Funding for Major Infrastructure Projects

Peter Grant Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mr Carmichael]

Absolutely. I am horrified that, having been a colleague of mine, my hon. Friend says she does not know much about ferry services—she has clearly not been listening! However, the point she makes is a good one.

This is where Treasury rules and funding come into play. If we are looking at ferries, for example, we look for a pay-down over a 20-year or possibly 30-year period. A tunnel will be several times that, but Treasury rules constantly push people towards a like-for-like replacement. They seem to lack the flexibility and creativity necessary to provide the services that will maintain the economic and social viability of such communities in the longer term.

There is also a continuing role for EU—sorry, for Treasury—funding.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

You were right the first time.

[Mr Carmichael]

Yes, I am always right the first time.

There is a continuing role for the Treasury in relation to funding, because a significant proportion of the ferries that we are now looking to replace were purchased and commissioned in the first place with a proportion of EU funding. That funding now sits with the Treasury, so although transport as a whole is devolved, there is still an obvious and strong role for the Treasury.

Following on from the Tunnel Vision roadshows that we ran in the summer of last year, as we suggested, communities set up tunnel action groups to decide how they could make the case. The case for a big infrastructure project like that, for a small community, is always that it should basically be designed by the community itself. I am happy to tell the House that the Unst and Yell tunnel action groups, working together, have already obtained pledges in the region of £100,000 towards the £200,000 that they think might be necessary to get the first stage of a feasibility study.

The project will have not just local strategic importance, but national significance. Unst will probably be the earliest and most effective—possibly the only—spaceport in the United Kingdom that is capable of doing vertical as opposed to horizontal launches. The people behind the SaxaVord spaceport in Unst tell me every week that that will be critical to their ability to exploit to the maximum the potential of the project in which they are investing.

There is also the question of the carbon cost. In the medium to long term, tunnels will always be much more carbon-efficient than ferries, with respect both to running costs and to ongoing replacements.

The Treasury has a pot of money that is currently set aside as a consequence of the wish of the last Prime Minister but one, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), to build a bridge from south-west Scotland to Northern Ireland. I can promise the Minister that there are none of the problems with unexploded ordnance that befell that particular project. The money still sits there in a ringfenced pot, so if the Minister wants to stand up and give me a commitment to fund tunnels for Shetland, I will be delighted to take it.

What we are looking for at the moment is a bit of willingness from the Treasury to engage with our community and allow us the opportunity to make the contribution to the rest of the United Kingdom that we have always made and that we know we can continue to make. Might the Minister agree to meet me and a delegation from the Shetland communities and the Shetland Islands Council to hear their intentions and hear what they want to do to make this happen? A small amount of Treasury money at this stage, to establish the case with scientific and technical rigour in a way that as a community we may be unable to do for ourselves, could be transformative in future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am pleased to begin summing up the debate, and it is good to see you in the Chair, Mr Sharma. I commend the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) on her very well informed introduction to the debate. I heard her say that she did not win the ballot for this debate, but was asked to hold it later. That may be a lesson for us all: losing one vote does not prevent you from having another go later.

The hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) gave a very interesting examination of the technical and organisational factors needed to get a project right, and to make sure that future projects go well. One thing that has struck me in this place is that when a big project goes wrong, nothing gets learned. If the Department of Health and Social Care has a project, the Department for Transport does not learn anything from the mistakes, so it makes exactly the same mistakes. We could fill a library with the things that we could learn from problems with Ministry of Defence contracting, for example. There does not seem to be any process for making sure that lessons learned are remembered and transferred across the whole organisation.

The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) gave a very interesting speech. I know a bit about Orkney and Shetland. I have not been to Shetland yet, but I have been to Orkney and hope to go back. He reminded us that we often think that a lot of the public are not interested in politics, but when they understand the impact that an issue will have on their life, they are interested. If the public are not interested, it is maybe more of a comment on politicians, who manage to turn the public off. It is certainly not the public’s problem if the way we do politics causes people to turn off.

I like the right hon. Member’s comments about the GP service on Islay, because several years ago two of my best friends spent two summers on the neighbouring island of Jura, providing cover for the only GP on the island; he was not allowed off the island unless he got cover. The right hon. Member reminded us that for a number of very remote communities in these islands, and sometimes for communities that are not all that remote, the realities of life can be very different from how they appear in this place, and possibly from the way they appear to Ministers or civil servants ensconced in their fancy buildings in Whitehall and around Westminster.

The right hon. Member mentioned the inflexibility of Treasury rules. I do not understand how we can possibly run a 25 to 30-year contract on an annual and cash-limited budget; it just cannot be done. It produces incentives to do stupid things. We have seen that with HS2. He also mentioned the very strong part that the EU played in the previous round of procuring ferries for the islands in his constituency. Yes, the Scottish Government have attracted, and probably deserve, criticism for their record on some of the ferry procurement that we have done in the past. Nobody gets it right all the time. Interestingly, the right hon. Member’s comment seems to show that the people who we were told were remote, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels could sometimes get closer to delivering what people in our communities wanted than the decision makers down here. Perhaps that is because the EU knew that it was sometimes remote, so it did not think that it knew what was best. Most of the funding programmes that it ran had to be managed by the Scottish Government, mostly in partnership with local authorities or other local organisations. Although not everybody agreed with every project that was approved, people could at least point to strong evidence that the project was born in the community and funded from elsewhere, rather than having been invented to fit a set of criteria that were often not relevant to the community in which the project was delivered.

[Mr Carmichael]

I bridle slightly at the hon. Gentleman’s use of “remote”. I am always being told that I live in a remote community, which means that I have to define the place I call home in relation to somewhere else. Surely the point is not about the distance between Brussels and the place where the projects were delivered; it is about understanding that the European Union enabled communities to do something for themselves. That is a very different model from the one in Edinburgh and London these days. Viewed from Shetland, both those places are pretty remote.

[Peter Grant]

I take the right hon. Member’s point. Let me clarify that I do not measure remoteness by how far people are from this place or anywhere else. It is arguable that parts of the right hon. Member’s constituency are more remote from each other than they need to be, because the infrastructure is not there, so a journey of a few miles can be a lot more difficult than it needs to be. The important point is that far too much infrastructure spending in Scotland is not done according to the priorities of the Scottish Government, local authorities, or the Scottish people. The fairy-tale vision of the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), of a bridge to Ireland is a good example of that. I have not heard anybody in my constituency or elsewhere in Scotland say that that was a priority.

Too many funded schemes in Scotland are the priority of somebody in London who holds no mandate whatsoever in my constituency or anywhere else in Scotland. The criteria are set by somebody in London, sometimes having invited comments from the devolved nations or local authorities; most of the time, they ignore any comments that come in. The allocation of money does not have any rational basis, or follow any measure of need or priority. For example, the UK Government promised that the shared prosperity fund would fully replace the EU structural funding that Scotland lost after we were dragged out of the European Union against our will. Over three years, we expected to get about £549 million in structural funding; through the shared prosperity fund, we are getting £212 million. We are losing £337 million, more than half of what we would have had.

Other Government investment schemes, such as levelling up, were supposed to be based on a prioritisation of need, but somehow that prioritisation of need meant that the Prime Minister’s constituency got more than the whole of Glasgow. Of course, Glasgow got nothing. The Prime Minister’s constituency got exactly the same as mine, which is one of the most seriously deprived areas in the United Kingdom. The towns fund was the same. On the face of it, that fund was based on some kind of objective assessment of need, but everybody knows that it was more about who the sitting MP was, or which party hoped they might win the seat at the next election. The way that the criteria are set is not in the interests of the communities that the fund is supposed to serve. The funding allocation is not about need or what is right; it is about what suits the party of Government.

Almost 20 years ago, my very good friend and then fellow member of the council, Michael Woods, discovered that the then Labour administration in Fife Council had a secret plot to close the award-winning sports centre, the Fife sports institute in Glenrothes, and Kirkcaldy swimming pool. Thanks to Michael’s determination, that plan was abandoned. In 2007, Michael and I were both re-elected to the council, formed a joint administration with the Liberal Democrats, and immediately put in place plans to not demolish those two institutions, but replace them, and make them brand new. Six years after we were elected, we delivered a new sports centre in Glenrothes. Sadly, Michael did not live to see it happen, but the Michael Woods sports and leisure centre remembers that it would not be there had it not been for Michael. That is what can happen if we have the political leadership that knows what needs to be done, understands what communities need, and is prepared to deliver it. We had to devise a new delivery model to make the sports centre happen. I note the comment from the hon. Member for Wimbledon. If that delivery model had not worked, it would not have been the fault of the delivery model; it would have been our fault. It was our responsibility to set out a delivery mechanism that would work.

If we want to look at something on a bigger scale, in 2007, when the SNP was elected to the Scottish Government for the first time, it inherited a Forth Road bridge that was in danger of becoming unsafe and being closed. Some 10 years after, the SNP having inherited no plans whatsoever, the new Queensferry crossing was opened to the public. It was a £1.3 billion investment, let it be noted. The SNP did that without putting the albatross around their neck of a private finance initiative, and the crossing is toll-free, as are all the bridges, motorways and roads in Scotland.

Compare that with HS2. In 2009, the Government set their delivery company a budget of between £31 billion and £36 billion. By 2013, almost exactly 10 years ago, the National Audit Office was already warning about problems. We are now looking at a cost of somewhere between £72 billion and £98 billion. The cost of a single railway station at Euston has increased by £2.2 billion, and construction on that station has stopped for two years. How can one Government—or one series of Governments—get one project so catastrophically wrong so often, with no one being held to account?

Lack of accountability is a significant problem. We could ask what has happened to the 40 new hospitals; maybe some of them will happen, but there certainly will not be 40 of them. We seem to be living in a time when “a long-term investment strategy” means “to get us through the next election”. We are clearly living in a time when “priority areas of need” are marginal seats, and 40 new hospitals means, if we are lucky, half of that number—most of them will never be built. Partly due to covid and partly due to the self-inflicted damage of Brexit, construction project costs are rising, often faster than the official rate of inflation. Contractors and subcontractors are finding it harder and harder to recruit the skilled workers they need, because in that industry a lot of the skills are international. The market is global, and Britain is making itself a less attractive place for overseas workers to come to and work. That is not just because of Brexit, but because of how it has been seen to be implemented by the Government.

We need a complete change in the way that the Government allocate and manage the funding for their major infrastructure projects. The hon. Member for Bath was a fellow member of the Public Accounts Committee for a while; I have not seen any evidence, in the reports that come to the Committee, that lessons have been learned. I would love to be able to say that during my time on the Committee—or even in Parliament—I have seen evidence that this Government are becoming better at managing large-scale projects. I cannot say that; if anything, I would say that they are becoming worse.

We have a Government and a governing party that are becoming more inward looking, more concentrated on looking after their own interests, less willing to face up to the decisions that need to be taken, and, frankly, less caring about the impact on communities all over these islands of their failure to deliver the kind of infrastructure that a modern western democracy should be allowed to take for granted.