Oral Answers to Questions

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

There are significant plans to electrify across the network. Another thing we can do to spend money more cost-effectively is consider where battery trains can be used in order not to electrify the very expensive parts of the network. I am also aware that Chiltern is looking at modernising its rolling stock, particularly to improve air quality. All the things that the hon. Gentleman raises are absolutely in progress. The Rail Minister will be able to say more about them in due course.

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

4. If he will make an assessment of the potential merits of creating new direct ferry links to mainland Europe.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Anthony Browne)]

The UK ferry sector is a highly competitive commercial market. There are currently a significant number of links to Europe offering a variety of freight and passenger routes from many locations, including five new routes since 2021. Ferry routes are developed on a commercial basis by private sector operators to provide services that meet wider passenger or freight demands. As such, the Department does not currently intend to undertake any such assessment.

[Neale Hanvey]

The reinstatement of a direct ferry link from the Forth estuary into Europe addresses three key objectives: an environmental objective of reducing road congestion and carbon emissions from heavy goods vehicles; improving import-export resilience; and delivering economic opportunity to Scotland. Industry agrees and ferry operators stand ready to deliver a route, but the Scottish Government lack the courage to support Project Brave. What can be done to encourage the Scottish Government to invest a modest amount of pump-prime funding to realise the economic and environmental benefits that would be felt by all across the UK?

[Anthony Browne]

As I said in my initial answer, the UK Government see the ferry sector as a commercial market and do not subsidise it. As the hon. Gentleman points out, however, this is a devolved matter—in Scotland, ferries are the responsibility of the Scottish Government—so he should make his protestations about that route to the SNP Government, because it is up to them to decide what to do. I totally understand that they are slightly worried; they have an undistinguished track record on ferries, with various fiascos—maybe it is because they try to get ferries that can hold motorhomes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call Mark Eastwood—not here. I call Neale Hanvey.

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

I do not have a topical question.

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

T5. I thank the Secretary of State and the Rail Minister for their support for my campaign to deliver a direct train service between Cleethorpes and King’s Cross. Will the Rail Minister give an update on when the service is likely to start?

Oral Answers to Questions

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Holden]

Decisions on setting local speed limits on roads are a matter for local authorities and they are democratically accountable for them. They also have the power to decide and implement traffic-calming measures if they are more appropriate. Most central Government funding for local government is not ringfenced, so local authorities can make the best decisions relating to local priorities. My Department is providing £170 million this financial year to local highways authorities in England outside London and city region areas through the integrated transport block for small-scale transport schemes, but we will continue to look at all evidence provided to the Department on all sorts of road safety and transport schemes.

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

10. What recent discussions he has had with (a) Cabinet colleagues and (b) the Scottish Government on the re-establishment of direct ferry services between Rosyth and mainland Europe.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Richard Holden)]

The operation of international ferry routes is primarily a commercial matter and as a result I have not discussed it with either Cabinet colleagues or the Scottish Government to date.

[Neale Hanvey]

The ancient nation of Scotland, independent for centuries before its coercive incorporation in 1707, was taken out of Europe against its democratic wishes. Yesterday, the UK state apparatus told Scotland it is not a colony and does not lack meaningful political process. So, will the Minister tell me what funding is to be made available to Scotland for direct ferry links from Rosyth to Europe, now that the EU motorways of the sea funding has been cut off? Can the Minister tell his Government colleagues that the British state may say no at every time, but the sovereign people of Scotland say yes, yes, yes?

[David Duguid (Banff and Buchan) (Con)]

11. What recent steps his Department has taken to support the spaceflight sector.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)]

6. What steps he is taking to support the roll-out of electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

16. What recent progress has been made on the roll-out of electric vehicle charging points.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Rachel Maclean)]

It is very appropriate that my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) has asked this question because today is World EV Day. We are investing £1.3 billion in accelerating the roll-out of charging infrastructure over the next four years. On average, over 500 new chargers are added each month.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean]

I thank my hon. Friend for all the hard work she has done on her ten-minute rule Bill, which addresses a vital issue. We in Government are going to act. We have heard her calls and those of her residents. We will publish our consultation response on requiring all new residential and non-residential buildings to have a charge point, and we intend to lay legislation later this year. We have also confirmed our intention to mandate that home and workplace electric vehicle chargers must be capable of smart charging.

[Neale Hanvey]

The continued roll-out of electric vehicles and the 25,000 charging point milestone is to be welcomed, but how confident is the Minister that the investment in charging points, particularly in remote and rural areas, will meet the scale of the challenge when committed investment is still a twenty-fifth of the £1 billion earmarked from the far from carbon-neutral HS2?

[Rachel Maclean]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that his constituents in Scotland, like those across the whole country, are benefiting from the UK Government’s funding support: £1.3 billion is being spent on grants, charge point infrastructure, installation, and tax breaks on electric vehicle motoring. That is a significant sum and it is benefiting his constituents in Scotland.

Covid-19: Support for Aviation, Tourism and Travel Industries

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

Thank you, Dr Huq; it is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship. I thank the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) not just for securing this debate but for his tenacity and championing of this cause from the very start. That really should be recognised. I also thank the Minister before he even gets to his feet. Our meetings have not been as productive as I would have liked, but despite that he has been available and he has listened. Like others, I urge him to listen to the gaps. It is the gaps that we are concerned about today and the gaps that urgently need the support.

As the Minister will know, my constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath is very close to Edinburgh airport. Constituents of mine include pilots, cabin crew, ground crew and those who work in the general airport environment. I also have constituents who are travel agents, and they are the group I am currently most concerned about.

In ordinary times, outbound travel is worth more than £37 billion a year to the UK economy. It supports the employment of more than half a million people across the UK and plays a crucial role in sustaining our leisure and business activity. ABTA’s collective membership puts people on planes, ships and trains—outbound, inbound and domestically—across leisure and travel. It is fundamental to our regional connectivity, opportunity and prosperity. The aggregate turnover is £40 billion in normal times and that supplies over £6 billion to the UK Treasury.

Those businesses know that recovery will be slow. The travel sector has been hardest hit, with bookings down by 90% and in some cases more. A 2021 survey of ABTA members found that 57% of small and medium-sized enterprise travel agents did not believe they had the cash to survive more than six months, based on current conditions and available Government support. Strikingly, 87% of SME travel agents believed they would fail within a year.

I am not complaining about this only to the UK Government; I am raising the issue across these islands. The Scottish Government recently said that travel agents have had support. They have had support in Scotland and down here, but it is not enough, it is not tailored and it does not recognise their unique needs. That is the fundamental issue. It must be really hard for business people who have invested their lives in building a thriving travel business to hear of an underspend by the Scottish Government of more than £450 million when they desperately need that help now.

This is about a joined-up approach. It is about coming together and recognising where the gaps are, and, most importantly, recognising the fundamental role that travel agents play in the industry. The airlines have had staff on furlough and been bailed out, and the public have either been on furlough or been allowed to continue to work and enjoy an income, but the travel agents are the ones who have moved bookings, taken the cancellations and kept open the pipeline of supply for the recovery we all hope for.

All of us—Government, tour operators and airlines—should be bending over backwards to ensure that travel agents get the support they desperately need, because they will secure and supply business as we move forward.

Aviation, Travel and Tourism Industries

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

I will echo many of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), and I also find myself echoing, quite unfortunately, the contribution from the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) in raising concerns about the aviation industry near to my constituency at Edinburgh airport.

The frustration within the industry is significant. It is a simple fact that a plane cannot take off without an engine. The travel industry’s engine is travel agencies, and without travel agencies, we will not recover our travel industry. One such business in my constituency is called Travel Your World. Bruce Lamond, who runs that company, signed off one of his emails to me with, “To travel is to live,” which is from Hans Christian Andersen. That business has been without income since March 2020, and many Scottish travel agents are in a similar boat. He has been working full time. He has not been able to furlough his staff. He has had to pay full wages with no income and no means to make an income, and unlike other retailers, he remains open but unable to make any money.

The Department for Transport’s traffic light system is disorganised and unhelpful, and the limited notice, which was so evident this week with the Portugal decision, has damaged public confidence significantly. Even visiting green list countries can cost in excess of £170 per person on top of the trip, for testing and other considerations. Bruce tells me that the industry is down and is now being kicked while it is down. What other part of the industry is getting absolutely no support for doing the right thing? Bruce’s business is losing thousands of pounds a month and time is running out.

The Government’s support and funding grants have not been as available to travel agencies as they have to other businesses. The Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association tells me that it has members who have exhausted their savings, remortgaged their homes and emptied their pension funds. What should they do? Close the business they have invested all their life in? Default on debts in excess of £70,000? They need and deserve answers from the top. Pubs, bars, cafés and restaurants are all open. Retail is open. It is time to put the engine back into the travel industry. It is time to give proper support to travel agencies.

Aviation Sector

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

Let me, too, start by welcoming the new Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts), to his place—if he is listening. He has a fantastic job, albeit an extremely difficult one, because the challenges facing our aviation industry are manifold and unprecedented. Our Committee managed to examine them in depth and detail, even though Members were scattered in spare rooms and at dinner tables around the country. That is a tribute to the Clerks, the staff of the Committee and its Chair, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman), who opened the debate so powerfully. I thank them for their generosity and hard work in ensuring that the Committee’s report was as thorough as it was. Those challenges facing the industry are not going away, and as the decision to scrap the furlough kicks in over the coming weeks they are just going to get worse. Aviation faces a crisis the likes of which has not been seen since world war two.

As others have, I wish particularly to highlight the fact that regional airports across the UK are facing existential challenges. Too often, aviation policy and debate seem to be driven by the big London airports, particularly Heathrow. The local airports around these isles, such as Glasgow airport, in my constituency, provide not only domestic links, but connectivity to Europe and a world without a stopover in the south-east of England. That connectivity is now under serious threat. Many airports are teetering on the brink, hit by a double whammy of coronavirus and the collapse of Flybe earlier this year. Others still face short-term and long-term challenges that not only threaten their businesses, but risk having a severe impact on other sectors of the economy as well.

There is a real urgency to this issue, and recommendation 9 of the Committee’s report urged the Government to commit to complete and publish their much-heralded regional connectivity review by the end of the year. To say that the Government response is underwhelming is an understatement. It said:

“Workstreams focusing on regional connectivity will continue beyond the publication of the Autumn recovery plan”—

one that is already coming too late for many. The only action in response to the connectivity points was the support for some Northern Irish routes: nothing about support anywhere else in the UK; nothing about increasing use of public service obligations; and, on the review, nothing about a definite timetable, let alone the required acceleration to it. This simply is not good enough. I ask the new Minister to look at this issue and to do all he can to bring this forward.

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

On regional connectivity, the first airline to fall foul of covid was Flybe. Does my hon. Friend agree that in supporting the Flybe workforce as a result of the pandemic, EY and the Government have been completely neglectful? The workforce have been cast aside and completely ignored throughout this whole experience. They should have had full entitlement to the job retention scheme and should have been protected, because they are essential to the recovery post covid.

[Gavin Newlands]

I could not agree more. The Transport Secretary came to the Dispatch Box and said that he had saved Flybe. Furthermore, the Chancellor promised back in March that there would be sector-specific support for the aviation industry. The Secretary of State stood in the same room as me, looked the industry in the eye, and said, “I understand the enormity of what you are facing and this Government will stand by your side.” But where is he? Where are the Government? The loyal workers of British Airways, EasyJet, Menzies Aviation, Swissport and so many others look at their P45s or their shamefully slashed contracts and do not think that the Government have been by their side. What is left of the sector is waiting. As of now we have seen nothing, and, as we have seen, it is the employees who are taking the brunt.

The Committee also recommended that business rates relief should be extended in England and Wales to aviation businesses. The only sector-specific support for the aviation industry has come from the Scottish Government and Northern Ireland Executive in giving airports and ancillary firms a rates holiday for a year. The Treasury must step up and do the same.