at least one lane open each way. We made the decision not to shut the bridge or use a contraflow system that would have caused more expense and extensive delays. There will be delays, for which I apologise, but investment must be put into the bridge because of its age, and that will be done. It is a reflection of the amount of traffic that the bridge carries.

The only party political point that I will make during my speech will be to touch on the recent elections and my Welsh colleagues’ proposals to fund the costs of the toll increases through the Welsh Assembly. It is entirely up to the Welsh Assembly whether or not it wishes to use its funds in that way. If the Conservative party had been elected, it would have been its decision how to run the economy in Wales, just as today’s Administration make those decisions. If the Conservative party—or any other party as the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) said earlier—decided that it wanted to fund the cost of the difference between the toll today and the proposed increases under the contract agreement, that could be negotiated with the United Kingdom Government. My door is open to the Welsh Assembly, under the respect agenda to say the least. I wrote to my counterpart in that Assembly—I must now write again because the holder of that position has changed—and offered my assistance.

I am speaking on behalf of the Department rather than the Treasury, but if that money were used to offset the difference, the contract would not be affected and would remain in place. The only difference would be that money would be recouped from the Welsh Assembly rather than directly from the tolls. It is a complicated legal issue. It sounds simple, but it is quite complicated. Did I know about this? I have to be perfectly honest: the answer is no. However, that does not mean that we would not get into negotiations or provide every assistance for that to happen.

All the discussions that we have had to date, including in the Select Committee, have been based on whether there could be a reduction in the toll at night or a reduction in the toll for local residents. I must admit that the position is much more complicated in this case than it is in the case of the two other major bridges that are often cited. Could there be no increases whatever? Everything comes down to the fact that a contract is in place that says that the company is allowed, after costs, to recoup X amount of money before the bridge is handed back into the full ownership of the Secretary of State.

If I were the company, would I want to negotiate any changes to the present contract? Probably not. So what we are talking about is an increase in the time that the tolls would be there. At every stage when I talk about the tolls and the bridge and we have these discussions, it is a question of a balance between the length of time that the bridge is out of our ownership, based on the contractual agreement that we have, and when it could come back into our ownership and decisions could be made.

It would be wrong of me to say that we are not thinking about what will happen at the end of the concession agreement. Of course, we are thinking about what will happen. However, as I have said, this is a national piece of infrastructure and a cross-departmental matter. It is a national asset. I am sure that the Welsh Assembly and the Welsh people will understand that we will have to consider what happens to the bridge in the context of the investment going into our networks. However, no decision has been made.

[Geraint Davies]

Naturally, the debate focused on whether we could reduce the toll to £1 up to 2017, but I infer from what the Minister has said that if the money was forthcoming—for example, from the Welsh Assembly or from anywhere else—to pay down the debt now, the bridge would move into public ownership earlier than 2017, in which case we could have lower tolls now, although perhaps not a toll of £1. Can the Westminster Government now pay down that debt from their own money, with a strategy of recovering the money that they pay it down with by reducing the toll now to somewhere between where it is now and £1, so that we could have a lower toll sooner, albeit not as low as £1?

[Mike Penning]

This is where I wish that I had not joined the Army at 16 but had gone to university and become a corporate lawyer. We can discuss the legalities in quite simple terms. Nothing at all can be done without the agreement of the concessionaire, so should the company decide that it does not want to do what has been suggested, that will be a fact. We are trapped in a contract; everyone knows that and the Committee examined the matter in detail.

I can see the logic of where the hon. Member for Swansea West is coming from, but the Welsh Assembly subsidising what would be the increase this year would not cause the contract to be terminated earlier, because all that would happen is that the same money would be recouped from the Assembly or whoever wanted to pay it as would be recouped from tolls. Thus the length of time would be exactly the same. I will write to the hon. Gentleman—the lawyers are probably panicking as they listen to the debate—to clarify exactly what the legal position is. However, I am certain—this is what all the advice says—that if the company that was formed specifically for this purpose does not want to play ball, there is nothing that we can do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Penning]

No. That would be a spending commitment, and I do not have the authority in my lowly position to dream of ever giving one. I know that the hon. Gentleman would not want to put words into my mouth, but the answer is no. The only way of funding that before 2017 would be through the concessionaire, and the discussion would be about whether it is willing to fund it under the existing contract—I doubt whether it would be. If we did not allow the company to increase the toll, it would look for an extension or—this is within the contract, and it would have every right to do so—to seek compensation from the Treasury. That, too, is unlikely.

By a miracle, a document has appeared before me. It says that SRC is prepared to negotiate extending the TAG scheme for car sharing. Naturally, however, it will not want to be financially worse off. That may not fully answer the question asked by the hon. Member for Newport East, but it is the best that I can do. I want to be as open as I can about this. I shall write to SRC saying what I was told during the debate and asking the company to clarify its position. I shall share that information with colleagues. It is only right and proper to do so.

I realise that I still have plenty of time, but I have no intention of filibustering—not least because Members wish to disappear. However, I have a speaking engagement in London this evening, so I am more than happy to continue.

In conclusion, I welcome the Committee’s report, and I shall work closely with the Welsh Assembly Government in analysing the economic effect of tolling. As my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth rightly pointed out, there is little hard evidence that the bridges have had an economic effect. I do not say that they have not, but the Committee made extensive efforts to find evidence and did not, despite Chinese whispers among local communities. As I have said, the Welsh Assembly has publicised the fact that some 700 companies have located in the region over the past 40 years, long before the Welsh Assembly was formed, so something must be right. I believe that that evidence is shown on the Assembly website.

I realise that the crossing is a vital piece of national infrastructure. I am proud that my portfolio predominantly covers the whole of this great nation of ours. It is for me to work with and alongside the various devolved Assemblies and Parliaments. At the same time, however, I must ensure that they understand that it is a Department for Transport piece of infrastructure—a Westminster one—despite knowing how emotive it is to the local communities in Wales and those on the other side of the bridge in England.

I have listened carefully to the hauliers. I listen to them nearly every day, and they are an amazing group of people. Perhaps I think that because I hold an HGV licence and used to drive lorries when a fireman—like most firemen, I used to drive part-time when off duty.

The key is fairness. If tolls continue beyond the existing agreement, and if free-flow tolling comes in, it would be wrong in my opinion that the tolls should remain one-way. That unfairness would have to be addressed if we had free-flow tolling and if the toll was increased. A number of truck drivers have told me that they go into Wales one way and come out the other because of the toll. Not only is the Treasury losing income, but it is another unfairness that needs to be addressed, although it is difficult to deal with it now, because of the way it is set up.

I hope that I have not delayed anyone’s journey home. Indeed, we will finish a fraction early. I hope that I have answered most questions, at least in general terms. I have been as honest as I can, as I was when giving evidence to the Select Committee. I pay tribute to the Committee on its conclusions, even if we do not fully agree on certain aspects. I was interested to note that all who are here today are Welsh MPs, yet the subject has a significant effect on the UK as a whole.

[Geraint Davies]

I wonder whether the Minister could signal in the most general terms whether he anticipates the direction of travel for the toll post-2017 to be significantly downwards. It would be interesting information for inward investors.

[Mike Penning]

As I have said, I do not intend delaying the Chamber. The answer is no. I cannot give an indication, and the hon. Gentleman can probably understand why.

On that point, I hand over to the Committee Chair. I hope that I have paid the report due credit.