Iain Wright
Main Page: Iain Wright (Labour - Hartlepool)Department Debates - View all Iain Wright's debates with the Department for Education
(9 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
George Freeman
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to his doughty campaigning on this issue throughout this Parliament. It is part of £460 billion package, with £12 billion in city deals and local growth funds and £1 billion in broadband. As he says, this is alongside our investment in vocational training and apprenticeships in engineering to put our economy back on its feet.
Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)
The Minister mentioned the CBI, and Katja Hall of the CBI has said:
“The vast majority of businesses back the creation of an independent body to assess the UK’s long-term infrastructure needs”
as a means of finding
“a new way to agree upon and then consistently deliver the improvements we’ll need over the next fifty years—not just the next five.”
EEF has said that
“good infrastructure is an essential building block for the UK’s long-term competitiveness and growth”,
and has called for a permanent infrastructure body to act as a “game changer”. This is not, as the Minister said in an earlier reply, “bureaucracy”, so will he respond to the question of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson)? In the light of overwhelming business support and to stop decisions on our country’s long-term future prosperity being kicked into the long grass, will the Minister back British companies and support Labour’s plan to set up an independent national infrastructure commission?
George Freeman
This is a bit rich from a party that neglected our infrastructure for 13 years and left us with gridlock Britain. Let me repeat: £460 billion-worth of investment amounts to the biggest infrastructure programme since Victorian times—and it has been welcomed. As I said, the CBI’s John Cridland said that businesses in the north would be “encouraged”. We have set up the National Infrastructure Advisory Board and we do not need another commission. What we need is to continue with the progress of investments. Let me quote Simon Walker from the Institute of Directors:
“The Chancellor was right to resist the temptation of politicised giveaways, and focus instead on long-term investment in infrastructure, science and efforts”.
We are making progress.