My Lords, I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, with great interest, and I have been pondering for a few minutes whether in fact he is right. My mind goes back, if I am allowed to reminisce, to when the then Government were planning the motorway network. At one stage this involved taking the M11 motorway from London up towards Cambridge and then to join the A14, and it went slap bang through the middle of my constituency, Wanstead and Woodford. Initially my constituents were pretty horrified by this, as indeed was I. This urban area was proposed to have, in effect, a four-lane dual carriageway going from Hackney Wick towards Epping Forest.
The Minister of Transport at the time was my noble friend—as he now is—Lord Fowler, and his junior Minister was my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke. I persuaded the Minister that they should come and spend a morning with me in Wanstead, which was the part of my constituency that would be most dramatically affected. They came to the perfectly wise conclusion that that part of the road should go underground. It would involve a cut-and-cover operation, which eventually happened.
Once that announcement had been made, though, overwhelmingly my constituents said, “Well then, get on with it”. They did not want constant delay. However, and this is the point that I want to make to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, it was held up for nearly eight years by a series of demonstrations supported by precisely the environmental bodies that he mentioned, and others. Some of them were quite clearly anarchists. They rechristened the area of Wanstead Green “Wanstonia” and declared independence, and all that sort of nonsense. The courts became bogged down with a series of cases to try to get them out, which held up the process for years to the increasing fury of my constituents, virtually none of whom took part in those demonstrations. The demonstrators were all from outside and were the kind of person for whom demonstrating is what they live for. That is what makes them tick; it is their new religion. I can tell the Committee that that caused enormous irritation in the area. Now, of course, if anyone drives up to Cambridge by that route they go through the cut-and-cover and it is entirely sensible, and people say, “But why couldn’t it be done before?”.
I question whether it is possible that the monitor should regard, as it were, the CPRE and bodies like that as within its remit. It is monitoring the transport system. It is for the planning system to determine whether or not the environmental consequences are acceptable. I do not believe that the monitor should have anything to do with it. There are already enough obstacles. We are debating in another Bill the question of judicial review, because that can also be a great obstacle to getting a transport system properly up and running because of local nimbys and so on. When one is dealing with road and rail—look at what is already happening with HS2—there are enough obstacles in the way already. What we should be
arguing about here, in an infrastructure Bill, is ensuring that what we want to produce actually happens without undue delay.
I hope that we shall never see anything again remotely like what happened in my constituency and indeed in other areas around the country, as plenty of former Members of Parliament will be able to testify. That has been one of the biggest obstacles to getting a modern road and rail network, and it does not seem to me that the monitor can have anything to do with that at all.
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