Time is clearly short, so I will be as brief as I can be in having to cover a wide range of amendments and issues.
The Minister began by mentioning the walking and cycling issues covered by the amendments and new clauses. For too long, walking and cycling have been an afterthought in transport policy, given attention only
when the end of the list is reached and the tick needs to be put in the box. There is now widespread consensus on the need for change. Getting more people walking and cycling will improve our nation’s health, tackle congestion and make our towns and cities better places to live.
We lag behind many other countries. Just 2% of overall journeys are made by bike and walking levels continue to decline. Some 64% of all journeys are made by car, but more than half of them are shorter than five miles, with a fifth being under a mile. We need to move walking and cycling to the mainstream of transport policy. We raised that point time after time in the other place and in Committee. In the other place, Labour secured an explicit consideration of pedestrian and cyclist safety in the Bill, and that is to be welcomed. In Committee, we pressed the Government to include a long-term strategy and funding for active travel, but sadly they voted against our plans. One always welcomes a sinner who repents, but if that was the Government’s intention all along, why did they oppose our amendments in Committee?
The Government’s change of course is a credit to the cross-party members of the all-party cycling group; to cycling groups such as British Cycling and the CTC; to transport campaigners such as Living Streets, Sustrans, the Campaign for Better Transport and the Campaign to Protect Rural England; and the Richmond group of health charities. They have all put the right kind of pressure on in the past two weeks to secure this change, which we welcome.
The new clauses and amendments tabled by the Minister are almost identical to those tabled earlier, with the exception that the original contained an explicit obligation on the Secretary of State to “comply” with the strategy. The absence of that word may not mean anything significant, but perhaps that could be clarified.
The Bill will turn the Highways Agency into a wholly owned Government company. We support road investment strategies to give the roads sector the same funding certainty as the railways, to enable efficiency savings to be delivered in the supply chain and to improve infrastructure planning. Most reviews of the Highways Agency—most recently the Cook review of 2011—have shown that the ending of stop-start Government funding could cut costs on the strategic road network, construction maintenance and management by 15% to 20%. We support that, but we will continue to ask the Government why we need a top-down reorganisation of the Highways Agency to deliver that strategy.
We have still not had the evidence for that. The only real evidence I have seen is an EC Harris paper in 2009, which found that motorway construction costs were higher per lane kilometre in the UK than in Holland, where the road operator is at arm’s length. If we look closely, however, we see that the additional costs in the UK were from CCTV, speed enforcement and vehicle recovery services, which are funded separately under the Dutch model. The additional costs also come from higher technical standards for pavements and structures, more complex ground conditions, design solutions and drainage provisions. Therefore, there is not the evidence to say that the Government need to have that top-down reorganisation. We are not convinced. We have debated this and scrutinised it in two Houses of Parliament, but there is no substantial evidence to prove that an institutional reorganisation, with estimated transitional costs of
£100 million, is needed. That is why we will be moving to delete the clauses from the Bill today, while maintaining a commitment to the road investment strategy.
The Minister touched on accountability. I welcome the changes and amendments he has made. There are still some pretty fundamental questions, however, about primary accountability and responsibility. We cannot allow the Secretary of State to become a third party commentator on the performance of a company and the state of the road network: he must be answerable for it. The Minister has said that he completely signs up to that and I believe that that is his intention, but if so why are we having to debate a structure that separates responsibility for the road network from ministerial responsibility? In the absence of any real evidence to prove that this is needed, is it any surprise that many people are worried that this could become—not now, but in the future—a way of creating an increasingly contracted out, carved out and removed from public control structure? That is causing concern from organisations as diverse as the Public and Commercial Services Union, Prospect and the Alliance of British Drivers, right the way through to members of the British Chambers of Commerce. Our amendment would keep the oversight mechanisms of a monitor and road user watchdog in place, even if we did not go ahead with the reform of the Highways Agency.
The Minister talked about route strategies. He was right to do so, as they have been a major part of the discussion in Committee and elsewhere. Our concern is that, while reform and investment in the strategic highway network is absolutely necessary, we have to remember that the changes and the whole Bill affect just 2% of roads. The Department for Transport’s own research shows that 90% of the public are satisfied with those roads. That is not to say that there should be any complacency, but it does not affect the 98% of local roads that people rely on every day. It is here that we see the pothole epidemic, and it is here that we see record public dissatisfaction and congestion levels estimated to rise by 61% by 2040, so it is crucial that strategic road plans support city, county and regional growth plans and help councils to improve road conditions and to tackle congestion. Strategic roads must be co-planned with local networks and other transport modes so that we can really improve people’s everyday journeys and reduce traffic congestion.
I am pleased that pressure from Labour and transport campaigners has secured a greater priority for local roads and joined-up transport thinking in the Bill, and I thank the Minister for the movements he has made, but we need to go further. We need to get our entire transport system working as a connected whole. That is why we want Network Rail and the new company to sit down and map and plan road and rail routes together, and not only to take reasonable account of each other’s views. We want to ensure that local authorities and devolved bodies are represented at board level in the company, too. There are long-running difficulties in joining up local and strategic roads to get the network moving as one. We do not agree that “considering” local views and allowing local authorities to align their plans with a company is enough.
For that reason, our amendment 43 sets out some safeguards to ensure that the road investment strategy is a genuine co-product of plans with other transport networks, devolved growth plans and local transport
provision, including walking and cycling, and to ensure that the road investment strategy is developed in consideration of the condition of local roads, a third of which, we know, are in urgent need of attention. Under the Government’s plans, £1.4 million per mile will be spent on the maintenance of strategic roads, but only £31,700 per mile is allocated to local roads. I hope that hon. Members will seriously consider the safeguards that we have argued for and which have been supported by the Local Government Association and others today.
Throughout this debate, it has been clear that infrastructure must be planned to meet clear economic, social and environmental objectives, but we have seen from previous debates on energy and planning that the Bill has often fallen far short of doing that. Along with groups such as the Campaign for Better Transport and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, therefore, we have pressed for obligations to ensure that strategic roads investment improves our environment. That means action to meet legally binding climate change targets by 2050. Worryingly, the Department’s forecast predicts that although road traffic emissions will flatten they will then start to increase in the 2030s. We need urgent action, therefore, to tackle air pollution, which is estimated to be killing up to 29,000 people prematurely each year, and vehicle emissions, such as particulate matter and oxides of nitrogen, which are major sources of the problem.
The road investment strategy states that the new company should make progress towards reducing the negative impacts on air quality, but in the light of the Government’s record on air quality that is not very reassuring—a point to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) alluded earlier. The UK is not compliant with EU limits on air pollution now. In November, the European Court of Justice said that urgent action was needed, but under this Government’s plan we will not be compliant until 2030, and that simply is not good enough. That is why we are asking for much greater action than is in the Bill; why we have committed to a national framework of low-emission zones to help local authorities tackle the problem; and why we are pleased to support amendment 70, which my hon. Friend tabled, and which would add an explicit obligation on the new company to address air quality issues.
I wish to say a word about transfers—I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) will want to say something about this as well. I welcome the Minister’s assurances in Committee that the terms and conditions of employees transferring will not diminish—I believe he meant it, and it was good he met the trade unions—but, as my hon. Friend said, one issue remains: if the TUPE regulations, or the mechanisms used to apply them in other reorganisations, are to apply, why has that not been enshrined in the Bill? As the Bill continues its passage, I hope that those issues will be addressed further, and I welcome the Minister’s clarification today that he will come back to us on the question of constructive dismissal, on which the Bill does not currently make sense.
The road reforms could have done so much more to fix Britain’s roads. A constituent of mine wrote to me last week:
“I have major concerns about the ill thought out proposals which will do nothing to assist the UK economically and will be of great concern to road users.”
I think a lot of people would agree with that. We need to ensure that infrastructure decisions are based on national independent evidence-based assessments, which could be done if we set up the national infrastructure commission; we need to facilitate more efficient joint road and rail planning, which could have been done had our amendments been accepted; and we need to join up local and strategic roads to get the whole network moving. Unfortunately, the Bill is a wasted opportunity. Its centrepiece, before all the others things were added, was another top-down reorganisation that cannot deliver the changes our road network needs.