My Lords, I yield entirely to the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Berkeley, for their huge expertise in this field. I have not attempted to master all the details. However, there was one point made by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, which I am not sure I correctly understood. It was about the licence. My attention was drawn to the Written Statement that was issued by the Government. Indeed, my noble friend on the Front Bench repeated a Statement made by her colleague, the right honourable John Hayes. He was talking about the draft licence, which is a new document that was issued six days ago. I shall come back to that point in a moment. It states that the licence,
“indicates the manner in which the Secretary of State proposes to issue binding statutory directions and guidance to the new company, setting objectives and conditions around how the company must act”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/10/14; col. 18WS.]
I do not think that there is anything obscure about that; it is perfectly clear that the licence is issued by the Secretary of State. In those circumstances, the Secretary of State can clearly be held responsible if it does not work properly. But it may be that I misunderstood the noble Lord, Lord Whitty.
The Statement from which I quoted was issued less than a week ago and announces the publication of several substantial new documents which bear on Part 1 of the Infrastructure Bill. I fear that the Government have got themselves into rather a bad habit of publishing documents very shortly before Parliament has to consider them, leaving those of us who perhaps do not have the resources behind us that some may have to find it very difficult to catch up with it all. The most recent example—I do not hold my noble friend Lady Kramer responsible for this—is something that we will debate on Wednesday: the community electricity scheme. A task force looking at exactly that issue has been sitting for a year, but its report was made available only this morning. When I first came into the House, it was not even available in the Printed Paper Office, so I am afraid that I rang up the department concerned and expressed my displeasure, if I may put it in neutral language.
I have to say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that that is no way to treat Parliament. If the Government get into difficulties on some of these issues, it is because officials have been allowed to drag their feet to the point when things are issued only a matter of days before they have to be debated. I leave my noble friend with that thought.
Finally, I should say how much I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. I am sure that we have to come to some form of road pricing in future, if we are to make sense of this. There has been a huge increase in road traffic and no sign of it declining. The fact of the matter is that, while people of course pay the
petrol duty, the licence and other taxes, that is in no way related to the amount of use that they make of the roads. I am quite sure that we will have to come back to that at some stage, and it may be something that emerges from the revised structure being set up in this Bill. As I said at Second Reading, I totally support it, and think it a very good move, but the revised structure may well bring these questions of how it is to be paid for much more to the fore. Then we may have the sort of the reform that my noble friend Lord Bradshaw advocated.