My Lords, like others on this side, I give a half-hearted welcome to the Bill. The opening by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, put it in the right context. I am surprised that nobody else has mentioned the less than flattering view of Britain’s infrastructure by China’s Prime Minister when he was visiting here and gave us a rather low score. Perhaps, being an outsider, his view was rather more objective than the rose-tinted view from certain Benches here in the House of Lords.
All, I think, agree—road enthusiasts or otherwise—that strategic highways play an enormous role in the economic development of the country. I personally saw the extraordinary development in north Devon once the highway was produced under a previous Tory Government. It was remarkable how that led to economic development. There is no question but that road building is of vital importance. In our crowded island, however, other factors also are extremely important, particularly air pollution. Air pollution, as we now know, is much worse in big cities where a lot of traffic is present. It is particularly bad where motorways intersect. Therefore the planning and design of motorways should be of considerable concern in terms of air pollution.
Most importantly, the UK has benefited from the fact that we do not have massive motorways through the middle of our towns; in particular, not through the middle of London. Some noble Lords will recall going to protest meetings in the 1960s when there was a real possibility that we would have enormous highways right through London; fortunately, we did not. However, there is a threat for this in other big cities. I believe that that is one of the strategic areas.
The other point, made by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, is on the question of carbon emissions, which is important in the case of major motorways and part of our impact on the climate. The other effect of motorways is that they can
help or hinder water movement. In Malaysia, the motorway that goes into the centre of Kuala Lumpur is generally a road but can also be an enormous drain when there is enormous rainfall. Similarly, we could have road tunnels and cuttings to use our roadways as part of our water infrastructure.
The other point to emphasise, when you go to Germany, is that you should moderate your speed because of the noise. The Germans do not generally moderate their speed, but they do when suburbs tell them about the noise. We have extremely noisy roads, such as the North Circular Road, and those are aspects.
I want to come back to that in a moment, and the role of the private sector. I am surprised about the confidence in this Bill about the private company solution. Who will own the company? Will it be owned by five different banks all around the world? There was an article in one of the Sunday newspapers recently. Thames Water has been owned by many banks, finally ending up with the Macquarie bank in Australia. English people are being told all sorts of undesirable things on water to maintain the very high profit levels of this multiple bank ownership. How are we going to be sure to avoid this kind of thing?
Well run companies, such as we see in France with their motorways, not only run the motorways well but also give extremely good advice to road users. They tell them not to go too fast because it is dangerous and it is adding to carbon emissions. Here, under our Department for Transport control of the motorways, road users are told to go faster—they say, “In 70 minutes you will reach Bristol going at 70 miles an hour”. That is not the right message. The private sector with proper guidance could help, but the transparency that we need of private sector involvement needs to be a great improvement on what we have seen with the massive water companies.
The other feature of roads and road strategy is the question of whether they will continue to be the same. Are we going to have automatically controlled cars and cars and vehicles that are electrically driven? The big question is whether the investment and financial case being put forward for roads is based on current technology. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s view on that, and on who will be responsible for making the strategic technological decisions.
It is very important that there should be an overall strategic view on highways as regards the transport, economic and environmental aspects. That issue was of course reviewed in the Armitt infrastructure report, which put all those things together—things which we are not seeing at all in the Bill as drafted. In his report, which he produced with a number of important advisers, including my noble friend Lord Adonis, it was suggested that roads need to be considered in a broad context, obtaining maximum value. That requires an integrated approach by government. I have mentioned some features, but other important ones include other aspects of transport, such as rail. Surely, many railway journeys to the south-west tip of Cornwall would be much more comfortable for everybody if the car was put on a train and the train went to Penzance—the sort of thing that used to happen and which still happens in
France. Everybody charging down these roads to that tiny peninsula at the end of Britain is a very strange thing to do.
Finally, there is shipping, which is a very important aspect of transportation around the coast of the UK. This was discussed in considerable detail when we had our coastal Bill in 2009-10, and should again be considered in a strategic way.
On other aspects of the Bill, I welcome the speeding up and clarification on land assets and conveyancing. Purchasing and conveyancing in the UK is nothing like as fast as it is in some other countries, and I hope that the efficiencies there will bring benefits. We should take on board the comments made about the possibility of fraud, when you have a highly computerised system. With people not understanding the process, there are dangers.
In Part 4 there is the discussion of indigenous oil and gas, as the Minister rightly emphasised. Will this be a possible source of energy for the UK via fracking? It is important to consider all the environmental costs. It is unknown by many in Britain, as we have been told here by visiting American politicians, that in the energy Bill proposed by President Bush he explicitly said that the costs of water and water clean-up would not be ascribed to the energy. It is therefore really important that all the environmental costs should be ascribed to the energy benefits or costs of fracking. It would be useful to have that point clearly made. The assumption in all the discussions is that you put a pipe down in the ground and oil or gas will come up out of the pipe. But the point about the experience of America is that, once you start really forcing the structure of the ground well below, you can get a release of gas coming up through other cracks, and some of these—as you can see when you look at the photographs from North Dakota—are very serious indeed. You can see flames popping up in between the nodding donkey gas extractors. There are still significant features of the chemistry of shale that need to be understood, when the shale is there in the presence of water. I visited a chemistry lab at the University of Leicester where they are studying this, and they pointed out that there were still important research questions to be assessed.
Another feature of Part 4 is the encouragement to build more energy-saving houses, as the Minister explained, with technology solutions that should of course include not only new sorts of emission but also ventilation and insulation, which are serious problems. Noble Lords might be interested to know that there is a nice book in the Library, which I edited, called London’s Environment, published in 2005, in which we described in great detail the excitement of the House of Lords committees at that time about what was happening in some of the new housing developments, in BedZED and Woking, some of which were looked at by many other countries. The Minister was right to imply that much of this technology is known, but the question is now to push this out and to ensure that it is available to social houses. I am afraid to say that some social housing is particularly bad with regard to insulation and ventilation, and this causes ill health, so housing for the whole community must be at an appropriate level.
Clause 26 in Part 4 has this very important development, which has been quite widespread in other European countries, in involving community investment in renewable energy. In Denmark, it had a great impact on involving people in their local wind farm installations. As the Bill describes it at the moment, it is a question of the community investing in the generation; there is no discussion that I have seen about generating local electrical networks. Woking was a borough run with no overall control, and some people say that that is why the Woking experiment or development worked so well—but that is a political point. It was at any rate extremely innovative, and Mayor Livingstone said that he wanted to make London look like Woking. That did not quite happen, but it was an ambition. One important point that was made was that the people in Woking could use a local electrical network and then the price of electricity that they paid for was much reduced. I suspect that the scheme being envisaged here is that community people might benefit to some extent from the income to the generators, but will they get cheap electricity out of their electrical plug to their kettle? I am not so sure about that. It is very important to have this done in an integrated way.
Finally, it is very important that if communities are to be involved in fracking, as has been suggested—I think that the Minister suggested that—they must also contribute to the costs. As others have emphasised, these costs include roadways and destruction of the local bio-environment, as well as the costs of the water supply and clean-up and recycling. So it is not just a free lunch. There will be quite considerable investment in all of that—but I believe that if the community is involved the right answer might be obtained.
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