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House-building Programme

My Lords, I want to deal with the Government’s failure to plan properly for the movement that is associated with housing development. Like the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, I am a county councillor—in Oxfordshire in my case—and we share the problems of the south east. It is typical of the south. We decided, as members of the county council, to locate significant housing in Didcot, although the location is not really important. There is space, there are good roads and a good railway service and a lot of employment is available. We went through a long and painful consultation about the precise location for the development. All this is for the 2011 version of the structure plan, which was published five years ago. What has been the Government’s contribution? Some years after the plan was adopted, the Highways Agency, which I take to be part of government, objected to the plans for Didcot because it said that the A34 was overloaded. It is almost impossible in Oxfordshire to develop anywhere without having an impact on the A34, but the Government have consistently rejected the requests of the county council to undertake a study of the A34 corridor. Because they will not do that study, the whole plan for whether you can upgrade the railway that passes through Oxford is on hold, because again we have a log-jam. The Highways Agency starts things off, and then you do not get a study and then you cannot consider what the railway alternatives are because you do not know whether there are any road plans for the A34 corridor. So the Government say, ““Expand housing””, and we respond. Then the Government or their agencies make life impossible by objecting to the chosen sites several years after they have been chosen. The situation gets worse, because we have just finished the 2016 structure plan, which is likely not to produce enough houses to satisfy government targets. So there will be more houses, and the likely sites are either in Bicester or around Didcot, both of which are adjacent to the A34. In drawing up the new Great Western franchise, the Strategic Rail Authority, another agency of the government, wrote about four or six months ago saying that it proposed to cut in half the intercity train service to Didcot, which was expanded two years ago when the franchise was let. Now the proposal is to cut it in half. The trains that travel along the corridor from Didcot, Swindon and south Wales—I am not being parochial now—are nearly full. In fact, they are full and standing room only and very over-crammed, but the government agency proposes to cut the train service, although we must wait until the franchise emerges to know whether that will happen. Bicester is to the north east of Oxford between Milton Keynes—an area of huge housing expansion—and Oxford. The roads are fearfully congested; I instance junction 9 on the M40 as a case in point. Yet we have pleaded to have attention given to the east-west railway, which runs from East Anglia, through Bedford and Milton Keynes, into Oxford through Bicester and down to Didcot and south Wales. The railway actually exists for a good deal of the way, and the cost of upgrading it is only £64 million, which is small money at this stage. But we have a complete mismatch between government agencies saying that we cannot have that railway line, although the cost-benefit ratio is only 4:1. How are we going to have the houses that we are going to build in Bicester—and the Government are going to build a lot more at Milton Keynes—when the road and the railways are congested? I shall not go on to talk about the schools and the sewage and all sorts of other things. The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, referred to the other pressures that are being felt by county councils. So we have a complete mismatch between the Government’s housing proposals and those allowing people and goods the mobility that they deserve. I shall not go on at great length, as I feel that I have made the points that are essential and which the county council feels are essential. These issues much be addressed, because if you want to build houses, you must provide the wherewithal for people to move. The Regional Transport Board is a rather peculiar body, as it comes under the South East England Regional Assembly, which is not an elected body although it has elected members on it; but it has a Regional Transport Board. It has not allocated any funding for the next five years to central Oxfordshire or the western corridor that lies behind it. The regional funding allocation is only £140 million a year, and that is for the south east. That will not buy us more than 20 miles of widened motorway or new roads. I have concentrated on the transport situation in Oxford and its environs, but it is difficult to see how we can progress with these new transport regional infrastructure schemes if we persist with our adversarial planning system which takes 20 years to decide whether one can build any major infrastructure system. It means that lawyers go through tremendous processes—Terminal 5 at Heathrow is probably the worst, but there are many others. I have calculated that it takes 20 years between the time one starts drawing lines on a plan and one can actually open the motorway or railway. We have a complete mismatch there. Perhaps the Minister can tell us whether something will be done about the planning processes themselves. They are sclerotic and prevent progress. The county is very prosperous—there is much industry and it develops rapidly. People want jobs in our factories, laboratories, offices, shops, hospitals and services. It is a prosperous county, but it is also one of the engines of growth of the economy. That is where we will gain the money for Britain to pay for the many things that are needed.