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Mr. Damian Green: The situation is even worse than my right hon. Friend supposes. Under the comprehensive spending review, the Government slipped out the fact that they had dropped their target of reducing traffic congestion. One would have expected that; they have failed miserably to reach the target since the 10-year transport plan came out. More to the point, the Government will not even define traffic congestion until July next year. They will spend the next year trying to decide if they know what traffic congestion is. Asking a traffic director to predict how traffic congestion will be reduced when the Government cannot even define it puts an onerous burden on the people they are to appoint.
Mr. Forth: I am grateful, but alarmed. Should the Bill receive Royal Assent, there will be at the very least a lacuna, during which nobody will have any idea about these important matters. Having referred to crystal ball gazing and to the anticipation of future occurrences, the Bill goes on to say—with an insouciance of a kind I have rarely seen in legislation—that
"nothing in this subsection is to be taken to require the identification or consideration of anything appearing to have only an insignificant effect (or potential effect) on the movement of traffic on their road network."
We are now into multiple subjectivity. We are judging future occurrences that have potential effects that are significant or insignificant. I defy anyone to pick their way through that, given that we are talking about a matter as important as the imposition by central Government of all-powerful traffic gauleiters in local authorities. Even before I get past clause 20, I am thoroughly confused and alarmed.
I want, however, to try to tease out from the Minister his view of the relationship between the Mayor of London and London authorities. Clause 20(5) states:
"The Secretary of State shall consult the Mayor before giving an intervention notice to a London authority and, if such notice is given, shall give him a copy of it."
We all know about the new bear hug in which the Mayor and the Government are engaging and it is wondrous to behold. However, I would have thought that people in London boroughs, whose councillors are properly elected to take local decisions on their behalf, would be more than a little alarmed at the thought of the remote Secretary of State taking their decisions for them.
I do not want to be too personal about it, but given that the current incumbent Secretary of State also happens simultaneously to be the Secretary of State for Scotland, it is conceivable that he might be spending rather more of his time in Edinburgh than in London. Earlier today, when he was wearing his Secretary of State for Transport hat, he referred to a surface railway line—or he thought he was referring to one—as the Northern line. You will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that it is really a tube line.
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I have given the right hon. Member some latitude, but I hope that he will now return to directing his comments at the amendments that we are debating.
Mr. Forth: Of course, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would not dream of disputing anything you say, but we are debating whether clause 20 should be in the Bill, and I am talking about clause 20(5), which explicitly refers to both the Secretary of State and the Mayor, and London authorities. I was talking about the Secretary of State in almost complimentary terms.
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I think that we went rather beyond the Secretary of State when we got on to the Northern line.
Mr. Forth: That is what we all thought when the Secretary of State said that, too. I am grateful for your endorsement, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I will send Hansard to him on Monday.
The point at issue is a very serious one. We now face the dangerous possibility that the Secretary of State—regardless of who he or she may be or what other jobs he or she may have—will consult the Mayor on a matter that should be the business only of the London authority. That applies whether it is my authority or any of the other London boroughs. The Government suggest that there are now two people with the potential to interfere and intervene on London matters in London boroughs. I find that wholly unacceptable and I would be surprised if any London Member representing a London borough were any happier than me about that. I press the matter no further than that.
Moving on to clause 21—I want to make progress and there are many clauses to wade through—my eye alights on subsection (3), which states:
"An intervention order providing for the appointment of a traffic director must (among other things) . . . confer such general powers on the traffic director as the national authority considers appropriate for achieving those objectives."
So a potential outsider with as yet unspecified but unlimited powers will be imposed on a local authority, subject only to the whim of the Secretary of State. The clause proceeds to hint that the general powers
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conferred on such a director are to "monitor" and "report"—I might just about be able to go along with that—but then to
"intervene in activities of the local traffic authority"
"to carry out functions of the local traffic authority".
Moving on rapidly to clause 22—I am picking up speed now, Madam Deputy Speaker, and there will be no legislative congestion here—can the Minister help me? The clause states:
"Where by virtue of an intervention order a traffic director is to be appointed in relation to a local traffic authority . . . any person . . . may be appointed",
"the national authority making the order".
That suggests to me that the Secretary of State could be appointed as the traffic manager. Could that possibly be true? Is the Secretary of State bidding for yet another job? In addition to being Secretary of State for Scotland and Secretary of State for Transport, does he want to be traffic manager for Bromley?
That strikes me as ambitious, to the say the least. Under the terms of the clause, could he also be the traffic manager for every other authority as well? If so, he would be a busy man. Would his salary rise commensurately? Would he get extra money and work overtime? We need to know. Provisions such as this may look innocuous when they are buried in a Bill as clause 22(1)(a), but they have the potential to be extremely damaging.
Clause 30 deals with the recovery of costs from local traffic authorities. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford has considered this matter, given his intimate knowledge of the Bill, but the clause states:
"The appropriate national authority may recover from the local traffic authority such sum or sums as it may consider appropriate."
That is really scary. It suggests that the Secretary of State, on a whim, can recover any amount of money that he considers appropriate from local authorities and, therefore, from council tax payers. How much further must the Bill go before it wrecks any concept of a proper relationship between central and local government?
The proposals are truly frightening. The House of Lords is often criticised by the Government as undemocratic and unaccountable, but we must now look to their lordships to defend local democracy and the proper relationship between local government and central Government. The Government repeatedly pay lip service to local decision making and decentralisation, but they are setting out to wreck and undermine the relationship between local government and voters.
The Bill is appalling and disgraceful. We must oppose it at every turn.
Mr. McNulty:
I shall deal first with some of the points raised by the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth). There are 35 highway authorities in the London area. The Bill is restricted to
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looking at, and imposing duties on, highway authorities. Regional assemblies are not highway authorities, so it is clear that they are outside the Bill's scope.
There are 32 London boroughs, including Bromley. The City of London is another of the 35 highway authorities, as is the Highways Agency, in part, because of its roads network. Finally, there is Transport for London. The relationship between TFL and the London boroughs, after the Greater London Authority Act 1999, is complex. The Mayor is the TFL and GLA representative, and the Bill requires the communication of information to him for that reason alone. However, he must also satisfy the Government in respect of his own network management duty. There is no elaborate conspiracy to Livingstoneise Bromley, or any borough in which people had the misfortune—or were misguided enough—to vote for a party other than the one to which the Mayor now belongs.
I hesitate to mention that, as the United Kingdom Independence party almost won Bromley in the European elections. I shall not go beyond the scope of the amendments, Madam Deputy Speaker, and push the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst about how he voted in those elections. I shall not ask him whether he voted for his party or for UKIP. I shall not go there.
The right hon. Gentleman made a fair point about Barnet. The same complexities apply here: TFL has a funding relationship, and other relationships, with Barnet and all the London boroughs, which are not part of the local transport plan process referred to by the hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Green). In that process, there is a direct relationship between the Department and every highway authority in England outside London, whereas the London boroughs relate to TFL in respect of funding, and other matters.
I turn now to the way in which Barnet relates to the Government in respect of its ability to fulfil its network management duty. If a party manifesto promised the wholesale removal of sleeping policemen or street furniture, for example, that would have to be seen to be consistent with the fulfilment of the network management duty. I take the point that this is not about a party of whatever colour elected centrally, imposing by some back-door route its view of what the local highway authority solutions should be to achieving its works management duty. Behind the noise and rhetoric, happily, at least in part, Barnet is not doing what the rhetoric suggests it is doing. I do not think that many sleeping policemen or road humps have been moved. Rather like the hon. Member for Ashford, the rhetoric is a lot noisier than any subsequent action. That explains in part why, to the apparent disgust of the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, the Mayor is mentioned so frequently within the whole document. There are complexities that do not prevail in the rest of the country.
I do not accept that the network management duty and the clauses that we seek to restore are undemocratic, unclear, impractical, unnecessary or unaccountable in part, which was the broad gist of what the hon. Gentleman said. Neither, given all the elements of the Bill, including those that we seek to restore, do I consider it to be centralising control, arbitrary or
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anything else that he said. It is not undemocratic because we set out clearly what the network management duty should be. We will subsequently flesh that out with criteria and practicalities in guidance. We will make clear in guidance after full consultation what steps need to be taken.
I know that many find it unsatisfactory, as I do to some extent, when I describe the Bill, as I have done on many occasions during its passage, as like a Christmas tree. Broad, enabling powers are taken in the Bill, around which a whole series of regulations, criteria and guidance will be hung subsequently. In the totality of the Bill there will be guidance on the techniques of securing the national management network duty, on intervention, on what the traffic director may and may not do, on making intervention orders and notices, on what the network's duty will be and on a range of other areas. It may be unsatisfactory that all those are not clearly and explicitly in the Bill, but I assure hon. Members that there will be substantive consultation as each of those sets of guidance and regulations comes to fruition.
There is also the backstop. Every time there is an apparent need for intervention, there will be a separate intervention order for that specific authority, which can be discussed in the House, should it be prayed against on the negative resolution procedure via a statutory instrument. A series of belts and braces have been established. I do not think in the main that all should appear in the Bill. It is certainly not the norm in legislation. It has not been the norm in the past and I could point to many Acts since 1979 that are of the same order as this Bill, where the substantive work is done in regulation in consultation or subsequently.
This is not supposed to replace local transport plans, nor does it make them redundant. The network management's duty is entirely consistent with LTPs outside London. The monitoring, which is part of the local transport process, can and probably will be part of the assessment process for the criteria on achieving the network management duty. Such issues are just the kind of matters that we are discussing with local government and others in developing the criteria.
4.30 pm
The half point made by the hon. Gentleman that was valid was that it clearly would be foolish to impose a network management duty, and seek to produce criteria and measurements for that duty, as if the whole local transport plan process did not exist. Of course, the two would need to be intermeshed, and that is what will happen.
It is not right to say that there would be no consideration of the costs of an intervention. Clause 30 allows the recovery of costs associated with appointing a traffic director, but it does not require the recovery of those costs. The Secretary of State might decide that it would be far more efficient for the authority to use those resources to improve its performance. The burden is not as explicit as some would suggest. Neither is it arbitrary. The intervention powers are not arbitrary or unfettered. Any decision must be consistent with the principles outlined in the guidance in what was clause 27—which we seek to restore—and would need to stand up to scrutiny. Those criteria will be set out in an order and
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can be discussed. They are being developed with stakeholders—I apologise for using that word, and perhaps I should say interested parties—including the Local Government Association, and will be subject to public consultation.
We want the process to be as transparent as possible. The guidance and criteria will overcome many of the difficulties that hon. Members have suggested. The protocol is in place. It is wrong to suggest that the power is brand new and a first in the relationship between central and local government. The protocol contains a long list of existing service-specific powers for statutory intervention related to failure, including on housing, environment, planning, education, health, and even libraries and museums. That demonstrates that these powers are not unusual. It is a widely accepted concept that appropriate national authorities should intervene if an authority fails in its duty. The House is not being asked to take the criteria on trust. As I have said, they can be considered in great detail by both Houses.
The problem with the amendments suggested by the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) in Committee was that they personalised the issue around the traffic manager. We have deliberately abstracted the notion of traffic manager. In one way, we could care less who the traffic manager is and where they stand in the structures of the local authority. The failure of the traffic manager is not the issue. The failure would be of the authority to fulfil its collective and corporate network management duty.
I repeated frequently in Committee that we see intervention as a last resort. I accept that there are those—such as the LGA—who would not seek to push the ability of central Government to intervene any further than it goes now, as a matter of principle. I accept that, but I congratulate the LGA because—despite that principle—it has discussed the criteria and other elements with us at length. We envisage a series of discussions—and, perhaps, mentoring by other highway authorities that are in a better position to address the failure—as well as other measures, some of which will be contained in the guidance and some that will be agreed with local government.
I have also said that notice will be given of intervention, so that even at such a late stage in the process the difficulties in a highway authority may be addressed. I said on Second Reading, and I repeat today—not least for the benefit of those in the other place who will consider this issue subsequently—that I would see intervention, as outlined in the Bill, as a collective failure of central and local government. Long before intervention was necessary, matters should have been resolved by all three parties—the potentially failing local authority, local government and the Government. However, if we are to impose a statutory network management duty on local authorities, we need, as a long, long backstop—as I have assured the House—the ability to intervene and correct things if an authority fails in that duty, as neither the local community or the Government would want such a situation to prevail.
On Second Reading, it was suggested that I was simply saying, "Trust me". I am not saying that. I am saying that one of the prerequisites of imposing such a statutory duty on local authorities is that the whole array—the panoply—of powers is in place, so that,
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ultimately, if there were a failure in that duty the responsibility would return to the Government, who would secure the situation or ensure that the local authority could recover and return to a position where it could fulfil its duty. The intervention powers are thus part and parcel of the Bill, by imposing that network management duty in the first place.
I shall be more than happy to speak to Opposition Members from both parties, or their counterparts in the other place, about the criteria, the guidance and the other elements, where much work has already been done; and to give them reassurance about any aspect of the process—the intervention notice, the orders, the criteria for the network management duty—to allay any fears that I have been unable to set aside today. However, for the integrity of the Bill and in order for the Government to secure what we want in part 2, we feel that we must disagree with the Lords. The provisions need to be restored and in the spirit of eminent reasonableness that I am pursuing, I ask the House to endorse that approach and to disagree, in the nicest possible way, with the Lords on these amendments.
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