| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Wilson: I note that the hon. Gentleman wishes to intervene.
If someone has paid for something and another person takes it away without paying, what is a better word for that than stealing? It seems not to be an unreasonable word in the circumstances. It is surely not a moral transaction to take the Chiltern line, for example, it having been paid for by the taxpayer, and convert it so as to make private profit, without any recompense to the taxpayer.If that is set as an example of enterprise against what genuine entrepreneurs did, what a pathetic bunch the Tories are today. The sadness and the tragedy for the United Kingdom is that a Government who have been in office for 17 years cannot appreciate what constitutes enterprise.
The Government have had it so easy for so long. There have been public assets to rip off for so long. It is only when the well runs dry that, it is to be hoped, someone will get round to the idea that part of the role of politicians is to stimulate and engender genuine enterprise to ensure that there is investment, rather than to take assets created by entrepreneurs in the public sector and dress them up with a self-congratulatory term such as private enterprise.
Mr. Smith:
If the hon. Gentleman is so keen on public ownership, will he tell us how Railtrack would be taken back into public ownership by Labour?
Mr. Wilson:
All will be revealed in due course.The hon. Gentleman is obviously in the know. Will he tell me whether there will be a golden share? Is there to be a sale of 51 per cent. or 100 per cent.? Perhaps he will tell me if it will be possible to sell Railtrack at all. After all, it is clearly a high-risk investment in every sense of that term.
I return to London Underground. We shall not vote against the Bill. Instead, we shall vote for the Opposition amendment, which is on the Order Paper to demonstrate our support for the public-private concept, on which we have led the way and with which we find no ideological difficulty. We are talking all the time to those with whom we shall work to make public-private partnership projects come to fruition. Indeed, that is not an issue of division within the House because, to some extent, the Tories have caught up with us.
How can Tory Members be satisfied with the Government's record? Throughout London, lawyers' offices are full of documents--they are piled to the ceiling--setting out public-private partnership projects that have never come within 100 miles of being fulfilled because of the terms that the Government have set. Lawyers who work on such projects tell us what they think of the Tories and their version of the private finance initiative: they will speak of the frustration that is caused by negotiating endlessly on projects that never come about. They do not believe that the present Government have any commitment to the PFI. Unless it can satisfy their ideology by transferring all the risk--including the operational risk--to the private sector, the Government are not interested.
Mr. Norris:
With the leave of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, it is with a considerable sense of relief that I utter the immortal words, "This has been an interesting debate." We heard excellent speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Chipping Barnet (Sir S. Chapman), for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall), for Croydon, North-East (Mr. Congdon), for Beaconsfield (Mr. Smith), for Brentford and Isleworth (Mr. Deva), for Sutton and Cheam (Lady Olga Maitland) and for Twickenham (Mr. Jessel), and from my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier). We also heard extremely interesting speeches from my good friend the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Hill) and from the hon. Members for Eastleigh (Mr. Chidgey), for Hampstead and Highgate(Ms Jackson) and for Newham, North-East (Mr. Timms)--and, of course, from the hon. Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson). Many of them made extremely kind personal remarks--albeit with a faint whiff of those old-fashioned obituaries that I fear I shall have to accustom myself to in the House.
I am delighted to see that my hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet is present. He is a long-term supporter of London Transport. He made a germane point about Northern line trains: he said that it was extremely desirable for us to secure the new trains through the private finance initiative, at a gross contract cost of about £400 million,
but expressed regret that they might not be delivered as quickly as we might have liked. I am advised that GEC Alsthom, which won the contract--
Mr. Norris:
Indeed. I understand that GEC Alsthom is currently suffering from a delay in production. One of the key features of the contract that we have been able to negotiate with GEC Alsthom is that the delay will not simply result in further delay for London's taxpayers and passengers; GEC will have to pay a penalty to London taxpayers, in the form of a rebate of part of the price of the contract, in recognition of the fact that it was not prepared to start the contract on time.
I cast no aspersions in relation to possible reasons for the delay. No doubt there are perfectly good reasons for it. I merely make the point that it underlines the cardinal advantage of transferring that part of the risk to the private sector. For the first time, the contractor has a real stimulus to ensure that what is promised is delivered when it is asked for.
The hon. Member for Eastleigh was kind enough to refer to my election to the companionship of the Institution of Civil Engineers. I promised myself that I would get that into Hansard at least once before my retirement; I have done it now, so I can retire tonight a happy man. It was extremely kind of the hon. Gentleman to bother to mention it, and I was greatly honoured to receive it.
More to the point, I understood the hon. Gentleman's analysis and his points about a strategic London authority. I hope that he will accept that the creation in 1992 of a specific post in the Department of Transport to take a multi-modal overview of transport in the capital has been of value to London. The hon. Gentleman is right that it is impossible to consider these issues in a disaggregated way. We must have an integrated view of how services in the capital operate, but such a view does not imply that all services need be under one control or ownership. That is the wrong sort of integration. It leads to a sclerotic view of transport provision and to the sort of provision that for many years handicapped the development of the public transport service not only in London, but outside the capital.
I issue a word of caution to the hon. Gentleman. If he is saying, on behalf of his party, that he will fund crossrail, Thameslink 2000 and all the other expensive projects to which he referred, I should like him to say so and the House to be able to cost such a commitment. He asked me a simple question: does the Bill facilitate privatisation?I hope that, listening to the argument throughout the long debate, he has been convinced that the answer on that straightforward point is of course no.
The hon. Member for Cunninghame, North made the discreditable suggestion that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough might not be worth the fees that he is privileged to charge to his occasional clients.In an emergency, I would certainly turn to any hon. and learned Member who, with Madam Speaker herself in the Chair, could introduce the Market Harborough bypass and the channel tunnel rail link into a debate on London Regional Transport. He gave a brilliant exposition, stretching my credulity only when he asserted that he was too young to have known my noble Friend Lord Parkinson because that cannot conceivably have been the case.
My hon. and learned Friend touched a raw nerve in the Opposition by suggesting that the reasoned amendment might have been drafted by Mr. Jimmy Knapp rather than by the Labour party.
Mr. Norris:
If the hon. Lady says so, I accept that assertion.
My hon. and learned Friend touched on a point that is absolutely seminal to the debate. He pointed out how extraordinarily foolish it was to concentrate on who the employer of an individual might be, whatever function he was to discharge in the public service, without considering properly whether he was properly trained, qualified and equipped to do his job. That is what is important and Conservative Members have never lost sight of it because they are interested in practical solutions. It was significant that the Opposition should have drawn the distinction which led my hon. and learned Friend to make that point.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |