National Infrastructure

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on securing this debate and on the prize we have just heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I have had huge respect for him ever since his recent very fine report about the north-east of England. I am very sympathetic to much of what he has to say about the future of infrastructure but I will focus my remarks on roads.

Since 1990, France has built 2,700 miles of new motorway. Between 2001 and 2009, under the previous Government, this country built just 46 miles. To use the words of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, himself, this was a “master class” in underinvestment, although admittedly it was before he was Transport Secretary. The UK has half as much motorway per vehicle mile as other major EU countries. It is not as if the Labour Government did not know that they were underinvesting in this, because in 2006 they commissioned Sir Rod Eddington to look into the road network and make suggestions. He wanted to tackle a number of bottlenecks, build bypasses, widen roads, improve junctions and so on, and he made a number of recommendations which largely were not acted on.

The Institute for Economic Affairs calculates that, over the last decade or so, we have been cancelling road projects that would have an average benefit to cost ratio of 3.2 to 1 and deferring ones with a benefit to cost ratio of 6.8 to 1. Yet at the same time we have been funding public transport projects with much lower benefit to cost ratios averaging about 1.8 to 1. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, why so little was done to fix the roads when the fiscal sun was shining. Was it just because we were all frit of Swampy in those days? I welcome the fact that, as my noble friend Lord Sassoon said, this Government are planning, under much tougher fiscal conditions, to spend £24 billion on roads between 2010 and 2021 to resurface 80% of national roads, to add 221 lane-miles of motorways and start 52 major road projects. I echo what my noble friend Lady Maddock said about welcoming the dualling of the A1 through Northumberland.

The crucial point is that we need to rethink how we pay for roads. In 2011, the RAC Foundation said that we had fallen behind other nations in the way we fund road building because in both the United States and across Europe contracts to build roads are nearly always, or very frequently, privately financed, often regionally commissioned and invested in by pension funds because there is a capital return through tolls. For example, in the United States, 4,500 miles of new highway infrastructure have been built in this way, using tolls, since the early 1990s. In France, which is hardly a hotbed of free-market economics, they have privatised most of the strategic road network and drivers are now very used to using tolls, particularly because of electronic tolling. That is, of course, why the roads in France are so good and they have been able to build so much more. The RAC Foundation concluded:

“Across continental Europe, toll roads now account for a significant portion of the strategic road network in all of the countries we have reviewed.”

We need to be more radical, open and imaginative if we are to cut congestion, which is a huge drain on business in this country, and boost economic growth.