Queen’s Speech

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow such a considered and well expressed speech by the noble Baroness. I shall comment on the Government’s commitment in the Queen’s Speech to strengthen the national infrastructure to foster growth and employment. Taken in the round, and for a variety of reasons, we have the worst national infrastructure of any major country. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has brought characteristic verve and attack, at long last, to developing a UK high-speed rail network—hurrah for that. But just one glance at a map of Europe’s existing and planned HSR network reminds us that we lag decades behind other major European countries. Secondly, there is the issue of roads. As we all know, 92 per cent of all of our travel is on roads, yet our highway network is by far the worst of any major country. The contrast with our neighbours is startling and shameful. Our main arterial roads throughout the UK are bursting and the experience of driving on them is unpleasant and stressful. The position is forecast to deteriorate further. Yet the current level of national investment that we make annually in our roads is a rounding error in the budgets of other major spending departments. We desperately need a system of universal road pricing, as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, suggested. Perhaps the Minister and Boris Johnson, those unlikely twins, could be joined at the hip on this issue, too. However, we also need investment in a new fit-for-purpose strategic road network linking our major centres of population and our ports, airports and railheads. Carbon reduction will come not from constraining road capacity or individual liberty but in due course, as the Minister implied, from powering cars with electricity generated from nuclear and renewable sources. The third issue is air. Heathrow’s runway capacity is already well behind those of Schiphol and other major European airports. As a result, Heathrow is operating without proper operating margins and at absurd levels of utilisation. If only for national economic reasons, we need to maintain a major hub airport in the UK, sited where it can continue to grow to meet 21st-century need. Fourthly, there is the question of water and sewerage. The traffic-throttling roadworks in every nook and cranny of our capital city remind us that we failed to renew in time our superb 19th-century water and sewerage infrastructure. The fifth issue is communications. Regulatory failure had us lagging well behind other leading nations in the development of our digital communications infrastructure, although the Digital Economy Bill to be considered in this Session offers the prospect of a catch-up. The sixth issue is energy. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, suggested, our long-term planning to meet our national energy needs securely, and in carbon-reducing ways, has not been timely. Moreover, our national grid is designed around our coalfields and requires major investment to configure it for multiple and diverse sources of renewable energy generation. Here I declare an interest as a director of a renewable energy company. We made great progress in the 20th century in many areas of our national life, but no area has been more neglected over the past 50 years than our national infrastructure. When I worked as the Prime Minister’s strategy adviser, I was party to some analysis of the reasons for our chronic and entirely measurable underinvestment in transport infrastructure compared to that in other countries. Put briefly, transport investment fell victim to the increased economic volatility and turbulence of our post-war years, to the distorting impact on public expenditure of high unemployment in the 1980s and to the understandable prioritisation of social and welfare spend over any kind of infrastructure investment since. This underinvestment is likely to have been a significant factor, although not the only one, underlying our national economic productivity remaining stubbornly behind that of our industrial competitors. However, we are where we are and, however behind we are, I suggest that now is the time to begin to remedy those 50 years of underinvestment and to place the modernisation of the UK’s infrastructure firmly among our leading national priorities. In reality, this is a task for the next Government, whoever forms them, rather than for this Parliament. It will be for that Government to provide an overarching framework and an outline plan, even if financing and execution can be left largely to the private sector. It will need to be not a five-year plan but a 25-year plan if it is to measure up to the awesome nature of the task. We will need to shift from an emphasis on consumption now to prudent investment in our own future and that of coming generations, both for their economic benefit and to improve the quality of their lives. However daunting the task, we must start somewhere and we must start now.