My Lords, I apologise for not being present at Tuesday’s Committee debate due to private reasons. I have subsequently read the report of the proceedings and very much
appreciate the contributions made by my noble friends Lady Mallalieu, Lady Young and Lord Rosser. I particularly appreciate the Minister’s contribution as he covered some of the points I would have made had I been present, and did so very well. Of course, now that he has declared that he is a would-be train driver, I am sure that he will be disqualified from any future activities with regard to transport, but while we have him, we should cherish him.
I declare my interest as a resident of Little Missenden in the Chilterns AONB. I have also been involved in some of the campaigns associated with Little Missenden. My private interests were dealt with during a sitting of the Select Committee in your Lordships’ House. However, I think that, to the extent to which they were able to help, those matters are extinguished. Therefore, I am not dealing here with private interests but with the fallout from the issues that occur to me as a Member of your Lordships’ House in relation to some of the processes that I have been able to observe from a variety of positions.
I am speaking to Amendment 30, dealing with a complaints commissioner; to Amendment 31, in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding; and to the associated amendments relating to those. Amendments 30 and 31 relate to issues that stem from some of the processes that have been established to try to progress the Bill through a hybrid arrangement. The noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, made a very good speech in which she tried to identify where the gaps occur from a local perspective. I should have mentioned in my opening remarks that I thank her for speaking on Tuesday on another amendment. Noble Lords may not be aware that she rushed here, almost straight from the airport, and had not even unpacked before she arrived, and yet she was still able to give a very substantial speech, and I thank her for that.
The process we have been through reveals the need for either a complaints commissioner or an adjudicator. I absolutely agree with the points made by my noble friend Lord Berkeley and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, on these issues. During the Select Committee phase, the focus is on the personal interests of those who are directly affected by the Bill. The problem is that, even if you are trying to argue a more general public interest case, what you can do is narrowed down by the fact that the opening position and arrangements against which those presentations are made relate to your residence and propinquity to the line.
I am conscious that there are members of the Select Committee here today, and I do not in any sense want to do anything to suggest that I do not hold them in the highest regard or do not think that the report was an excellent summary of the work that they did. However, I found it a very difficult experience, and I am not an inexperienced public speaker. If I found it difficult, it is fair to say that other petitioners will have found it the same. It is a very adversarial process, focusing on private interests, and therefore mitigation, rather than on the broader issues that exist. There is no equality of arms because the process is done in a court-like setting with very highly trained, and presumably quite expensive, advocates against you.
The particularity of the situation in the Lords was that the committee, for reasons that I understand, had decided that it would not hear cases that involved alternative provisions. That meant that most of those who wished to speak, certainly those from the Chilterns, felt that they could not raise all the issues they wanted to. I could go on—I could mention that the lack of action groups and the reliance on parish councils was reflected, but I do not wish to get into that area. I just want that to be noted as the background. Looking back at the process, it seems to me that important issues have fallen by the side. It is not clear to me how those can be picked up, except through this process. This process is dealing with the public aspects of the Bill, but it engages with issues that could be regarded as private, even though they are germane.
I appreciate that this is quite a difficult point to get across and I have no doubt that I will be attacked for it. However, there is a gap around the need to regard what local expertise and understanding can bring to the broader picture. That is not the same as private interests. The issues faced by those trying to petition the Select Committee were no different from the issues faced by those arguing more generally against the Bill.
The Bill will go through—there is no question but that the Government will get their Bill. Therefore, it is now a question of how best to improve it for the future for all people. However, in the absence of the ability to get direct cost information about what is involved, we were constantly frustrated. How could it be that decisions were being reached that balanced the direct costs of building part of the railway and the adverse costs that would occur if the environment were destroyed? This obviously applies to the Chilterns, but there are other areas in which this is also a responsibility. We could not get that cost information: we lacked the ability to do so through the private sector and we have not been able to do it in any public way. That is a problem. I am not saying that were the information to be made available it would change anything, but we cannot get it and the decision is not transparent. There is no information available in the public sector about the trade-off that needs to be made—as I understand it, through the legislative process—between the responsibilities the Government have to maintain AONBs and the need to have the infrastructure of a railway. I have come to terms with the fact that there will be a railway and it will go through the Chilterns. However, I do not have the information to understand better the mechanics of how a decision was reached that it was too expensive to continue the tunnel past Wendover, for example.
There are some difficulties here. It may be that the review which is to be carried out on how we deal with these issues and how lines are to be built will pick up on the point, although I certainly understand that it is probably too late to look at this particular railway. But I want to put on the record that, from my experience, there are difficulties here.
My real point is one I mentioned earlier. It is about the way in which local experience about the problems and the pinch points cannot be built into the process. Some very good examples were given to the Committee in the sitting on Tuesday. The noble Viscount, Lord Astor,
in what was a series of powerful and appropriate contributions, talked about the tunnelling at Wendover and the issues that have arisen from knowledge about a cheaper version which simply is not being discussed, along with the issues at Doddershall and Quainton. As the noble Viscount explained, these are all extremely pertinent in the local context, but there are wider issues about whether they are the better solution to the problems being faced by the proprietor in putting forward the railway. Like the noble Viscount, I do not understand how it is that these decisions are taken in the absence of information and in the absence of a process under which better interrogation could take place.
I shall mention two or three other matters although I do not wish to go into any detail and I am not looking to the Minister to make a response to them. However, I have been copied into correspondence from people living near Savay Lake and Savay Farm, which I know the committee heard about at length. As I say, I do not wish to go into the detail, but it seems that there may be a miscarriage here which is of an extent that might require, for instance, an independent adjudicator to take some interest in further down the line. That is why I support the proposal. The question about the haul road in Great Missenden for which there seemed a solution brokered outside the Select Committee in order to ensure that there would be a programme to mitigate the damage to Great Missenden collapsed and there seems to be no way to retrieve it because the system simply does not provide an opportunity to do so.
All these issues—there are others; I could mention the question of more issues closer to Great Missenden at Hyde Heath and further up the line as referred to by the noble Viscount, Lord Astor—show that the detail is not needed to make the general point that there is no body, no person, likely to be able to take account of redress where there is environmental impact as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, or impacts on communities which occur after the Act is passed but during the process and before the line is opened. That is because the system does not seem to permit it. It will be, as it were, cast in concrete as soon as the Bill gets through. That seems wrong and therefore I agree absolutely with the idea that there should be some form of complaints commission. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, made the right point when she said that we need something with teeth, and therefore her proposal for an independent adjudicator may be the right way forward.
Before I close on this perhaps I may mention a point that was raised by my noble friend Lord Rosser on Tuesday. Many of the complaints that arose in the original hearings and in both Select Committees were about compensation. I think we have all had experience of how difficult that can be to apply. There is a proposal which I would commend to the Minister to take on board. I do not think that it could necessarily be available on this project, but it might be appropriate for phase 2. It could be of more general interest and I would ask him to take it away because I am not looking for a response today. It stems from a Private Member’s Bill tabled around 18 months ago in the other place. The idea is a property bond approach
through a substantial fund that would be controlled by a mutual on the basis that where a person has a property which is affected by some form of infrastructure arrangement, it would not be necessary for the promoters of the scheme to provide a direct contribution towards the replacement costs should that property be required. There is too much detail for me to go through at this point in the proceedings, but I would like to leave the proposal with the Minister and I am happy to write to him and attend meetings if he feels that it is worth following up.
The difficulty that has bedevilled all the compensation schemes in the Chilterns has been around propensity to the line. Setting an arbitrary figure of so many metres before someone can qualify for one or other of the various arrangements was always going to cause problems, and that is a general observation rather than applying just to this line. If it could be possible to arrange matters, perhaps through some form of mutual obligation on all property owners, so that anyone affected by waterworks activity, electricity, railways and roads is covered for the diminution in the value of their property because of the works, that would lift a huge weight from those who are affected by infrastructure arrangements and, I think, it would help the Government to gain support for their projects. The proposal comes under the general idea of a property bond, but it is really related to the blighting effect of infrastructure projects. I commend it to those who might be interested and I will be happy to follow it up later.
4 pm