North of England: Infrastructure Spending

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I am relieved to see a Treasury Minister here who has also been a Transport Minister, so we might have a good chance of a response to our debate, given the focus on transport.

This should be a technocratic debate as much as anything. There is no Labour philosophy on pouring concrete to build a new road, and no Conservative philosophy based on an exegesis of Edmund Burke on how to erect a gantry for overhead line electrification. This is predominantly technocratic. I could spend an entire four minutes trying to demolish the per capita regional spending figures that I have heard quoted for the past 10 years. They are a myth and deeply misleading, but the political class seems universally to have drunk the Kool-Aid.

More topically, it is worth thinking about the review of the Green Book announced today and the impact it will have on benefit-cost ratios. As a Minister who had to focus on BCRs time and again, I can tell colleagues the input to deliver any BCR they wish to find. BCRs on their own do not allow projects to move forward. They are a useful tool in comparing projects that achieve a similar objective—for example, how to improve trans-Pennine links. We can then compare different ways of achieving that and work out the best value.

What BCRs do not do is allow us to choose between north and south projects. It will still be a political choice whether to opt for Crossrail 2 or Northern Powerhouse Rail, and the sequences in which one might do that. In particular, and I will disappoint my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Damien Moore), it will not get us any new rail carriages—as I know from experience—because a BCR does not take into account the fact that any new rail carriage does not mean more passengers travelling. Therefore, there is no benefit in the Treasury’s mind in that regard.

It is also worth considering that one of the problems that the Treasury has created—and a rod for its own back—which I have been unable to solve over many years, is that it has numerous fantastic projects across the north of England that cannot proceed, because they are predominantly private sector-led. A good example right now is Peel Holdings, which owns Doncaster airport. It wanted to build a short four-mile spur of the east coast main line into the airport. The Department for Transport has just turned it down, despite it being private sector-led. That is because, despite a Treasury and DFT joint review, we could not find a straightforward and simple way to keep such projects off the public purse—that meant that they would have counted towards our debt figures. That still needs to change if we are to properly unlock the true potential of all the private sector-led schemes out there.

Since my three minutes have gone—very quickly—I will make one final plea. I am struck by the fact that I have never detected such a dislike of devolution at any point in the past 15 years from the Government and most of my colleagues. In my view, and in my experience, it is only by devolving power to Metro Mayors, combined authorities and our regions that we will get these smaller projects through and get the compromises that are needed between the regions to deliver some of the more strategic projects. In all my conversations with Metro Mayors and combined authorities—with one notable expectation that Members can probably predict—they have always been apolitical, sensible and constructive and have improved decision making because of the quality of local transport planners. If we move away from devolution, we will have a much less effective transport policy and must less infrastructure built, so please show a little confidence in why George Osborne chose to devolve during the coalition Government. That is my four minutes up.