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9 pm
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire): Serving on a Select Committee produces a curious kind of split personality: one finds oneself liking, admiring, listening to and even becoming friends with those with whom one has fundamental disagreements. For example, it is an honour to serve under the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), whose grasp of sound common sense often makes me wonder how she can possibly be in the same Labour party as some of her hon. Friends. Equally, one respects the knowledge that the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Mr. Stringer) has of Manchester and of the inner cities, although he perhaps knows less of other areas.
I often tweak the tail of the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Brake) because he talks glibly about the countryside even though he lives in central London. He is more at home talking about such things as walking, cycling, integrated transport and cutting vehicle emissions, which are the home territory of the Liberal Democrats, than some of the issues on which he pontificates often in this place.
The report of the Transport Sub-Committee of the Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee was technically unanimous. Some of us abstained, but we certainly did not divide the Committee. However, we produced a press release highlighting our fundamental differences with a number of points in the report. The whole point of the report is the search for the great grail of an integrated transport system. Every politician of every party in the history of parties has sought to achieve integrated transport--of course they have. I agree with everything the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich said about us having to find ways of integrating trains and buses--of course I do; what sensible person would not? But the trouble with so much that new Labour does is that it concerns not what to do and how to achieve it, but aspirations, launches, glossy new brochures, clever cliches and constant talk about the millennium.
I am beginning to suffer from millennium fatigue. I shudder to think what I will do the next time a Minister says that we will drive forward into the new millennium and that everything will be different on 2 January 2000, but that is what so much of the integrated transport White Paper is all about. It is not about doing things, what will happen or legislation that will be in the Queen's Speech, but what we would all like to happen--the 19 daughter papers and all that. There are marvellous words and clever spinning, but that does not amount to a row of beans. Of course we did not divide the Committee, because of course we agree with the vague aspirations in the report, but it was important that we put out a press release
highlighting our differences with the majority of the Committee because so much in it simply does not stack up.
The Government's response to the Select Committee report, which was issued at some pace this afternoon, equally tends to the aspirational--the "hand everything over to a new Committee" way of looking at politics--rather than to anything realistic. It seems to me, to the papers and to every observer across the nation that their whole transport policy is seizing up in the most extraordinary way, but perhaps that is hardly surprising considering who is running it. Just look at who is in charge: the man whose only claim to any knowledge of transport of any kind at all is that he was a steward on a cross-channel ferry and that he now owns two Jaguars.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley):
Snob.
Mr. Gray:
From a sedentary position, the hon. Lady says that I am a snob. She is quite wrong as I come from a grammar school background. Nothing is snobbish about me, I assure her. My point, which is a powerful one, is that the Deputy Prime Minister has had no experience of any kind of anything to do with transport policy, with the single exception of being an agitator in the National Union of Seamen as a result of his job as a steward on a cross-channel ferry. That is his only experience of transport and that is the point I was making; it has nothing whatever to do with snobbery.
Mrs. Laing:
I fear that my hon. Friend is doing the Deputy Prime Minister a disservice. Yesterday, he increased his experience of transport by travelling by helicopter to Silverstone, while the people whom his party always appears to address were waiting in queues on the motorway.
Mr. Gray:
My hon. Friend makes an important point. I understand that, when the Deputy Prime Minister got there, he was so upset by his experience of travelling by helicopter and looking down at the plebs stuck in the traffic that when he went to ask officials how our best driver was doing, he inquired, "How's Damien?". They looked back at him blankly, because he had, of course, mistaken the driver's first name.
Mr. George Stevenson (Stoke-on-Trent, South):
If the hon. Gentleman is so opposed to the contents of the report, why did he not vote against it rather than using the bolthole of issuing a press release, which he now thinks justifies his point of view?
Mr. Gray:
I was happy, in my opening remarks, to try to draw a blind over our reason for not dividing the Committee, but as the hon. Gentleman asks me, perhaps the House will allow me to spell it out in detail. I made it plain to the Committee Chairman that I was determined to divide the Committee, but that, unfortunately, I was unable to be present in the Committee on the day on which the formal--[Hon. Members: "Oh."] The reason was that I was having a private meeting with a Minister, who refused to move the time of the meeting.
Mr. Gray:
I shall not give way as I have just done so.
I made it plain to the Chairman that, as I was unable to be there, I could not divide the Committee--
Mr. Stevenson:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Gray:
No, I have given way already and we do not have much time to carry on this sort of banter. My party wholeheartedly and fundamentally disagrees with many of the points in the report. As we could not divide the Committee for procedural reasons, we produced a press release to highlight our differences.
The Deputy Prime Minister, who gets muddled up about the names of our racing buffs, presumably looked down from his helicopter and was unable to spot a bus lane clear of traffic--or a bus lane full of traffic.
I spotted an interesting paragraph in the Government's response to the Select Committee report. The Committee referred to bus lanes and the Government responded:
What happens to people who drive down bus lanes? The Government have helpfully pointed out in the report what should happen to people such as the Prime Minister, who abused his position by using a bus lane. The report says:
"We agree that comprehensive bus priority measures have a major part to play in making bus travel more attractive and better able to compete with the car in congested areas."
My goodness, the Government have certainly tried to compete with the car. Presumably, it is all right for those in chauffeur-driven limos to compete with buses by making use of bus lanes, but not, as my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) pointed out, for the rest of us who are queueing to get to Silverstone.
"We agree that bus lane infringements need to be subject to appropriately stringent penalties . . . infringements cause danger, as well as inconvenience, to other road users."
I hope that, this evening, Ministers will carry that message, contained in paragraph (uu) of the Government's response to the report, back to No. 10 Downing street and say that it is not acceptable for Government car service drivers to break the speed limit and that they will get busted, just like the rest of us. Neither is it acceptable for them to drive on the wrong side of the road. It is not acceptable, in their words, to use even the "daft" bus lane--which the Deputy Prime Minister introduced--on the M4 on the way into London from Heathrow.
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