Access to Ports

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 27th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. This is an important debate, and I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) and her Committee on choosing this inquiry. Dare I say it, they had the wisdom to visit Felixstowe in my constituency as part of it and they did a great job of taking evidence. As the hon. Lady will know, I have childhood memories of Liverpool, which is where I grew up. The docks are very familiar to me, and they continue to transform themselves. It is good to see more shipping back in Liverpool.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), who made a good contribution. He is right to highlight small ports, which also need access. Although they are not in my constituency, the ports of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft are important to our economy in East Anglia as they service offshore energy and continue to serve the fishing industry, which is important to coastal economies.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), who was generous in recognising the Government’s success. I assure him, as I am sure the Minister will, that the Government have plenty of legislation to get on with, but it seems that the Opposition do not want to vote against much of it. It is good to have consensus. I echo the hon. Gentleman’s thoughts on having a debate in the main Chamber because, as he eloquently pointed out, the issue is important. I am slightly surprised by how few people are here for today’s debate; that is a shame. I know today is a Thursday, but it is important that the subject is regularly raised by Members who have ports in their constituencies.

Mrs Brooke, I hope you will allow me to go a little further than the report’s recommendations so that I may raise issues relevant to Felixstowe, which is the largest container port in the country and the second largest in Europe. There are various ways to get to Felixstowe: road, rail and sea. I am grateful that recommendations 3 and 4 address public infrastructure and pleased that the A14 has not been tolled—good news not only for the port of Felixstowe, but for businesses across Suffolk.

I commend the Government for continuing the road scheme and for recognising the bottlenecks in Cambridgeshire, which are often generated by the growth of Cambridge rather than that of Felixstowe. We all eagerly await the next stage of the consultation, which I understand will take place next month. I am sure the Minister will continue to commit to there being no delay as a consequence of the tolling option being ruled out.

There are problems closer to home, and I want to address the resilience of the A14 much closer to Felixstowe. For those who have never been to Ipswich, I should say that the Orwell bridge is dramatic and grand, but at times it is entirely closed, which causes chaos for the poor residents of Ipswich as the traffic gets rerouted. Although the port does its best to alert people in advance through the booking system, there is no doubt that the bridge’s closure can cause huge problems.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) and I had a summit last year with the Highways Agency and the police. We were pleased to hear that the Highways Agency has reasonable recovery facilities. There was a particularly notorious incident involving onions; I will not go into great detail. The incident closed the road for several hours, and there was another accident within a few minutes of the road’s reopening. Everything ground to a halt that day.

Unfortunately, such things often happen. The Highways Agency has proposed to reduce speed limits in the area, which I welcome. I do not welcome average-speed cameras, because such incidents tend to happen at peak times. I thank the Highways Agency, which has done a lot of work, but I encourage it to continue upping its game. Recovery can still be an issue, but I commend the agency on its work. The agency has also been good at addressing road noise, although I am sure my constituents would like even more road quieting schemes and quieter surfaces. We will continue to press the arguments on their behalf.

I have one little bugbear, but I will not be too tribal. The signs along the A14 were introduced at the great cost of £70 million, and for a long time they were not connected. Even now, it is frustrating that the Highways Agency does not necessarily allow local messages to be displayed. The agency uses references that do not make sense to most drivers, unless they are hooked-up lorry drivers. I hope the agency will be more responsive in future. If local messages need to be displayed, that should happen in a timely manner and should not be constricted by unnecessary rules.

I am delighted that the A14 has not been tolled and look forward to its being ready before the end of the decade, although I recognise that there are still resilience issues in the Ipswich area that need attention from the Department for Transport.

The Felixstowe to Nuneaton rail line is important, as the Government have already recognised. The line is mentioned in the report, and Network Rail has cleared the gauge higher up the track. In the past week, the Minister has been in Ipswich constituency. There has been an announcement on the Ipswich Chord, a project undertaken by Network Rail that should save considerable time and lead to considerably more freight trains being able to run smoothly through to Nuneaton and up to the midlands. The Chord was completed ahead of time, and I give a big “well done” to Richard Schofield, David Ward and all the people who worked on the project.

The link between Felixstowe and Ipswich continues to generate significantly more problems. I will not go into detail on the Ely junction, as Network Rail has already committed to doing work higher up the line. Some time ago, when the port was looking to expand further, Network Rail committed to dualling the line as part of the section 106 agreement. I recognise that that would be an expensive infrastructure investment, and the timeline has been delayed, but the port is looking to change the commitment and instead put money into a loop solution devised by Network Rail.

I still think that we should look to dual that section of the line, which would make a difference to local resilience. Passengers are the people who suffer on the line and, for a variety of reasons, things have been particularly bad recently. The gold standard would be to dual the line; the proposed series of loops, which will not be ready until 2017 anyway, are a silver or bronze solution. I genuinely believe that we need to dual the line to ensure the continued growth of Felixstowe. At the same time, as the Minister may know, I have been pressing for electrification of the Felixstowe to Nuneaton line, and beginning with the Felixstowe to Ipswich line would be a huge start, along with the dualling process; we should try to do both electrification and dualling at the same time. Both the Government and the private sector—Hutchison Ports—would play their role together.

We know that some of the freight rail companies have no particular interest in electrification, but we also know that one particular firm—I will not get into naming and shaming, as it were—is quite happy to use electric locomotives. Electrification would do two things. First, it would obviously be quieter and more reliable. Secondly, it would allow a much quicker service on trains when they go from Felixstowe up to Ipswich and then off to London, and allow the passenger service to be much more resilient as well. Everyone would be a winner. Admittedly, electrification is not cheap. Nevertheless, it is important and can be achieved in a reasonable time frame.

Of course, we have greater ambitions—for the Felixstowe to Nuneaton line to be electrified the whole way. The Government have committed to hundreds of miles of electrification. The midlands spine is an important part of that process, but I am pressing the case that the Felixstowe port stretch is probably more important to the country than the Southampton port stretch, and I will continue to make that case.

Putting more freight and passengers on to the rail network would be good for the environment. I recognise the point about coastal shipping and I share the disappointment of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) that coastal shipping has not worked out as well as people had hoped. However, it was put to me by some of the local shipping lines that there is no doubt that road and rail are simply more reliable than coastal shipping, and if the weather is against you the weather is against you, which leads to complexity. I agree with the hon. Lady that we should try to do more on coastal shipping. A grant was given to try to improve the Felixstowe to Teesport route, and I am sure that other ports around the country will also be looking to do more on that.

Sea? Absolutely. It is quite interesting how people forget that sea is necessary to get to a port, although the Committee certainly did not. It is fair to say that Felixstowe is located in a rather congested channel. It is not only the stretch of water between us and the continent—we have oil tankers going past, so there are really busy shipping lanes—but there are a significant number of energy wind farms, and the channel is also where the interconnector for electricity comes from Belgium into the UK. It will continue to be a busy shipping lane and there will potentially be more wind farms. A 7.2 GW farm, called the East Anglia array, is under preparation, which will inevitably lead to increased congestion. And there are all the other things that have to happen at sea. I say particular thanks to Harwich Haven Authority, which is a good steward of that area. It continues to invest in dredging. I know it has had other issues to face, but overall it has done a good job.

Turning to marine planning, in their response to the report, the Government refer to the east inshore plan. I have had the chance to meet the Marine Management Organisation to discuss in detail my concerns about aspects of that plan. What is possibly controversial at a macro level is the potential designation of the area as a marine conservation zone. I have fought that vigorously and I am pleased that the Government—in the form of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—listened. It was very worrying for the port, Harwich Haven Authority and other local businesses, which were concerned about the blanket designation of the area as an MCZ. Felixstowe has plenty of environment around it, thank you very much. There are the Trimley marshes, which were redone; there are Landguard Point and Landguard Fort; and loads of birds come to Felixstowe, apparently because they like going on the cranes to have a rest before they complete their journey, or because they are attracted to the port’s lights and so on.

During a previous debate in Westminster Hall, we discussed Southampton and the legal action that took place between ports. I know this issue is not the Minister’s direct responsibility, but I hope he will continue to stress to the MMO that it needs to treat ports consistently; that is vital.

Other planning issues have been dealt with by the coastal concordat. I pay particular tribute to Andy Smith, a district councillor in my constituency who is chairman of the coastal special interest group at the Local Government Association. It is important that those involved in land planning and sea planning, the Environment Agency and Natural England work more harmoniously together—they need to do so—and I hope the coastal concordat will be a great success.

I have become passionate about Felixstowe since I moved to Suffolk. It is a wonderful town with a vibrant industry, and I want the port to continue to be a success. That is important not only for Suffolk but for the country. In my view, Felixstowe is the premier gateway for containers to this country.

I will just add a little advert if that is okay with you, Mrs Brooke. The senior director at Hutchison Ports is very keen to ensure that Felixstowe is not only an importer but an exporter, and he offers free advice to anybody who wants to get into exporting. I stress that he does not make it conditional that exports go out through Felixstowe, but it is important to ensure that ports such as Felixstowe are connections to the rest of the world.

I commend the Committee for its report. Its sensible approach to environmental issues, expressed in recommendations 10 and 11, is important. And I continue to fly the flag for the great port of Felixstowe.