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Crossrail Bill [Instruction No. 2]

I welcome this short debate on instructions Nos. 2 and 3 to the Select Committee and the motion on late petitions. I also welcome the Secretary of State’s clarification of the petitions; it is perfectly acceptable for him to act as he has done. Most Members present for the 19 July Second Reading debate, which also covered the committal and the instructions, would agree that it was not a model of clarity. The responsibility of the Select Committee and the Standing Committees are now much clearer, and I thank the Secretary of State for that. The Select Committee can consider the detail but not the principle. My understanding is that although instruction No. 3 extends the scope of the matters that the Select Committee can consider, it does not, as the Secretary of State made clear, extend that scope enough to cover the principle. The Secretary of State’s view on the extension to Reading has not changed. He said on Second Reading much the same as he has said now. On 19 July he said:"““As I said right at the start, the project had to be made manageable and the sums had to stack up, and that is why we chose not to include Reading.””—[Official Report, 19 July 2005; Vol. 436, c. 1135.]" Presumably at that time the right hon. Gentleman held the same view about Ebbsfleet. The Secretary of State has said that he does not want Crossrail to suffer the same fate as its predecessors. I do not have time to run through a full timeline of the action that has been taken on Crossrail since 1989, but the list runs to just over three pages. We are somewhat closer to Crossrail being completed now than we were in 1989, but, as the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), the Conservative spokesman, said, in practice we have yet to see a spade go into the ground. There has been a lot of preliminary work, it is true, but there is no real action and no real digging. I am still somewhat perplexed that although the Secretary of State has said that the Select Committee can consider petitions about Reading and Ebbsfleet, he has, as the Conservative spokesman also said, made it very clear that in his view the sums do not stack up. Yes, the Select Committee can consider the petitions, but in practice, whatever the petitioners say, the Government are unlikely to take any action on Reading or Ebbsfleet. One wonders what the purpose of hearing the petitions is. It will be satisfying for the petitioners to know that their petitions will be heard, but it will not be so satisfying when they read the Hansard report of today’s debate and see that the Secretary of State says that he still does not think that these sums stack up for Reading—or, presumably, for Ebbsfleet. The debate is simply about the instructions, so we cannot have a detailed debate about the funding aspects. However, I hoped that the Secretary of State would have dropped something in about those, even if it was just a single sentence saying that the £16 billion was in the bank so that the project could proceed. He did not do that, and he will be aware that in the business community there is a lot of disquiet on that subject. No doubt the right hon. Gentleman will have seen the article in the Financial Times on 21 July, immediately after the Second Reading, in which, for instance, Michael Snyder, the policy chairman of the Corporation of London, was quoted as saying:"““There is a moment in time when the business community is up for it and we meet the resistance that everyone fears. We need action, not just rhetoric.””" That was the view of the business community in July. I am not aware of any change in those views, or of that disquiet having disappeared. Perhaps when the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), replies to the debate he will be able to confirm that discussions with the business community have taken place, it is now confident that the project will progress, and there is no risk that it will withdraw the £2 billion funding that it has offered as part of the process. The Secretary of State has said that Sir Michael Lyons’ review will consider this—or at least that the decision about the funding has been put back until the review reports. According to the Lyons website, that review will be complete by December 2006. I assume that there is the possibility of slippage, so we may not see a report before the end of this year. I hope that when the Minister responds, he will be able to say that the idea of there being no decision until the end of this year, at the earliest, is a time scale acceptable to the business community, and there is no risk that it will withdraw its offer of a temporary one-off 3 per cent. increase in the business rate between now and then. As the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell said, the business community will take into account the decisions that the Secretary of State is now taking on other large transport projects, such as those involving trams. The Mersey tram has been mentioned in the debate, and one could also mention other tram projects, such as those in Leeds, Nottingham and Manchester. All the signals that the business community is receiving are negative rather than positive, and that must be having an impact on the business community in London. Instruction No. 2 lists many new scoping requirements that have emerged, presumably in discussions over the summer and more recently. After Parliament went into recess, a document was published explaining in some detail what that instruction covered. I hope that the Minister will comment on whether, in relation to paragraph (1)(a), relating to amendments avoiding the duplication of planning authorities when it comes to assessing diversions, there have been representations from local authorities on that proposal and whether they are content with it. Will he also comment on the fact that there will be an extension of rights of way over land, which will allow third parties to acquire any form of rights of way? I should be particularly interested to hear what legislation on compensation might be applicable. Finally, the instruction says that a number of additional buildings would previously have required consent for alteration or demolition, and will he say whether there is a readily available list of the buildings that will be affected? The debate on 19 July and the clarification provided by the Secretary of State on the roles of the Select and Standing Committees notwithstanding, many Members may still question why he has not used the opportunity provided today to confirm that freight services will not be affected by Crossrail and to strengthen the role of the rail regulator to leave nobody in any doubt that Crossrail services will not have priority over others. On 19 July, he said that those were matters of public, not private, interest, and therefore matters to be picked up by the Standing Committee, rather than the Select Committee. Surely, however, in relation to freight, if those services could be squeezed off rail and on to the roads in west London, that would be a matter of the greatest private interest. Our concerns have not gone away in spite of the Secretary of State’s reassurances before the summer recess. Perhaps the Minister will use this opportunity to say whether, following discussions with the rail industry, he is now comfortable on freight services and the office of the rail regulator. The instructions before us at least confirm that some limited progress is being made on Crossrail, and for that reason we will support them. However, they do not answer the £16 billion question, which will be answered, at the very earliest, at the end of this year when the Lyons report is published. Until that question is answered, we shall continue, in the words of Michael Snyder, to have rhetoric and not action.