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Sir Brian Mawhinney: The hon. Gentleman says that Liberal Democrats are in favour of reducing traffic. Will he offer us a small indication of how that might be done?
Mr. Brake: I am happy to respond to that point. As the right hon. Gentleman pointed out, congestion charges
may have a role to play--as would a substantial improvement in public transport, which would encourage people to switch to it from car use.I am happy to repeat the call for NATS to remain as a public company, allowed to raise funds for investment from the private sector.
Liberal Democrats are clear--as are Londoners--that the state of the tube has worsened under the Labour Government. However, our answer is not the Conservative folly of privatisation, nor the Government's mish-mash of partial privatisation and fragmentation. Our response is to raise the finance needed to revitalise the tube system through the issue of bonds against guaranteed future revenue streams. I am sure that Susan Kramer--as London's transport supremo--will fight for that--[Interruption.] Does an hon. Member want to intervene? If not, I am happy to repeat that Susan Kramer is London's transport supremo.
I hope that the Government will listen to the message that came across clearly at the recent elections for the Greater London Authority: Londoners do not want another rail privatisation fiasco on their hands--even only a partial one. I hope too that the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) will listen to Londoners and honour his pledges, and that he will not be tempted to compromise simply to secure his early return to the Labour party.
I am a regular commuter on Connex South Central, whose representatives were willing to talk to my constituents about the future of rail services; it appears that the Go-Ahead group has decided to pull out of the arrangements. I confirm my party's support for the establishment of the Strategic Rail Authority. We believe that it will improve regulation on the railways, although its scope could have been widened to include other modes of transport. The existing remit of the SRA should be extended to cover the expansion of the rail network where appropriate. As a priority, the SRA should simplify ticketing throughout the network.
In the wake of the Paddington crash, the public are still rightly concerned about safety. Immediately after the disaster, the Deputy Prime Minister announced that he was minded to remove the setting of safety standards from Railtrack. We supported him on that matter, but we were much less comfortable with his proposal, announced in February, that an independent subsidiary company of Railtrack should be responsible for transport safety. Railtrack should not be judge and jury on such an important matter.
We remain concerned that there is still a considerable shortfall of funding for investment in the railways. Without the investment, there will be no improvement in the services promised by the Government. If they continue to reduce the amount that they spend on the railways, it is increasingly likely that it will be left up to the passenger to make up the difference. That is why we believe that the tapering of subsidies has to be called into question.
Our tax plans reflect our transport priorities. We would invest in public transport first, securing a leap in the quality of public transport, and only then consider the introduction of congestion charges. We would abolish road tax on all cars of up to 1600 cc; this would be paid for by a small compensatory rise in the fuel duty. With
two thirds of British drivers driving cars of 1600 cc or below, the majority of drivers would be better-off. The policy would also have the beneficial environmental effect of encouraging smaller engined cars. That is the right way to proceed.The debate about transport needs an infusion of honesty. The Tories' promises will come to nothing unless they are prepared to say where they will raise the finance to improve our transport infrastructure. In 18 years in government, they failed to invest in roads, rail and the London underground. Tonight, they have said nothing to make me believe that they will do any better next time. They are all mouth and no delivery.
9.6 pm
Mr. Peter Snape (West Bromwich, East): I declare an interest: I am the chairman of Travel West Midlands, a subsidiary of the National Express Group, and I am a director of other National Express subsidiaries in the bus industry.
Mrs. Gorman: Will the hon. Gentleman repeat that?
Mr. Snape: The hon. Lady, who is not averse to dodging the rules of this place occasionally, asks me to repeat that; I am delighted to do so. I speak as the chairman of Travel West Midlands and I am the director of various National Express Group subsidiaries. I hope that satisfies her. My other interests--I am a member of the RMT--are in the Register of Members' Interests.
I hope that the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Brake) will forgive me if I do not pursue most of the points that he made. However, I am inclined to agree with him about the future role of the Strategic Rail Authority. I shall return to that subject shortly.
These are enormously depressing debates for those of us who have a long-standing interest in transport. The hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) made a speech that I have heard umpteen times--so many times, particularly in Committee, that I would have thought he would have refined it by now, but he has not. He has done his usual disappearing act. He opened this debate by demanding the presence of my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister, and he opened the proceedings of the Committee stage of the Transport Bill by making exactly the same speech. He then did a disappearing act there. Of the 36 or 37 sittings of the Committee, he missed more than he attended. He has disappeared again tonight and it brings the House into disrepute when Opposition spokesmen behave in that way. The hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) has been left to pick up the pieces and, no doubt, he will do that in his own adequate fashion. However, it is still a sad commentary on Conservative policy.
Stale statistics have been trotted out. Usually they are the prerogative of the motoring organisations, the AA and the RAC. Although I have been a member of the AA for many years, it has never asked me for my views on the subject, but it still trots out the same old rubbish about £36 billion being raised in taxation and £6 billion being spent on the road network. There is some excuse for the AA; it is part of the motoring lobby. However, I do not think that there is any excuse for someone who purports to be a shadow Minister of Transport to trot out all those statistics.
As the hon. Member for Colchester (Mr. Russell) reminded us, there are more than 3,000 road deaths every year. Each one of them, as he again rightly reminded us, has a financial cost as well as a human cost--a point that was made by my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning. It costs about £1 million for each accident, so can we add that sum to the £6 billion that is spent? Can we add on to the £6 billion the £16 billion in congestion costs, which is the estimate of the Confederation of British Industry? Shall we add on all the police, court and legal time that is spent on the aftermath of the motoring offences committed? If we do so, the equation does not look too attractive, although it is beloved of motoring organisations and idle hacks on daily newspapers, who spend their lives driving cars and reporting that the ashtray is in the wrong place to guarantee that they will get another new car to test within three or four weeks.
Surely transport receives better treatment than it is given in the House. I was disappointed by the speech of the right hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Sir B. Mawhinney), who did not come up with anything new. When a Conservative Government gave local authorities the power to impose residential charging schemes, some Tory backwoodsmen asked how that would affect shops and visitors to people's homes, as though an impossible barrier were being erected around residential areas. Those schemes have worked well, and some are in constituencies that have long been represented by Conservative Members.
The right hon. Gentleman went through a list of road schemes that he said we are still considering. I am interested in one scheme in particular--the Hazel Grove bypass around Stockport. I do not represent that part of the world, but I come from that area. I remember, as a councillor on Bredbury and Romiley urban district council--that ages me somewhat--taking part in a debate in Stockport about that particular road. That was in 1971, so delays in building roads are nothing new and did not start on 1 May 1997.
I come now to the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody). Parliamentary privilege is precious to all hon. Members and should not be abused. Blaming Railtrack for Ladbroke Grove when an inquiry into that accident is taking place is an abuse of parliamentary privilege. I have no brief for Railtrack, but I hope that my hon. Friend will reflect that Railtrack did not design the offending layout at Ladbroke Grove; it was designed in British Rail days. Railtrack inherited the design in 1994, when it was still a public sector company.
That design is pretty complex, but, goodness me, in my youth as a railway signalman the entry to most railway terminuses was guarded by a multiplicity of semaphore signals, and that was a pretty complex business. To suggest, as some of my hon. Friends occasionally do, that drivers have passed signals at danger only since the railway was privatised is to ignore a long history of railway accidents. Ladbroke Grove was an enormous tragedy, but we should let Lord Cullen decide who was responsible and make recommendations accordingly.
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