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Ms Ward: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Jenkin: I give way to the enchanting lady.
Ms Ward: The hon. Gentleman is most generous. He may have forgotten, however, that the Conservatives cut the road maintenance programme by 9 per cent. over a four-year period. Is the hon. Gentleman taking no responsibility for what happened under the last Government?
Mr. Jenkin: I would have expected the hon. Lady to have something to say about all the traffic that is being driven off the motorways, which go through and near her constituency, on to local roads. This Government have cut the road improvement budget so that traffic is driven on to the roads where her constituents shop, play and drive to work.
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Mr. Nick Raynsford): As the hon. Gentleman has raised the question of spending on road maintenance, will he confirm the following figures? In 1994-95--a year that he likes to cite because it was the best year of the Tory Administration--£2.8 billion was spent on road maintenance. Over the subsequent two years, the amount fell to £2.45 billion. Since we have been in government, it has increased to £2.899 billion. Will the hon. Gentleman concede that he was wrong to claim that the present Government had cut spending on maintenance? It was cut by the last Government; we have increased it.
Mr. Jenkin: Unfortunately, the Minister has been given cash figures rather than figures relating to prices in real terms. In real terms, in 1994-95 we were spending £3.3 billion. [Interruption.] These figures are from the House of Commons Library: the Minister may want to argue with those in the Library. Not in any single year, either past or for which the Minister is planning, does expenditure match that amount.
The present Government, not the last, are responsible for today's spending levels. I know that the strategy of the Minister's party is to try to fight the last general election rather than the next, but we will not let him do so.
In its White Paper, Labour claimed:
- We are already . . . investing more in public transport.
Sir Nicholas Lyell (North-East Bedfordshire): When we start talking about killer facts, things become very serious. Is my hon. Friend aware that I was told I should say thank you when the Government rightly kept the Great Barford bypass in the programme? Is he further
aware that, since then, absolutely nothing has been done to build it? There was yet another fatal accident earlier this month on the A428, leaving a family husbandless and fatherless.
Mr. Jenkin: I would not want to make a party political point about any tragedy. The fact is, however, that the less spent on highways maintenance and improvements, the more dangerous those roads will be and, inevitably, the more deaths and injuries there will be.
Mr. Bob Russell (Colchester): The hon. Gentleman referred to killer facts. Until this moment he has not mentioned road deaths, and he has done so now only in response to an intervention. Will he at any stage mention the fact that 10 people a day are killed on our roads? Will he challenge the Government to do more about road deaths? That is a question to which people want answers.
Mr. Jenkin: As it happens, I am not majoring on road safety today, but the hon. Gentleman has raised a vital issue. I would like a debate on road safety in Government time. They tried to sneak out their road safety policy without making a proper announcement to Parliament. In the end, they made a statement, but it should be pointed out that they did so at my request. These are important matters. I continue to reflect on them, and in due course we will produce a road safety policy to keep the Government up to the mark.
I was talking about killer facts. Killer fact: Labour is spending less on local transport. The local transport grant has been cut from £329 million in 1994 to just £13 million in the current year. Killer fact: we were spending an average of £2.25 billion on the trunk road and motorway network. Labour is planning to spend a mere £300 million in the current year and in the next year. Killer fact: on road maintenance, the top priority, in our last three years, we spent £8.6 billion--[Interruption.] The Minister is touchy on the subject and we know why. We spent £8.6 billion and that was despite the recession. We maintained that spending despite the recession and the squeeze on public spending. In a boom, Labour has spent a mere £7.8 billion in the past three years and it has no plans to spend any more than the Conservatives.
Mr. Raynsford: As the hon. Gentleman referred to the Conservative Government's record in their last three years in office, will he confirm that spending on road maintenance in those last three years fell year on year from £2.8 billion to £2.6 billion to £2.4 billion? Why does he try to mislead the House with bogus statistics?
Mr. Jenkin: I am a generous chap, so I will overlook the Minister's jibe, but he cannot shuffle off responsibility for his lower spending levels using the record of the previous Government. We spent more over those three years than he spent over the successive three years.
Killer fact: Labour is spending less on the railways. Killer fact: Labour is spending less on London Transport. We averaged £830 million per year; Labour is averaging just £640 million a year. In fact, the spending level is well under £500 million this year. It is about £245 million and it is scheduled to be nil next year. Let us hope that there
will be an announcement about that. The public-private partnership is mired in delay and the cost of consultancy fees is going up and up and up.
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich): I am interested in the fact that the hon. Gentleman says that Labour is spending and has spent less on railways. Is he suggesting that, somehow or other, the deal that his Government did on privatisation--that the public subsidy should consistently fall--is one that he now regrets, and that he would like a lot more public money to be invested? If that is the case, it is an interesting change of tack.
Mr. Jenkin: I am merely pointing out that the Government are responsible for spending levels today, just as we were responsible for spending levels before. It was the Secretary of State who said that he was going to change everything. If he is keeping everything the same, those are the facts that the hon. Lady has to accept.
The biggest killer fact, the killer blow to the Secretary of State's credibility, is that the Conservatives spent twice as much per year on transport as the Labour Government. Between 1984 and 1997, we spent an average of £12.2 billion per year on transport. In the past three years, Labour has spent an average of just £6.4 billion--barely half the Conservative commitment.
Against that background, there is Labour's killer tax lie. There is an extra £8 billion in taxes on the motorist compared with 1997 levels. The Government are raising £36 billion in motoring taxes and investing less than a fifth of that in transport. Half of that tax burden is paid by business, so it hits competitiveness and productivity. United Kingdom petrol is by far the most expensive in Europe. For every £20 spent at the petrol pump today, £16 is taken in fuel duty.
I will give the Minister the facts about the price of petrol because it is not a familiar topic on the Government Benches. The Government inherited a price per litre of 59.2p and it is now well over 80p per litre. The Chancellor of the Exchequer would do well to remember that. The average motorist is spending £270 more per year for fuel under Labour. It confirms that Ministers do not drive their own cars or have to fill them up. Motoring taxes have reached such a level that they now fund £1 in every £7 that the Government spend. Those are all killer facts.
Mr. Peter Snape (West Bromwich, East): Does the hon. Gentleman agree with the killer fact from a Tory Minister with responsibility for transport, who said in March 1994 that increases in fuel duty and motorway tolling would help people to make more informed choices about the cost of using their cars?Was it a killer fact then, or was he day dreaming?
Mr. Jenkin: The point is that it depends on from what level duties are going up. It was the hon. Gentleman's Government who doubled the rate of the fuel escalator, who imposed three increases in the space of 18 months--calling them annual increases--and who have been found to be cheating on the rate of inflation, using a higher rate for uprating fuel duties than for uprating pensions, something the hon. Gentleman might have found out about during the local elections. The important point is that there are more taxes to come: congestion taxes and workplace parking taxes. Those are Labour taxes, not just London mayoral taxes.
The Secretary of State and the Prime Minister are responsible for the taxes that the London mayor can apply under the Greater London Authority Act 1999. The Prime Minister says that Greater London Authority members must "abide by their manifesto" commitments not to introduce congestion taxes during the first term of the mayoralty. He should be aware that he was contradicted within hours of making that statement by the Labour deputy mayor, who was elected on that Labour manifesto. She said that "in principle" she wanted to introduce congestion taxes in the first term.
I read that the Secretary of State had a meeting with the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone). Perhaps we will learn what was discussed on the matter of congestion taxes. I tabled a parliamentary question, but the only answer that I got was:
- We had a wide-ranging discussion of issues of mutual interest including transport.--[Official Report, 22 May 2000; Vol. 350, c. 324W.]
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