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Port of Belfast

This is an issue close to my heart, and it is a privilege to be able to discuss it under your chairmanship, Mr. Williams. It is an unfortunate fact of life that for at least a generation, perhaps longer, the great city of Belfast, part of which I have the honour and privilege of representing, was known to most of my colleagues in the House and most of the public for one thing only; the violent and futile conflict between its people. I hope that that conflict is now resolved. Had I been making this speech 50 or 100 years ago, the city would have been known for something very different. It would have been recognised as one of the most vibrant and successful manufacturing and trading centres in these islands. Indeed, when the Harland and Wolff shipyard was at its peak, Belfast was known as a global centre of manufacturing and trade. We had not only that shipyard but a massive ropeworks and Mackie’s foundry, to name but a couple, each employing more than 8,000 people. At the centre of all that success were Belfast lough and the port of Belfast. At that time the natural resource provided by the lough and the port, and our wise management of it, gave Belfast a strategic advantage over the rest of the region. That advantage has been the bedrock of the city’s economic life since the earliest days of Belfast, when it was a small community founded at the mouth of the Farset river and known in Gaelic as Béal Feirste; the mouth of the Farset. Officialdom’s attitude to the port down the years has often reflected closely the quality of life in Northern Ireland and the expectations of people living there. When things were bad throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the port was largely left to its own devices. The priorities of that time were different from today’s, with a few notable exceptions; individual Ministers sent from this House to administer government in Northern Ireland focused largely on containing a deteriorating security situation and then, in their own interests, getting out of there as quickly as possible to a better job in government. Through that difficult period, the port of Belfast continued to do its job, giving the enduring businesses that still operated there a reliable, economical link to the outside, normal world of commerce. It was a commercial success at a time when we had few successes. In the 1990s, the peace process began to emerge. Life and business made their first faltering steps back to normality and the people of the region began to hope and expect that the quality of our lives would improve. As part of that process, the Belfast harbour commissioners examined the port’s facilities carefully, and wisely began to invest heavily in improving them to ensure that the port could capitalise on the improved business environment around it. That the harbour commissioners continue to take seriously the role that they have taken on is reflected in the projection that between 1995 and 2010 they will have invested a massive £250 million in developing the port and the harbour estate around it. Amazingly, and as an obvious benchmark of the port’s success, that investment has been achieved without any direct expense from the public purse. I wish also to mention another organisation close to my heart; the Laganside Corporation. It was established in shadow form in about 1987 and went live under legislation passed early in 1989. It did some of the greatest work that our city has ever seen and was innovative and successful. It played a major role in reminding the people of our city of their connection with and reliance on Belfast lough and the River Lagan, which flows into it. The Laganside Corporation took over wasteland and waste docklands that people never dreamed would be of any use again. With appropriate infrastructure investments it turned hundreds of acres of worthless land into land for which anything up to £1 million or £2 million an acre is paid today. By bringing people back to the water and bringing the waterside of Belfast back to life, Laganside raised public awareness of the port’s key role and reminded us all what an amazing resource it had been and continues to be for our future. It is a matter of deep regret to me and to many of those interested in the improvement of the welfare of Belfast that the Laganside Corporation is shortly to be wound up despite the fact that much of its work remains to be done. Yes, an exit strategy was designed all those years ago when the body was set up, and it was intended to survive for only 15 or 18 years, but it has done such an outstanding job and there is still so much more to do that it should not be wound up. I will continue to bring the need for an immediate and effective successor to the attention of the House in the coming months. The greater awareness created by the Laganside Corporation and the waterfront developments meant greater scrutiny of the work of the port and the challenges that it faced. In 1998 a report issued by the Department of Education, as it was then, covered some of the issues involved and concluded that Northern Ireland’s trust ports, of which Belfast is one—there are others in Derry and Warrenpoint—should be granted greater financial freedom and more powers to do their work. In 2001, a Committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly, chaired by my party colleague Alban Maginness, carried out a detailed assessment and came to a similar conclusion; that things should be loosened up and that the enormous potential of the port could be achieved, and the potential benefits to the people realised, only if it remained a fully accountable trust port but with greatly extended powers to give it the financial and managerial flexibility to compete successfully with its competitors in Britain and the Republic of Ireland. I regret to say that the bulk of the recommendations in that Assembly report have been ignored. None of the necessary extended powers recommended was ever implemented. Instead, in 2001 the Office for National Statistics required that trust boards be classified as public corporations. That regulation eventually came into effect in 2005. The already restricted regulatory environment in which the port operated was further tightened and the clearly expressed will of the Assembly and the devolved Government ignored. Against that background, four months ago the Department for Regional Development published a public consultation document on the powers, status and governance of public trust ports in Northern Ireland. The Department has considered ports policy in parallel with a UK-wide consultation, and the report follows a lengthy period of debate. Unsurprisingly, the debate and uncertainty do nothing to improve our facilities or give the trust ports the freedom that they need to develop the appropriate infrastructure and help us to compete. Before I briefly consider what I would like to come out of the exercise, I want to look at the current state of the port of Belfast. By any financial measure, Belfast is one of the most successful and efficiently run ports in these islands. Only last month the port of Belfast was named Irish port of the year at the transport and logistics awards. It is by far Northern Ireland’s largest port and a strategic asset for the entire island of Ireland. It handles 60 per cent. by volume of Northern Ireland’s seaborne trade and 20 per cent. by volume of the trade of the island as a whole. The port of Belfast handles £19 billion of trade annually, in which is contained 25 per cent. by value of the goods coming from and going to the whole island of Ireland. The port is a significant gateway for trade and the economy. Apart from being Northern Ireland’s most important gateway for trade, the port is an economic catalyst and contributes significantly to its principal stakeholders, namely the Government, port users and the wider economy. Any failure of the port to develop to meet the demands that are placed on it would directly impact on thousands of businesses, big and small, and tens of thousands of workers who rely on it directly and indirectly for their jobs. The port of Belfast is also one of Northern Ireland’s key infrastructure developers. It has facilitated some of Northern Ireland’s most important economic urban regeneration projects, including the Odyssey complex, the Northern Ireland Science Park, Clarendon docks, Sydenham business park, Belfast city airport, which was built on port land, Hollywood exchange and, last but not least, Titanic quarter, where 25,000 homes will be built over the next 25 to 30 years. The total gross development value of Belfast harbour estate projects since 1991 is £700 million. The Federation of Small Businesses made something of understatement when it said in a recent submission that it was questionable whether those sums and those projects could have been achieved under a totally public sector model of governance. As the port of Belfast has succeeded, so too has the Exchequer. I understand that in the past 10 years around £34 million has been paid by the port in corporation tax and that £10 million has been paid in rates by the port and the port’s tenants—that is, people who have leased land off the port. I am told that, all in all, the port supports somewhere in the region of 175,000 jobs in industries not only right across Northern Ireland, but in a big slice of southern Irish territory as well. However, to deliver the regional economic growth that I and others in Belfast want, it is estimated that 69 per cent. more capacity is required in the next 19 to 20 years, to 2025. It is essential, not only for Belfast and Northern Ireland, but for the island of Ireland—particularly the northern half, within the Belfast port catchment area—that we move to achieve the capacity required to do the business. I see a major opportunity in the review for Belfast, Northern Ireland and the northern half of the island of Ireland finally to implement the Assembly’s recommendations of five years ago and to allow the port to develop into a major strategic asset that can take the city of Belfast to a new level strategically and economically. One example of the strategic opportunity that exists is the potential for transatlantic freight. Ireland does not currently have a transatlantic freight terminal. However, as the economy continues to race ahead and the north finds it feet for the economic boom that can and will follow the restoration of devolution, the case for a transatlantic freight terminal on the island becomes more and more compelling. Realistically, there are only two sites for such a development, Belfast or Cork. I believe that the choice should be Belfast; there is no surprise in that. With the investment in the roads network between Belfast and Dublin, the port of Belfast can come genuinely to compete with the port of Dublin in both revenue and Ireland-wide importance. In many ways the port of Dublin is choked, and serious discussions are taking place about relocating it away from the city centre, because the large vehicles trying to access the port are in conflict with a city that is bursting with all sorts of new technology projects and so on. That brings me back to the review. We must do whatever is necessary to ensure that the potential success is realised. The first and most obvious answer is that the port of Belfast and more generally all Northern Ireland trust ports require the end of public corporation status and the long-awaited granting of fuller commercial powers. It is widely recognised that public corporation status is incompatible with the commercial realities of running of a modern port, because it subjects organisations that are run in the commercial world to a public sector regime and the inherent Government controls that that entails. I am all in favour of transparency and openness, but it is vital that the ports should be freed up to do the job quickly and efficiently. Ports trade commercially, and they generate their incomes and finance capital expenditure commercially. They have no preferential access to public sector spending. Commercial operations are required to be flexible and agile, and ports need decision-making processes that are at odds with much of public sector control. Trust ports need to be fully accountable to the public, but that is achievable without labelling them with the wholly inappropriate title of public corporation. All the trust ports in Northern Ireland share that view, and I understand that they have provided detailed proposals to the Department for Transport on getting the balance right between accountability and financial flexibility. I call for those proposals to be adopted. It is vital that any conclusion drawn from the review should finally give the port of Belfast the commercial, managerial and financial freedoms that it requires to address the needs of the Northern Ireland economy. That is only half the story, however. I am concerned that the recent review also reopened a debate about what appears to be the privatisation of the port of Belfast land bank, creating the possibility of the port being stripped of its assets. However, free land in and around the port appears to be limited. Most if not all the land is tied up in leases lasting for 100 to 150 years from now. The concerns and anxiety about the implied threat has destabilised our situation. Access to that land is essential in the public interest. The port is a public organisation, and the public interest has to be kept at a high level. To those who wonder why the port of Belfast should be the city’s largest land holder, I would say that the public interest in the harbour estate is protected by legislation enshrined in the previous Assembly. Again, much of the harbour estate was created at the port’s own expense as the harbour extended. The port started small in the heart of the city, but as it needed deeper and deeper water it moved out and developed reclaimed land from Belfast lough. My figures suggest that 97 per cent. of the non-port land supports various forms of useful economic activity. Some 2 per cent. of the land was released for other uses in April 2006, and 1 per cent. is unusable. It would be wrong to interfere unnecessarily with the activities of the port and the success that it has been. Indeed, my opinion on that seems reflected and supported by no less an expert than the Minister with responsibility for shipping, the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman), who said this to the ports policy review conference:"““We’re not in the business of ‘fixing things that ain't broke’. Any future policy will be grounded on the evidence of what does or doesn't work in practice.””" I say to that Minister, and his colleagues in the Northern Ireland Department of Regional Development, that the port of Belfast is not ““broke””. It needs to be retuned and given more flexibility, freedom and scope to act commercially. It is delivering substantial benefits to the Northern Ireland economy and is well placed to gear up for future challenges. All Belfast wants is for the sentiment expressed by the Minister at the conference to apply equally to all UK ports. If that does not happen, the ability of Belfast port to prepare for and service the substantial anticipated economic growth will be hindered. In the short term, breaking up the port would yield some financial benefits but it would create obstacles in the long term. Massive investment will be required to build new quays, berths and deeper channels to accommodate growing international trade and a new generation of larger ships that, I hope, will use the port. The required investment will come relatively easily if the port has greater commercial agility and the ownership of the harbour estate is protected. At the beginning of my contribution, I remarked that until 50 years ago, Belfast was known as a centre for manufacturing and trade. If we make the correct decisions for the port now, Belfast will be able to resurrect itself as a centre for manufacturing and trade. Some 95 per cent. of all our trade is seaborne; I repeat that, by volume, Belfast handles 60 per cent. of Northern Ireland’s trade and 20 per cent. of the whole island’s trade. If time were available, I would add much more, but I shall leave the issue here. I call on the Minister to state whether he shares my vision of the potential of the port of Belfast. I welcome his views on the issue, whether he agrees with me or not, because we must have a serious debate on the port before any decisions are made that could put a positive and successful economic future at risk.