Rail Investment and Integrated Rail Plan
Debate between Toby Perkins and Grant Shapps(2 years, 4 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Transport (Grant Shapps)
Before I begin, I first welcome the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) to her place and congratulate her. She will be the third shadow Transport Secretary I have faced across this Dispatch Box, and I wish her all the luck of the previous two.
We were elected as a reforming Government. We have undertaken the biggest ever review of the industry and published the Williams-Shapps plan, creating a new public body in Great British Railways, with an overwhelming aim to deliver trains on time for passengers. We began by reversing the Beeching cuts, restoring lines to communities that were cut off from the railway in the 1960s and 1970s. We have set out our integrated rail plan, a £96 billion programme to reshape our railways in the north and the midlands. It is the largest single rail investment ever made by any UK Government.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Secretary of State described this as a reforming Government, but what they are reforming is their manifesto after they have been elected on it. People in Chesterfield and across north Derbyshire were promised HS2, which would increase capacity. Instead, what we have got are slower services and years and years of delays while the reforms happen.
Grant Shapps
Our manifesto talks about the Oakervee review. The hon. Gentleman’s constituency of Chesterfield will be served by a new line to the east midlands completing the electrification of the midland main line, which I will come on to shortly.
Our reforming vision marks a new era of investment and growth. The integrated rail plan starts to provide benefits to passengers and communities quickly, rather than leaving it for two decades as previously planned. We will boost eight of the 10 busiest rail corridors across the north and the midlands. We will speed up journeys, increase capacity and run more frequent services, and we will do all that much earlier than previously planned.
Grant Shapps
I am challenged that that is not what he said, but I have the quote. He said that the original plan would
“deliver maximum disruption and minimal benefit.”
In fact, he was campaigning against HS2 going north of Birmingham until Northern Powerhouse Rail was built.
Many towns and villages that would not have benefited originally will now benefit from this approach. Labour Members need to explain to people in places such as Kettering, Leicester, Loughborough, Doncaster, Grantham, Newark, Retford, Dewsbury, Huddersfield and Wakefield why they want to take away from them the services that our integrated rail plan will deliver.
Mayor Burnham had more to say on the subject. Just last year he claimed that the 2040s were far too long to wait for high-speed rail in the north. Perhaps that is why he was prepared to sacrifice HS2 north of Birmingham to focus exclusively on Northern Powerhouse Rail.
Grant Shapps
I want to get to the end and let others come in.
This Government are not going for either/or, as the Mayor of Manchester tried to persuade us to; we are going to deliver both—high-speed trains up to Leeds while building a brand-new high-speed line east-west between Liverpool, Manchester and West Yorkshire, with a total of 110 miles of new high-speed line and 180 miles of newly electrified line, all of it in the midlands and the north.
International Travel
Debate between Toby Perkins and Grant Shapps(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The threat to the travel and tourism industry is very real. Just this week, I met constituents who normally work on aircraft but now have either been furloughed or in some cases made redundant several months ago and they are extremely concerned about the ongoing future of the industry. So it is regrettable that the Transport Secretary should seek to misrepresent the position of my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) in terms of recognising an increase in the number of nations on the green list, seeking clarification of the system and calling for international co-operation on vaccine passports, which can give real certainty to the industry and confidence to holidaymakers, so that we can try to save some of these crucial jobs in our industry.
Grant Shapps
On the contrary, I have been listening carefully to what the hon. Member for Oldham West has had to say from the Front Bench. A few days ago, he was challenged about how many countries should go on to the green list and he said, “Well, from our point of view it has got to be about the science.” He said that he cannot give an exact number and that we have to take the expert advice—what on earth does he think we have been doing all these months?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Toby Perkins and Grant Shapps(4 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Grant Shapps
Unlike the hon. Gentleman, I do not think that MPs who represent their constituents, whichever side of the debate they are on, are somehow undermining democracy—quite the opposite, in fact. This is the biggest infrastructure decision that this country has ever made and the biggest in Europe. It is quite right that it is properly and carefully considered, using not only that Network Rail evidence but everything else. The good news is that he will not have to wait too long.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Toby Perkins and Grant Shapps(12 years, 7 months ago)
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The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is important to allow communities to grow and allow local people to have a stake in that growth, which is why we will ensure—both through the new homes bonus and through reformed business rates—that an ambitious local authority can improve the lot of people who live in their area, who, for the first time, will have a stake in the future.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
In response to the question from the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), the Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) said that we were facing a crisis of growth. What does it say about the policies of the present Government that after the abolition of the regional development agencies and six months after the budget for growth, a Minister has come to the House and admitted that there is a crisis of growth?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Toby Perkins and Grant Shapps
Grant Shapps
I am very grateful for that question, not least because I am able to congratulate Southwark on today pulling in £2.6 million from the new homes bonus. That money certainly can be used in precisely the way it is required locally, and whatever the principal concerns are for local people. It is the way to incentivise more house building, and we will make sure that it works effectively alongside the Firstbuy scheme.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Minister referred to the new scheme as relevant to the replacement of HomeBuy Direct, which as he is aware was the much more generous scheme that he scrapped just 10 months ago. Is this not another example of the Government introducing a new policy to make up for the fact that their previous policy has gone wrong?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman has got his facts wrong. HomeBuy Direct continues until 2012, so there is no question of its having come to an end. It was a funded scheme for a specific period which will come to an end at that point, so by launching another scheme that overlaps rather than replaces it, we have, I assume, achieved precisely what he would want.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Toby Perkins and Grant Shapps
Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that the policy needs to protect the most vulnerable and to introduce fairness into the system. The expansion of housing benefit to £21 billion—a 50% expansion in the bill—over just a 10-year period is unsustainable; it is more than the police and universities budgets put together and it simply has to be brought into line. It is not fair that people can be in receipt of £2,000 a week to live in areas of London that other people are unable to live in when they work. I am quite certain that Ministers will be very happy to meet such a group.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
19. What assessment he has made of the effect on third sector organisations of the reduction in local authority funding announced on 10 June 2010.
Local Government Financing
Debate between Toby Perkins and Grant Shapps
Grant Shapps
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his particularly eloquent contribution. Local authorities spending their time publishing weekly newspapers, or weekly Pravdas as the Secretary of State described them, is just not their role. We talk about front-line services, supporting people, homelessness and priority programmes to ensure that the sick, elderly and vulnerable are protected, but Opposition Members want to talk about local weekly Pravda newspapers published by local authorities. It simply is not the answer. What we want to do is ensure that local authorities are engaged in front-line services that help their population, not services that rival the local newspapers. We want to allow the local newspapers to operate without interference from local authorities.
Everyone knows that money is tight. Every strategy that we employ nationally and locally should focus on getting more for less. Innovation and efficiency must be king. The emergency Budget makes it clear that there are challenging times ahead. We want to ensure that local government is fully engaged with the next spending review. In particular, we expect councils to be involved in the series of events over the summer to discuss and debate various aspects of public spending. We will use the spending review to drive decentralisation across local government and national Government.
Toby Perkins
The Minister has said a couple of times that councils will have to do more for less. As a member of the best value and efficiency scrutiny panel on Chesterfield borough council for the past seven years, I know just how hard our council and many others worked to produce the efficiencies demanded under Gershon. Can the Minister tell us of any council leaders who have not been trying to give more for less in the last years of the Labour Government?
Grant Shapps
I accept that the hon. Gentleman and local authority leaders and councils throughout the country work hard to do those things. However, sometimes just doing something in a closed situation is not enough and we have to invite the whole general public to take part. We need to publish the stuff online, make it fully transparent and let people see what is really going on. As I explained in the context of my Department’s responsibilities, if that had been done, I do not believe that those tens of thousands—and even hundreds of thousands—of pounds would have been wasted on pointless projects. On a smaller scale, there will be examples in town halls throughout the country of money being spent on unsustainable projects, which best value committees sometimes do not reach, but a large army of armchair auditors will. It is called the general public; it is called transparency, and it will work effectively.