Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I travelled down this morning on a train marked "East Coast". I understand that that railway company is now run by the Secretary of State, or at least is controlled by him at some level. Signs in the train read, "We are providing a service as usual". As usual, my sliding seat was broken, so I thought, "Yes, it is service as usual". However, the train arrived on time, so from that point of view I gave the noble Lord a tick. I do not know whether the noble Lord knows just how much envy there is among probably the great majority of Members of this House who dabbled in railways and railway engines when they were small at the fact that he is running a railway company. We all enjoyed the Reverend Audrey’s books featuring Thomas the Tank Engine, Henry the Green Engine and a big, rather arrogant engine called Gordon, painted blue—but perhaps I had better not go further into that. We all wanted to be engine drivers. I am sure that the Secretary of State had ambitions beyond being an engine driver and wanted to be the Fat Controller. However, he is the wrong shape to be the Fat Controller. Whenever I think of the noble Lord in future, I shall think of him as the Thin Controller. We all wish him the very best of luck and success in running the east coast railway for a while. I am supposed to be talking about local government and the environment, but as a railway freak I cannot avoid picking up one or two issues. I was rather disappointed by the churlish way in which the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, dealt with high-speed rail. Some of us remember when none of the political parties supported it. However, the Liberal Democrats supported it long before the others. I think that it was the 2002 general election when the Conservatives sent out a letter to those on their target mailing list saying, "Don’t vote for those Liberal Democrats; they want to build a high-speed railway line to the north of England. This will be a dreadful waste of money and it will put your taxes up". I have a copy of that letter if anybody wants it. Back in the 1990s when I was a member of Lancashire County Council, that council was campaigning for a high-speed line to the north of England. Now there is a general consensus on it. The argument has been won in principle and it is a question of how to do it, how practical it is and where it should go—not just to the north of England but to Scotland and other parts of the UK. Given the scale of the investment that will be required and the length of time that it will take to begin to catch up with countries such as France, all-party consensus is necessary on this issue. At this stage we really ought not to make the party political points on it that the noble Baroness made. I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield on his maiden speech. While I listened to him, I thought, "I don’t know much about his diocese", but I know a great deal about the diocese of his right reverend friend, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn, whose speech I very much look forward to. Pennine Lancashire—we now have to call it east Lancashire—which his diocese more or less covers, will, I hope, be well served by having another voice in this House. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, spoke about the dreadful flooding in Cumbria. The three points that I should make on this are based on what happened last year in Hull, parts of South Yorkshire and other places. The Government and agencies must not underestimate the scale of need that will result from the flooding in Cumbria. The national agencies in particular at first underestimated the scale of need as a result of the flooding last year. I went to Hull three or four months after the flooding and met many people who were still not in their homes and were waiting for compensation or insurance payouts. They were in dreadful circumstances through no real fault of their own. There is a huge scale of need. When I saw on television that the Prime Minister had offered £1 million as his first reaction during his very welcome visit, I thought, "Do people really understand that they will need not just £1 million, but probably £100 million—perhaps more?". It will take months for some houses to dry out. Simple things such as getting industrial dehumidifiers quickly into the area are important, because you cannot start to clean up your house or live in it properly until it has dried out. Early action is important and should be co-ordinated by the local authorities, which come into their own in situations such as this. So long as there is delay, there will be local disillusionment; people will think that they have been forgotten and the opportunities for tackling many of the problems quickly will not be there. Manpower and resources are required and there is a need to get all the agencies working together. It is perhaps a fortunate coincidence that we shall discuss the Flood and Water Management Bill, the genesis of which lay in the previous round of floods. I am sure that the discussions that we will have on that Bill will be more serious and detailed as a result of recent experiences. I should declare that I am a member of a local authority in Pendle, Lancashire. I wish to say one or two things about the legacy of this Government over the past 12 years as regards local authorities. The Secretary of State said that the Government had a good record and that many powers had been delegated to local authorities. I have to say that, although some welcome changes have taken place, it does not feel like that on the ground. Local authorities have been encumbered by targets and ever more detailed requirements. Whenever a set of detailed requirements and top-down administrative orders are done away with, because they are seen not to be working, they are replaced by another set. This relates not to just local authorities. The wider system of local governance is an unbelievably complex tangle of local quangos, partnerships, forums and endless consultation, a great deal of which is meaningless. I am totally in favour of properly consulting and involving local people; I have worked for all my political life to bring that about. However, a great deal of consultation is just form-filling and box-ticking; it is a complete waste of time and resources. A plethora of consultants are involved, because the Government say that you must do this and that and local authorities do not have the resources to do it, so they bring in yet more consultants. Regeneration schemes, for example, spend hundreds of thousands of pounds employing consultants to produce schemes, appraisals of those schemes, then financial appraisals of the schemes, then appraisals of the consultation process—and so it goes on. It is madness. It is also linked to a string of acronyms—RDAs, the HCA, the LSP, the LAA system, the crime and disorder reduction partnerships, which we call CSPs—I will tell noble Lords why some time—and the new MAA system. There is now also Total Place, which at least is not an acronym. However, that does not matter because, if you tell people what these acronyms mean, they still do not have the slightest idea what you are talking about. If you tell people that something is being done by the local strategic partnership, they gaze at you blankly. The body that they know and understand is the council, because that is the body that they elect and can go to—there are councillors whom they can go to. The council is the body that they think does everything, yet in the Total Place pilots we discover that only 14 per cent of spending in those areas is carried out by the council. The system is hopeless. It requires root and branch reform and I am afraid that we will not get it from this Government. I look forward to hearing the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn.