Transport Connectivity: North-west England

Debate between Tim Farron and Andrew Murrison

Wednesday 19th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron]

May I point out that there were many more railway lines then, and therefore more trains to be slow? It was also mostly pre-electricity—so there we go. I am grateful for the hon. Member’s point.

The industrial capability of the west coast of Cumbria—not in my constituency—is significant to the economy of the whole country, and includes BAE at Barrow and Sellafield on the west coast. The railway line that serves them—the Furness line—saw a derailment a year ago and a flooding-related near disaster just a few weeks ago. We need to pay special attention to keeping the Furness line open, upgrading it and electrifying it if possible. I also want to make a case, on behalf of all my Cumbrian colleagues, for the Cumbria coastal line, which needs significant investment.

It is great to hear colleagues from metropolitan parts of the north-west talk about keeping the £2 bus fare cap, but for many of us in areas that are far less well funded, and where devolution has not really happened, such as Cumbria, we are stuck with the £3 cap, and we are worried about that being got rid of altogether. Before the cap came in, the most expensive bus journey in the United Kingdom was Kendal to Ambleside, which cost more than an hour’s wage for somebody working in the hospitality sector. Will the Minister confirm that the £3 cap will not be raised or got rid of any time soon?

It is my great privilege to represent a very rural area, but that means that even when the £3 cap exists, it is of no good whatsoever. It does a fat lot of good if we do not have any buses. Giving our local authority, Westmorland and Furness council, the ability to run its own buses is key to meeting the needs of many rural communities. I am honoured to chair an outfit called Cumbria Better Connected, to which all these issues are regularly fed in. One of the most important issues is connectivity and integration between bus and rail, but it is no—

[Dr Andrew Murrison (in the Chair)]

Order. I call the shadow Minister, Jerome Mayhew.

Renewables Obligation Certificate Scheme

Debate between Tim Farron and Andrew Murrison

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron]

I completely agree. We are talking about incentives that we give to renewable energy generators and providers, but we have an energy market that essentially advantages not just fossil fuels but ones that, to some degree, are in the hands of potentially hostile powers. That is ludicrous for both the environment and our security.

I was pleased to hear Members on all sides of the debate talk about the importance of farmers and farming to the battle against climate change and to clean energy generation. We would love to see a recognition that farmers are primarily food producers but that diversification of businesses and cross-subsidy within them is a good thing. It is right that farmers should be incentivised and encouraged to use their land—for example, by putting solar panels on buildings and land that is not good for food production—so long as that is not displacing good-quality agricultural land.

I want to draw attention to a site near Barrow, which is not in my constituency but next door, in the Westmorland and Furness council area. The council now has a solar farm on unproductive former agricultural land, with the full support of the local farming community. Let us look at the ways in which we can support farmers to do that. I live in a very wet part of the United Kingdom with 1,500 farms within it. Pretty much every farmer has fast-flowing becks and rivers on their land, so why are we not incentivising them to build small but nevertheless powerful hydro schemes? That would be great for the environment and the local economy, and it would ensure that farmers can continue farming.

I sound like a broken record given how regularly I talk about this, but it continues to astound me that the United Kingdom, which has a higher tidal range than any country on planet Earth apart from Canada, does next to nothing with the latent tidal power around our islands. I encourage the Minister to come up with schemes to reward that.

I also want to say a word about grid capacity. A huge barrier to progress with this scheme and those that follow is the fact that 75% of energy sector insiders find timely grid connections to be the biggest single obstacle to growing renewable energy in the UK. To give a sense of the size of the queue, there are £200 billion-worth of projects waiting to be connected to the national grid, and that delays all the benefit that would come with that. We would seek to expand the grid network and unlock those billions of pounds of renewable energy projects through a land and sea use framework that has statutory weight in the planning and infrastructure Bill. That would help us to balance the many competing demands on our land, and the competing priorities of security and self-sufficiency that I mentioned earlier.

Those priorities also include local communities’ experiences, which are important to understand when we are trying to tackle the climate imperative. It is no good building huge energy infrastructure near communities if there is no clear, tangible benefit to them. For example, customers in communities local to such projects should receive energy at a discounted rate. If we build renewable energy schemes on the River Kent or the River Crake, the people of Kendal, Staveley, Windermere and Coniston should benefit from them, at least to a degree. We also want to empower local authorities to develop local renewable electricity generation and storage strategies, because they are best placed to understand where the most and least appropriate sites to place them are.

I return to the issues raised by the hon. Member for South West Norfolk. It is important that ROCs have played a significant part in the transition from fossil fuels to new and renewable forms of energy. I recognise that they have had a big impact on his constituency by creating jobs and ensuring that farmers have additional sources of income. They are part of a range of actions—our arsenal—for tackling water pollution. We must not throw out the good things that ROCs have achieved when we move on to new schemes, which hopefully will make even more progress in our move towards a society run entirely on renewable energy.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (in the Chair)]

I call Opposition spokesman Nick Timothy.

Farming and Food Security

Debate between Tim Farron and Andrew Murrison

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dr Murrison]

I am following the hon. Gentleman’s remarks with a great deal of interest. Does he agree that the vast majority of people in this country, given the choice, would rather buy British food? Certainly, all the surveys that have been done would bear that out. However, one of the principal problems is the information they are provided with by the supermarkets and, I am afraid, the cynical way in which many of those supermarkets approach the labelling of food, suggesting it is British when in fact it is not. What does he suggest we do to give consumers, who have not yet been mentioned in this debate, the genuine choice they are seeking and to help our farmers along the way?

[Tim Farron]

The right hon. Member is absolutely right. I support the NFU’s call for accurate labelling that is enforceable, and he is right to say that.

To move on, if we are losing farms and losing farmers, which we are as we speak, not only are we losing our ability to feed ourselves as a country, but we are undermining our ability to deliver for the environment. Let us not fall into the mistake of thinking that this is a debate between caring for the environment and producing food; we either do them both or we do not do them at all. Some 70% of England’s land mass is agricultural, and the figure would be greater across the UK as a whole. If we think we are tackling the climate and nature crises without farmers, we are kidding ourselves. The greenest policies in the world will just be bits of paper in a drawer if we do not have the farmers on the ground to put them into practice.