Electric Vehicles and Bicycles

Debate between Steve McCabe and Jesse Norman

Wednesday 9th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Jesse Norman)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I am only sad that I have, now, four minutes, until 5.43.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

Until 5.45.

[Jesse Norman]

But do I not have to allow two minutes for my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous)?

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

You do not have to.

A5 Upgrade

Debate between Steve McCabe and Jesse Norman

Wednesday 7th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Jesse Norman]

I am rather regretting giving way to my hon. Friend, because his intervention was of such a length and repeats information he already put on the record through his speech. I have very little time to make a quite a lot of points that I know he and other colleagues will want to respond to. Needless to say, of course the Government are sensitive to great and fast-breaking developments. We have schemes, including the large local major transport scheme, that are designed precisely to assist local government to petition where there are important local developments that can require new infrastructure on shorter term notice.

Highways England is making good progress according to the investment strategy launched in 2015, which brought with it a very large increase in funding for the strategic road network—more than £15 billion in the five years between 2015 and 2020. Highways England has already delivered something like 18 schemes that are open for traffic. Work on the £1.5 billion A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme is advancing well.

My hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) mentioned the interaction between the M6 junction work and the work at Dodworth. He is of course right about that. What it shows—I use this to respond to the hon. Member for York Central—is that work has got to be phased, and sometimes the acceptance of bids is not consistent with the intelligent structuring of investment. As a result, Highways England routinely and quite properly slightly overprogrammes the amount of investment it is making, knowing that some of those schemes will not hit the correct benefit-cost ratios, some local authorities in some cases will not have their bids and other work ready on time, and there will be local opposition in some cases that may delay a scheme. Therefore, it is important to understand that some balancing out will be required, and that is what has happened in RIS 1. There has been some delay for all of those reasons. That does not, unfortunately, mean that the money that has not been spent can be redeployed, because it is overprogramming within an overall envelope that has been used for purposes of investment.

This represents significant progress, but we recognise that there is more to do, and it is in that context that it is important to think about the second phase of the road investment strategy, which has been highlighted by colleagues today, and the Government’s investment in the strategic road network between 2020 and 2025. It will be funded by the new national roads fund, an important development that is designed to assist planning, remove the potential for disruption and ensure that all money spent by taxpayers on vehicle excise duty in England will be reinvested back into the roads network. There will be a much closer link between the money people pay and the investment that is made, which will allow us and Highways England to take a co-ordinated, long-term approach to investment in the network.

It is vital that the strategy’s potential is realised, and that we use RIS 2 to unlock wide-ranging benefits for the whole nation. The RIS 2 system deploys and relies on proper input from local authorities, and we are very pleased with the work that has been done by those who have submitted bids and expressed interest in RIS 2 schemes across the country. That crucial feedback will help us to make and Highways England to implement the right investment decisions for our strategic roads.

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa), for North Warwickshire (Craig Tracey), for Nuneaton, for Rugby (Mark Pawsey), and for Bosworth for their co-ordinated approach to considering this road, which is entirely appropriate for a regional bid. I also thank them for the letter they jointly signed supporting the proposed upgrade between the M42 and the M1 near Rugby. I note that the scheme is backed by 18 local authorities and has been endorsed by the Midlands Connect strategy.

It is important to understand that Highways England is taking careful note of the bid—I want to put that on the record clearly. We are grateful for that. Highways England has proposed the conversion of the country’s busiest A roads to what it calls an expressway standard. It has provided evidence to suggest that that could provide users of those roads with improved performance and safety benefits, and a motorway-standard experience. As hon. Members know, the Department is consulting on the proposals, and the consultation closes, as luck would have it, today, having been open for two months—again, serendipity for my hon. Friend’s debate.

I assure colleagues that the case Highways England made for investment in the A5 has been recorded as a formal response to the consultation, and I have noted it in this debate. The Department will publish its response to the consultation in the spring. Officials—those present and those in the Department—will have been noting all the advice given today, which will be taken into account as part of the consultation.

The hon. Member for York Central was right to raise a quizzical eyebrow about the £10 million that my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth said would be the total cost of the scheme. If I understand it right, that £10 million will be required for the next phase of work into a study of the options. We are not quite in the world of Linda Evangelista, but £10 million does not go far when we are building roads. The research phase concludes after the Department’s response to the public consultation, after which decisions will be made about the content of RIS 2.

My hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton rightly identified the importance of avoiding accidents and pollution wherever possible, and of getting the full benefit from investments. I share that view. The reason for treating this as a route is so that a holistic view can be taken across all those issues—

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Jesse Norman]

You said we would finish at 5.46 pm, Mr McCabe.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

I said 5.43 pm.

[Jesse Norman]

In that case, I apologise.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

I am very sorry, but the clock has beaten you on this occasion.

Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

Debate between Steve McCabe and Jesse Norman

Wednesday 15th March 2017 Ministerial Corrections

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

I thought the Minister was a touch complacent in his earlier answer on smart meters given that this will cost the taxpayer £11 billion by the end of the Parliament. What is he going to do about the fact that they do not work when a customer switches supplier?

[Jesse Norman]

The smart meter programme should be judged on its long-term effect. It will save £47 billion by the end of that decade.

[Official Report, 14 March 2017, Vol. 623, c. 178.]

Letter of correction from Jesse Norman:

An error has been identified in a response I gave to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) during topical questions.

The correct answer should have been:

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve McCabe and Jesse Norman

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

I thought the Minister was a touch complacent in his earlier answer on smart meters given that this will cost the taxpayer £11 billion by the end of the Parliament. What is he going to do about the fact that they do not work when a customer switches supplier?

[Jesse Norman]

The smart meter programme should be judged on its long-term effect. It will save £47 billion by the end of that decade.[Official Report, 15 March 2017, Vol. 623, c. 5-6MC.]

Financial Sustainability (Local Government)

Debate between Steve McCabe and Jesse Norman

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Crausby. I am grateful to you and to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston for calling this important debate.

I absolutely applaud the measures that the Government have taken over the past couple of years, not merely to bring the national economic crisis under some kind of financial control, but to make specific improvements to local government in the hope of making it more relevant, more accountable and more autonomous. The hon. Lady made the very good point that local government was glorious in the 19th century, and one reason for that was how autonomous it was. It is very important that we restore proper dignity to town halls, and I think the Government are doing that.

It is remarkable that the Government have been able to do that in the extremely difficult financial conditions in which we find ourselves. It is extraordinarily hard to change embedded funding decisions and disparities that have been left over from times past. In my county of Herefordshire—although we are talking about cities and the wider impact, I hope that we can strike a rural note, as the hon. Lady acknowledges the differences between them and the effects that each can have on the other—levels of funding have always been extremely low. The culture is one of making do and mending. To take one example, it was a minor miracle when we moved from having the third worst-funded schools in the country to the fourth worst-funded schools in the country, in the past year or two. I hope that we will continue to motor rapidly up the tables thereafter.

Above all, the issue is not only about local government, but about the totality of public services, because, as I think all Members would recognise, the services interlink with each other and the cumulative and interrelated effect of them makes all the difference. I am perhaps somewhat unusual in that I commissioned an independent study of underfunding in Herefordshire in 2010, which concluded, based on a comparison with other authorities, that it had been underfunded to the tune of £174 million over the previous five years—the period from 2005 to 2010. That is £35 million a year or roughly 10% of local government spending.

Those totals broke down across the public services as: police, £11 million a year; fire, £4 million a year; schools, £30 million a year; and health, £44 million a year. Each of those sums, in turn, was dwarfed by the underfunding of local government, which was £85 million over that period, or £17 million a year.

It is important to put that in perspective. It is not only about underfunding in some of the leafy suburbs to which people like to refer, because there are areas of deprivation in Herefordshire. It is not a rich place; it is a county in which the average earnings are significantly below the averages for the west midlands and for England as a whole. It is well known to those who have studied the issue that public services are harder, not easier to deliver, and more expensive, not cheaper to deliver, in rural areas than in cities, whether that involves filling potholes or the number of women whom a midwife can see in a given year.

[Steve McCabe]

I want to see whether I understand the essence of the hon. Gentleman’s point. Is he arguing that his area is underfunded, as a number of us would think of our areas, and therefore that central Government need to do something to relieve that underfunding? Alternatively, is he arguing that money should be taken off other areas and given to his area to address what he perceives as the underfunding problem in his area alone?

[Jesse Norman]

I am arguing that the situation in Herefordshire is the result of well over a decade—possibly two decades—of underfunding and that therefore, although every area has been hit badly because that is the nature of the tough times we are in, the case for treating with care and attention areas that have suffered from that inherited imbalance of underfunding is clear.

Let me give an example. In many parts of the country, local councils have reserves—indeed, large amounts of reserves that they have stored up over many years against a rainy day. That is not true in Herefordshire. Herefordshire council is only 10 or 15 years old. It does not have large inherited reserves. All the reserves it has are spoken for, more or less, and therefore it is not in the position that some cities are in of being able to draw on inherited reserves.