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Mrs. Shephard: If the right hon. Gentleman is so concerned about the cuts, it is extraordinary that should continue to take £500 million from London Underground.
Mr. Prescott: Will the right hon. Lady say where the £500 million is being taken from? Our commitment was for three years; we hoped that, in 2000, the money would come from a public-private partnership. We will wait to see whether that happens.
Mrs. Shephard: It has not happened.
Mr. Prescott: It has not happened yet, as we are still waiting for the bids. The proposals do not apply until 2000, which, as the right hon. Lady may have noticed, has not arrived. Unlike the previous Administration, we will not sacrifice the investment in the underground.
Mrs. Shephard: The right hon. Gentleman seems to be saying that he is in a mess. In the transport White Paper, he announced the withdrawal of the subsidy. He now says that the plans to replace that subsidy will not be in place by 2000, but he cannot say when they will be. I hope that, in winding up, the Minister for Transport in London will explain what will happen if those plans are not in place, as the right hon. Gentleman does not seem to know.
The White Paper contained a lot of high-flown talk about an integrated transport policy for London, but if, as the right hon. Gentleman wants, the mayor has responsibility for London Underground, that will be a ball and chain. The right hon. Gentleman is not clear whether
the public-private partnership will work or when it will work. He is not bringing in private sector management expertise, so the responsibility will be a ball and chain for the mayor. The sooner he accepts that, the better, although we can, of course, examine the matter in Committee.
The withdrawal of funding from London Underground affects the Bill's proposals for congestion charging--another matter of concern for the Conservative party--about which the right hon. Gentleman did not say much in his opening speech. Obviously, we share the concern about the effects of traffic congestion on health and on the economy. Pollution is also a problem, even though emissions from cars are infinitely cleaner than they were 20 years ago. To use the motorist as an income stream, however, is not the answer.
Ms Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North):
Will the right hon. Lady take this opportunity to distance herself from her friends on Westminster city council, who last week wrote to my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister asking for powers on traffic congestion as soon as possible, including the power to examine the feasibility of congestion charging?
Mrs. Shephard:
I expect the hon. Lady will find an opportunity to read the Bill and reply to Westminster city council herself. Are not congestion charges only a means to clobber the motorist yet again? The right hon. Gentleman has not delivered on his promises, as he admitted this afternoon.
Mr. Dale Campbell-Savours (Workington)
rose--
Mrs. Shephard:
The right hon. Gentleman wants to intervene, so I give way to him.
Mr. Prescott:
The right hon. Lady has said that she is not in favour of introducing a new income stream. Is she distancing herself from the previous Government's Green Paper which made it clear, after analysis, that there would be a presumption in favour of introducing legislation in due course to enable congestion charging? That conclusion was right, and we included it in our White Paper. We also discussed whether the money should be related directly to transport expenditure. We have made it clear in our document on congestion that the 100 per cent. stated in the Bill will be applied, and that we will review the matter after 10 years. That is a fair assessment, and there is an admitted principle in terms of hypothecation. Has the right hon. Lady got the Opposition Treasury team to agree to hypothecation during that 10-year period--or, if the Conservatives were ever to be elected, would they scrap it?
Mrs. Shephard:
The right hon. Gentleman's position on hypothecation is a bit vague--even in terms of the Bill. We are not against the principle of road charging on the basis that people thereby pay for what they are using.
The Secretary of State is taking £0.5 billion from London Underground. The public-private partnership which was to provide the investment to repay the subsidy
for London Underground is in disarray, as he has said this afternoon. He is imposing more taxes on the motorist, but whether that money from the motorist will go into public transport improvements is a moot point. His own document, "Breaking the Logjam", cast doubt on whether the money would be hypothecated, and schedule 13 of the Bill contains the stated intention that the proceeds of those charges should go into the Consolidated Fund.
For the Secretary of State to claim, on the one hand, that he will hypothecate congestion charges to invest in public transport while, with his other hand, he is taking £0.5 billion out of London Underground is frankly so incredible that, tomorrow night, we shall have to urge the House to accept our reasoned amendment.
Mr. Prescott:
It may be a reasoned amendment, but it is not a reasoned argument. I have not said, and it is not true, that we have taken £0.5 billion out of London Underground--it is exactly the opposite. We put that amount in, following the comprehensive spending review. I have conceded that, in the last year, we hope to receive funding from the public-private partnership, but we must wait and see.
Bidding means that we do not know what people will offer--it is called negotiation. If the right hon. Lady thinks that she should know the amount of a bid before it is offered, that shows why the previous Administration got into such a mess, and cost the privatisation process billions of pounds. [Interruption.] Let us not contest that point--the Select Committees have made it clear. She has now admitted that the Opposition agree that a new income stream can come from charging. That is not what she was saying five minutes ago. That new income stream was in the Green Paper. Let us agree that she agrees with that, anyway--whatever she was saying five minutes ago. That much is clear. What we are saying--
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord):
Order. I appreciate that the Secretary of State is responding to points made in the debate, but interventions are getting longer and longer. A great number of hon. Members wish to speak today, and of course there will be an opportunity for Government and Opposition Front Benchers to wind up at the end of the debate.
Mr. Prescott:
I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The money will be used for those transport purposes for 10 years--as we have made clear in the document on congestion. The period of time beyond that is for the House to judge in a review. We are agreed on hypothecation--does the right hon. Lady agree on hypothecation?
Mrs. Shephard:
If the Secretary of State refers to the comprehensive spending review, he will see that funding for London Underground is to be phased out by 2000. That is what I mean when I say that he is taking £0.5 billion a year from London Underground. He has admitted this afternoon that he is not at all sure when the public-private partnership will come into place to get that sorted. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for reminding the Secretary of State that he has had his say.
I wish to ask a few questions of principle to which the Minister might like to respond when she winds up later this evening. Who can remove the mayor, and by what
mechanisms? Under what circumstances will the mayor be able to intervene in local planning decisions? How was the pledge in the White Paper that the new arrangements will cost Londoners 3p a week calculated, and why has the London School of Economics computed the cost at a great deal higher? How will consistency be achieved between the planning strategy of the London development agency and the spatial development strategy? Will the mayor set environmental targets? Should London, the least typical of all our cities, be the guinea pig in this experiment?
We agree that London should have a voice. We support the concept of a mayor for London, but the Bill as drafted will do little for transparency, accountability or the people's involvement in London's governance. It is a recipe for conflict at every one of the layers of government that it will insert into the way London is run. It makes the capital and the people who live and work there guinea pigs.
Mr. Ken Livingstone (Brent, East):
Personally, I look forward to the voice for London having a distinctly nasal quality.
If the speech that we have just heard from the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard) is an indication of what the passage of the Bill holds in store, it is clear that the Opposition will have to accept, as they did with the Scottish Parliament, that once people have voted in a referendum, the major issues are settled and it is now important to get the details right.
The most important detail, which did not come out in the right hon. Lady's speech, is that it would be a great mistake to confuse this proposal with the talk about mayors being elected in other parts of the country. Those mayors would be within the existing structure of local government, which delivers personal services such as housing and social security, but the Bill contains a package of powers that is the first stage towards regional government for England.
There might be some confusion. When the Government, in their second term, set up regional authorities for the rest of England, as I hope they will, perhaps they will not call the leaders of those authorities mayors. The Bill adds up to something much closer to the German Lander than the city authorities that are the subject of another Bill. I welcome that, because throughout my political career I have never doubted that the centralisation of power in Britain--the idea that everything can be run from Whitehall--is completely and fundamentally wrong.
To give but one simple example, when I was elected to the Greater London council in 1973, within a year or two--it was nothing to do with me--the council proposed to the then Labour Government the extension of the Jubilee line to docklands. That Government, on Treasury advice, turned it down on the ground of cost. The following Conservative administration of the late Sir
Horace Cutler went to the outgoing Labour Government and then to the incoming Government of Baroness Thatcher with a proposal that the council should build the Jubilee line extension to docklands, and the Thatcher Government rejected it.
My administration at the GLC in 1981 made exactly the same proposal. The people representing London were consistently right about the need for the line, and we would not now be biting our nails wondering whether it will be finished in time if London's representatives had been allowed to go ahead and get it built; it would have been running for the past 10 years, and we would no doubt have been able to go on to develop the Chelsea-Hackney link or other projects. In the same way, it was pressure from the old London county council that advanced the issue of a barrier across the Thames to protect London from flooding. Therefore, I am delighted to see the restoration of some form of democracy to Londoners.
I had grave reservations about the idea of separately elected mayors and authorities, but my concerns were mostly resolved by the decision to pay members of the assembly. Under the original proposals in the consultation document, it would have been impossible for the members of the assembly to operate any effective check on the mayor if they had not held full-time, salaried posts. Those tasks will occupy them fully.
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