Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Debate between Viscount Hanworth and Lord Judd

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Grand Committee

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to lend strong support to Amendment 56 in the name of my noble friend Lord Berkeley. In the phraseology of the Labour Party, paragraph (b) in his amendment contains an injunction to think in a joined-up manner and to envisage road and rail as parts of an integrated transport system.

The perspectives from which our party views matters of transport policy differ greatly from those of the Conservatives. We envisage an integrated system. The Conservatives, by contrast, tend to place road and rail in quite different categories. The railways were regarded by them as a prime example of a loss-making nationalised industry that required to be privatised. The roads have been regarded as a means whereby our citizens have been able to exercise a fundamental liberty to come and go as they please throughout the land, and for this the road users have been heavily subsidised.

The consequence of this dichotomy—or should I call it a schism?—has been a failure to envisage how these different modes of transport might interact or have a clear idea of their relative advantages. For example, the damage inflicted on the roads by HGVs has not been properly taken into account, and therefore the benefits of transferring road freight to the rails have been largely ignored.

We have before us an Infrastructure Bill that is liable to make joined-up thinking in respect of our transport system even more difficult to achieve. By putting the strategic highways company at arm’s length from the ministry, it will be out of mind and out of sight as far as the Secretary of State is concerned. The only respect in which the Bill proposes to join the roads with the rails is by asking the Office of Rail Regulation to monitor the highways company and by giving the oversight of road users’ interests to the Passengers’ Council, which is ostensibly a body that was intended to serve the interests of rail passengers.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, frankly, I am not very optimistic about the messages that are being put forward from this side of the Committee being taken very seriously by the Minister because she seems to be completely preoccupied with drivers and passengers as the paramount interests at which we should be looking.

If one were looking at the United Kingdom from another galaxy, the first thing that would be said is, “My God, look at the size of the population of that country. Look at the different, complex dimensions to that society. Look at all the issues that arise, the different groups of real communities and real industry and commerce. How can all that be reconciled?”. From that standpoint, where is the evidence of a strategic approach? This talk about being in silos is exactly what frightens me. It is a mad way to look to our interests as an integrated, complex, interdependent nation; it is crazy. We should be looking at what strategies are required, what the interests of the community are as a whole and how to bring them together to maximum effect. That must mean a closely integrated approach towards our railway and road development—but we just do not have that. Successive generations at the Ministry of Transport and the Department for Transport have completely failed to grasp that it is just not in the interests of the British people to go on operating in this way; we have to bring it all more closely and constructively together. From that standpoint, I applaud the amendment.