Clause 25 - Changes to, and revocation of, development consent orders

Part of Infrastructure Bill [Lords] – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:00 pm on 6 January 2015.

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Photo of Nick Raynsford Nick Raynsford Labour, Greenwich and Woolwich 2:00, 6 January 2015

I am pleased to speak in strong support of the case put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham for the independent commission as recommended by the Armitt review. Before I go any further, I should draw attention to my interests as declared in the register.

Why do we need an independent infrastructure committee? As my hon. Friend said, our country does not have a great record on ensuring that infrastructure needs are met in a timely, efficient and well co-ordinated way. We have too many examples of stop-start and changing direction of decisions that have not been taken at the right time and on the right evidence base to give us the infrastructure we need.

We should all recognise that Sir John Armitt is one of the country’s leading civil engineers. When I first met him, he was responsible for a lot of work on the channel tunnel. He subsequently went on to hold a number of very senior positions and to deliver the Olympic site as chair of the Olympic Delivery Authority, the body responsible for the site’s infrastructure development. We should pay heed to his words. In his report, he says that the current

“annual National Infrastructure Plan produced by Infrastructure UK is not strategic. It is essentially a list of projects which is not built up from an evidence-based assessment of the UK’s long term needs”.

He continues:

“Infrastructure UK does not enjoy the profile of independent bodies such as the Office of Budget Responsibility and the Committee on Climate Change. This means that its annual progress reports lack the authority that comes with statutory independence”.

He talks about the need for a new commission that will be strategic and evidence-based:

“Our proposals retain democratic accountability whilst reducing the present scope for policy drift that is so damaging to investor confidence. In particular: the Commission’s evidence based approach will promote a better public understanding of the key issues concerning the UK’s infrastructure. It will develop evidence about the state of the nation’s assets and the likely impact of key economic, environmental and demographic trends. It will also build an understanding of the implications of either delaying investment or doing nothing. In short, the Commission would provide the level of strategic thinking that has largely been absent in the UK over the past 30 years”.

We should take that very seriously indeed. The hon. Member for Daventry asked why the commission was necessary, and suggested that it would involve setting up a quango. The answer is that we already have the  quango, and it is called Infrastructure UK. The problem is that it does not have the independence or authority to be able to act independently, to say what is needed and to reflect the understanding of the wider world. There can be no better illustration of that than what is written on aviation policy in its first report, “National Infrastructure Plan 2010”. That report was the first iteration of an NIP produced by the present Government, and in it all that was written on aviation capacity was that we should be

“making best use of existing airport capacity to help improve the passenger experience”.

I am sorry, but no serious independent infrastructure body would agree with that assessment. We now know only too well that the Government take a different view. The 2014 iteration of the NIP goes into some detail about the importance of extra capacity. It says that that has been handed over to the independent Davies commission. So we have not one quango but two, and we have delay, because they have not been taking decisions; they are reasons for not taking decisions.

The hon. Member for Taunton Deane highlighted the problem of politicians not having the courage of their conviction and essentially passing responsibility across to other bodies. That is what we have at the moment. That is what the Davies commission is and that, I am afraid, is the problem which Sir John Armitt is trying to resolve. The solution—and it is an elegant one—is to have a body of independent experts who can assemble the evidence, who can show why the needs are there and what the priorities are from a national interest, taking account of economic, environmental and wider strategic issues.