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Ports: Draft National Policy Statement

Like the two noble Lords who have spoken, I do not quarrel with the idea of having a national policy statement on ports. In so far as it is necessary, I believe that capacity should be provided. But I quarrel straightaway with what the Minister said about the need to compensate and mitigate the environmental effects. I believe that the Government are not in a position to know what the carbon effects are. With regard to noise, no mitigation is possible; a place is either tranquil and quiet, in the case of a national park, or it is noisy. You destroy the environment once and for all if you subject that area to noise. I draw the Minister’s attention to the fact that the tranquil areas in this country have shrunk to a very large extent in the past 50 years. You have to go a long way to get away from road noise and aircraft noise. I have drawn attention, in the time that I have been in your Lordships' House, to the fact that the tranquillity of some of the remaining areas is, for example, prejudiced entirely by the fact that the Government will take no action about the flight paths of aeroplanes over some of the most precious parts of our country, such as the Brecon Beacons. So I do not believe that many of the ills that might follow the development can easily be mitigated. As both the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, have said, we are very interested in the inland effects of developing the ports. The port can be contained within an area and you can judge the effect of that development on the relatively immediate environs. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, that birds will move. They can fly; a thing like that has to be borne in mind. Birds will go elsewhere provided that somewhere reasonably suitable is provided for them. However, that is not the same for the removal of what comes through the port to where it is required, whether it is moved by road or rail. No doubt we shall return to that when the Government or successor Government come back and talk about high-speed rail. You have to spend a lot of money on more or less concealing the effect. If you drive the route through fragile countryside, you will lose something forever, not just a few years. Those things have to be considered. I now come to my major quarrel with the Minister. Several references are made in the draft policy statement to the fact that the environmental effects of things—the amount of money that will be spent on the roads, particularly—will be judged using the new approach to transport appraisal known as NATA and the WebTAG arrangements. In two meetings with his noble friend, the Secretary of State, I have debated whether NATA is actually a suitable method in the long term of measuring the environmental effects. I will not delay the Committee for long, but I will say that the perverse effects of NATA are huge. I am an economist not an econometrician, but I know the effects of NATA. If you have 100,000 vehicles using a road and each saves 30 seconds by some piece of work that is done, that 100,000 is multiplied by the 30 seconds, even though the road users do not discern any difference to them. In fact, if congestion rises, there will be no difference. The Government should give up trying to measure the minutiae of the detail that is the preserve of econometricians, of whom the department has plenty and lots of firms of consultants have plenty more. They should give that up and start measuring the things that really matter, such as carbon. That sort of thing will affect generations to come and is really important. Reference was made by the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, to the fact that the ways in and out of ports on the continent are provided by the state. If you go to places such as Rotterdam or Amsterdam, the way out is provided by the state. We know that the rail routes out of some of our ports, such as Felixstowe, are hopelessly compromised by the lack of gauge clearance and the fact that the diversionary routes available are awful. Also, the Government are still quarrelling with the Mayor of London about who should pay for the electrification of the Gospel Oak to Barking railway line, which will form a natural route to bring freight trains around and away from congested areas. I assure noble Lords that there are multitudes of other areas in the country where we need to improve the way in which the railway operates. I do not believe that Network Rail is in any way efficient. It is a hopeless organisation and the Government have contrived to make that organisation outside anyone's control—there is no public or private control. I could take the Minister to show him places where it has wasted large sums that should have been spent on gauge clearance, only it did not have proper forward planning to know where the gauge clearance should be. We are not talking about life up to 2030, but life for a century. When you invest in ports—all right, so the cranes may need to be modified—you are putting down infrastructure that will last for a very long time. It is not a temporary fix, but a permanent fix. We must make sure that those facilities are provided in places where the traffic they generate can be taken away with the least possible environmental impact. I have said enough, but I should like a definitive answer from the Minister’s noble friend the Secretary of State about what will happen to NATA. It is a very flawed system, and I know I have the support of a lot of economists in saying that. It attempts to reduce to very small sections of time, that are quite unpredictable and unforecastable. Most road users value reliability rather than the off-chance that they might save a minute and a half, if they are lucky, but the next day they will be a traffic jam and lose five minutes. They always have to take into account whether the network is reliable. That sort of thing is not embraced in the appraisal techniques that the Government use. I wish this national policy statement well. It is setting out on the right track, but it needs a lot of work to develop the other things that depend upon it.