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5.8 pm
Ms Margaret Hodge (Barking): We are debating the motion tabled by the Opposition, and I think that all Labour Members--particularly London Members--welcome the opportunity that they have given us by exercising their choice. I welcome the chance to debate an issue that is crucial to Londoners; in that I join the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke). The underground is vital to the well-being of our capital city, and hence critically important to the strength of Britain as a whole.
I also welcome the debate because it gives us a chance to make clear the miserable state of the legacy that the new Labour Government have inherited. We have inherited not an excellent system, as the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) said, but a system that has suffered from 18 years of neglect and underinvestment. I also welcome the opportunity to discuss some of the options that are open to the Government over the life of this Parliament to put in place effective programmes that will secure what we all want--an affordable, efficient, safe and modern underground system in our capital city.
Building and running a first-class underground system is essential for the building and running of a world-class capital city. It is an essential ingredient in an integrated transport system for the capital. Businesses will stay in the capital and new businesses will invest in London only if their personnel can get around it. Visitors form an increasingly important part of wealth creation and they will come to London only if they can get around it easily; the same applies to those of us who live and work in the capital.
The issue relates not just to London and Londoners but to the United Kingdom as a whole, because, when jobs, tourists and industries come here, they create jobs elsewhere in Britain. London contributes more to the Treasury than it receives from it. It is not a drain on
resources: it creates wealth for the rest of the country. What is good for London is good for Britain, but London's competitiveness has been seriously undermined and is at risk because of the inadequacies of its transport system. Businesses have expressed concern about the record of the Conservative Government. We all know about overcrowded trains, delays and cancellations, which make it difficult for businesses to recruit and retain staff. That makes them think about investing outside the capital.
It has been agreed that the millennium celebrations will take place at Greenwich. I welcome that decision, because it will attract more visitors to London and elsewhere. We have to get our public transport system right if we are to cope with the influx of people to London that those celebrations will attract. The Government are rightly looking at the environmental aspects of city living. We all say that we must tackle the growing dependence on the car, but we will change people's habits only by giving them the alternative of reliable public transport.
The problems facing the Government in that regard faced many big cities, but over the past 10 to 20 years most big cities have sought radical and dynamic solutions to the problem. Many of them have invested in new technologies and projects. The Conservative Government failed to do that. In those cities, such projects are often the pride and joy of the capital and the country. An unusual example is Venezuela, the capital of which, Caracas, has an efficient and well-maintained metro of which its citizens are rightly proud. The Conservative Government could have looked at that example in deciding how to run London's underground.
I agree with Opposition Members that we were once proud of our underground. It was once the world's best, but now it is a crumbling wreck and the neglect is not difficult to see. The system has crumbling tunnels and worn-out signalling, and the trains are overcrowded. The hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) shakes his head, but I wonder how often he uses the underground. We who use it know the problems, but each year our hopes of a better system were dashed as the situation worsened.
It is not just commuters and tourists who have to put up with shoddy services, because business also suffers costs as a result of the congested and gridlocked city. Business has estimated that the lack of a properly integrated transport system costs it about £20 billion a year. Anyone in London, except perhaps Conservative Members, will say that we need to get London's transport system right.
It is a bit rich for the Opposition to table a motion on the state of the London underground when the Conservative Government showed such complacency on the issue for so long. A former Transport Minister, Mr. John Bowis, said as recently as January that, under the Government, underground services were improving. The voters of Battersea did not believe him, I did not believe him and neither did Londoners. It is no wonder that Battersea now has a Labour Member.
The Opposition motion takes the biscuit. What were the Conservative Government doing for the past 18 years, and how can Conservative Members think that eight weeks in office is enough to change 18 years of neglect? We shall have to sort out the legacy that we have inherited and we must look at some aspects of the mess so that we are under no illusion about the scale of the problem. As the Minister said, the Conservatives have left us with a
staggering investment backlog of £1.2 billion. Worse still, they have left the Government with further budget cuts in Government grant of 28 per cent., which the Conservative Government incorporated in their budget for the next three years.
I agree with the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster that the Conservative Government's constant chopping and changing of investment proposals had an appalling effect on London Underground's investment plans. This year, it has been forced to cut its investment programme by £700 million. That money would make a real difference to the network. Those cuts fly in the face of the 1991 Monopolies and Mergers Commission report, which called for investment of £700 million to £750 million a year over 10 years. That advice was given to the Conservative Government in 1991, which makes it impossible for the Opposition to say that they were unaware of the problem, or that their record in government was excellent.
One of the key matters to be understood about the underground is the predicament created by the Conservative Government's failure over the Jubilee line. It is a scandal whose enormity has yet to be properly revealed. That Government allowed development to run wild in docklands without ensuring a proper transport infrastructure to link the development to the rest of London. They had resources to install such infrastructure, but they sold land cheaply and gave capital grants to the private sector and tax concessions to businesses and industries that chose to relocate in docklands.
None of those investors returned anything to the community in terms of transport structure for London. They were supposed to put money into the Jubilee line extension, but I understand that the amount of private sector investment is down to under £400 million. That was supposed to be another model private-public finance initiative undertaken by the Conservative Government, who made no allowance at all for the extra, inevitable costs that arise on such huge projects.
As a result, the extra costs, which will total about £300 million from 1997 to 1999, have had to come out of London Transport's diminished budget. Money that would otherwise have been invested in the rest of the tube network has had to be used to finance the overspend on the Jubilee line extension. To put it another way and to make it clear to the House, during 1996-97, more than £1 billion was invested in the underground system, of which £660 million went on the Jubilee line extension. Only just over £300 million was left to maintain the rest of the network.
Mr. Pickles:
Does the hon. Lady now feel that the Government should make up that money? Does she believe that the Government should put in £499 million to make up the shortfall?
Ms Hodge:
That is not a terribly clever point. The hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that this Government are having to work within the financial parameters that were laid down by the previous Government. No one can take him seriously if he suddenly pretends that he has no responsibility for decisions that were taken in his name a few months ago and if he tries to put the onus on us.
The funding crisis that we are left with has many graphic examples. Trains are too full to get on, as anyone knows who tries to get on them in the rush hour. Cancellations are commonplace and accidents and power failures are rife. Even today, we read in the Evening Standard about the problems of the escalators at Highgate station, which are 56 years old, are the oldest on the network and have more or less given up the ghost.
Since 1991-92, the number of serious injuries on the tube has more than doubled. In the past year, the number of stations that have been closed for more than 15 minutes--some, I might add, for nearly an hour--has also doubled. Last November, there was a power failure, with 30,000 people stranded in tunnels, some of them for more than two hours. To what was the problem traced back? To the 91-year-old Lotts Road power station. In the same month, 10,000 passengers on the Victoria line suffered serious delay.
The previous Government cannot claim ignorance of those things. Before the last Budget, I, along with some of my Labour colleagues who are in the Chamber today, led a protest to the Treasury to ask the then Chancellor of the Exchequer not to make rumoured cuts in the underground budget. Two weeks later, the cuts were announced and they were roundly condemned by everyone--every newspaper, every pressure group, every section of society and every passenger in London. It was only in the last weeks of the previous Government, when they were scrabbling about for policies to put into a well-worn manifesto, that they decided that something had to be done.
The panacea was privatisation, but there was no coherent package, no proper method of implementation and no real answers. The previous Government assumed that the years of neglect could be solved simply by privatisation, despite the evidence to the contrary--none clearer than the fiasco caused by the British Rail privatisation.
Reference was made to the leaked memo to the then Prime Minister from the former Secretary of State for Transport, who said what would happen if the tube were privatised. It is worth reminding hon. Members of what he said: that, if we privatised the tube, the investment backlog would not start to be dealt with until the next century. As we all know, the underground needs help now, not in several years' time.
Services were also threatened in the leaked memorandum. The former Secretary of State for Transport said:
The previous Government's piecemeal approach has meant that a proper plan for the underground has always been lacking. I shall give just one other example, which I know well. From the autumn, there will be new Northern line trains, financed from the private finance initiative. It took long enough for that to happen, but they will finally run. Unfortunately, the service will not be any faster; in fact, it may be slower because we have not modernised the track, and signalling work has been put back three years because of the previous Government's cuts.
I hope that I have said enough to convince anyone listening who does not already know that the blame for
the mess lies at the Government's door [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] I mean at the previous Government's door--we have all got to get used to this. It is now up to us to sort out that mess, and that is why we have announced a full-scale review of the underground.
We need a proper strategy, not a piecemeal approach. We need an integrated approach to all transport infrastructure in London, which is why our proposals for a Greater London authority and an elected mayor are essential for proper planning and a proper system in future. However, we have an immediate crisis and we need to tackle that with vigour, imagination and courage. We all recognise the public expenditure constraints that we have inherited and it is nonsense to suggest that bringing finance in to pursue the public interest is the same as privatisation. It simply demonstrates yet again the Opposition's inability to think in new terms for the modern world.
We can effectively use private finance to assist with the investment that we so desperately need. For instance, stations could be modernised with private investment and their potential for retail development exploited, so that the private sector interest could be married with a good public sector outcome. We have the example of the very successful Manchester metro, which was developed by a public-private partnership. Future investment is planned, with money coming from local authorities, Government, Europe and the private sector.
"I do not want to set existing service patterns in stone--some services may well be uneconomic."
The implication of that is not hard to imagine. In fact, a picture was offered by a Conservative think tank--the Centre for Policy Studies--which suggested that all the stations outside zone 3 could be closed, and that that could be justified on economic grounds.
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