I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and to the Minister for her response. I get the feeling that we are being directed
towards this lovely, short licence document, or the longer one, as being the answer to everything. It is not clear to me—maybe because I do not understand it—when we will see the longer version, which will have as much detail in it as possible before Royal Assent, and whether we will be able to debate it. If we are not, it is pretty important that there is some reference to a strategy, such as a road investment strategy or, if the Minister prefers, a transport investment strategy, because there is none at the moment.
We do rail one way and roads another—we have debated that very often in the House. They have different criteria; they do not seem to talk to each other, and they have different forecasting methodologies. Is there to be some read-across between how the railways are operated and how it is intended that the strategic roads are operated? It may be that things have moved on since the Railways Act 1993, with the Railways Act 2005 and the high-level output specification used to specify what the railways should do, but there needs to be something in the Bill to set the strategy and perhaps the duties. We can debate whether it is to be the Secretary of State or the regulator, but to just dump all this into a licence that we may or may not see will lose us a big opportunity to consider before we get into the detail not just how roads are built and operated but how they fit into the environment, including the issue of emissions, along with local roads and all the other people that my noble friend Lord Whitty mentioned. I shall reflect on that and come back to it on Report. Perhaps we can have a meeting with the Minister before then, but in the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.