| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
7.19 pm
Mr. McLeish: With the leave of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I should like to reply to the debate.
I thank the Opposition for adopting a very constructive and thoughtful approach. The right hon. Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) identified the important principles behind the Bill and outlined the criteria that have been satisfied--at least in his eyes. I also thank the hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) for his support.
I shall deal briefly with the point raised by the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond), who had the courtesy to write to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. The hon. Gentleman raised the question of an indemnity for the Scottish Parliament in the event of its having to meet financial liabilities as a result of the problems that have arisen in relation to intermediate diets. As I understand it, the hon. Gentleman is concerned that either the domestic courts or the European Court of Human Rights might find the retrospective nature of this legislation unlawful, leaving the way open for convictions to be quashed and resulting in entitlement to compensation.
I assure the hon. Gentleman and the House that we have taken careful legal advice and, on the basis of that advice, we are totally satisfied that the retrospective provisions of the Bill are entirely consistent with both domestic and European law. I would not otherwise commend it to the House. From the perspective of the Scottish Parliament, the position would be far worse if the legislation were not enacted. While I recognise that the hon. Gentleman has made a reasonable point, it is a hypothetical one. I assure the hon. Gentleman that we do not envisage any unquantifiable liability ending up with the Scottish Executive or the Scottish Parliament. The most important consideration this evening is to move forward with the Bill in order to ensure that the liabilities to which the hon. Gentleman referred do not end up with the Scottish Executive or the Scottish Parliament.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 63 (Committal of Bills),
Bill immediately considered in Committee; reported, without amendment; read the Third time, and passed.
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. McFall.]
Mr. Derek Wyatt (Sittingbourne and Sheppey):
Mr. Deputy Speaker, thank you for giving me the chance to put the case for the second crossing of the Swale. I have placed copies of this speech on two of my local constituency websites: Swale chamber of commerce, www.fenet.co.uk/swale; and Swale borough council, www.swale.gov.uk.
I am sorry that it is not possible to show a video of the current problems with the bridge or even colour slides in the Chamber tonight. I hope that one day this will be a Chamber of the 20th century of which we may be proud. In the meantime, I welcome my hon. Friend the Minister this evening. I hope that he will watch--and persuade the whole transport team to watch--the video depicting the problems with the bridge. It was made by Ray Featherstone, the youth leader of Sheerness county youth centre, with the help of local youngsters on the Isle of Sheppey a few years ago.
When I was parliamentary spokesperson for the new constituency of Sittingbourne and Sheppey in 1996, I was asked by Councillor Dennis Grover whether I could arrange a meeting on behalf of the Sheppey Industry Association with the then shadow Minister of Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short). I duly did so. The day before we were due to meet her in the House, she was transferred to what was then Overseas Development. I called Dennis to tell him that the meeting was off because my right hon. Friend had been moved to Overseas Development. As quick as a flash, he responded, "That's all right. The island has a better chance with her there--after all, we've been overseas for 1,000 years."
Although Great Britain is an island, there are people in our country who share a different understanding of the word "island". They are the people who live on Mull, Skye, the Isle of Wight, or, in my case, the Isle of Sheppey. They call themselves "islanders" because, for 1,000 years or more, they have been detached from mainland Britain. Islanders possess a different view of life and increasingly, because the islands have suffered greater hardships in terms of employment opportunities, health care, education and housing, they feel that they have been unloved and left out in the cold because no one in government understands their unique problems.
Our legal offshore islands suffer, at a micro level, all the problems of the United Kingdom mainland--but they suffer them at a level that is much more personal and debilitating. For instance, in the community of Leysdown on the east end of the Isle of Sheppey, where I recently conducted a Saturday surgery, it costs the population of 1,060 £4.20 return to go to the nearest shopping centre in the town of Sheerness. The bus runs once an hour and stops at 6 pm. The nearest accident and emergency unit is at Medway hospital on the mainland, which is only 20 miles away. As that hospital's A and E record is not what we would wish, many people travel to the A and E unit at the Kent and Canterbury hospital, which is only 32 miles away and is currently facing closure. Our new Sheppey community hospital has been delayed and delayed and delayed.
Worse still, if plans to close the magistrates courts in both Sheerness and Sittingbourne go ahead, it will cost citizens £6.80 to go to Chatham, or more to go to Maidstone magistrates court. They will have to travel across the bridge every time. Public transport currently takes more than three hours to get from Leysdown to Chatham--and longer to get to Maidstone--but it does not necessarily run at a convenient time when cases may be heard, and there is a considerable cost to the individual. Those problems have been compounded by the bridge. Nevertheless, they have been borne with some stoicism for generations, not just by the people of Leysdown, but by the people of Warden Bay, Eastchurch, Minster, Halfway, Queenborough, Bluetown and Sheerness.
The 1991 census gave the population of the island as 35,500, and today it is close to 40,000. The population almost doubles at weekends--especially when the clocks go forward--as many Londoners travel to Sheppey to visit their caravans at the east end of the island. The traffic is constantly delayed by the bridge.
Thirty-eight years ago yesterday, the then Conservative Government closed the naval dockyard at Sheerness, which caused unemployment on a scale never before experienced in our community. It broke up our community. Long-term unemployment continues to be a huge problem on the island, and stands at 23.8 per cent.--one of the highest levels in the south-east of England. Today, the port, under the ownership of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, is thankfully booming. It is the fifth biggest port in the United Kingdom and is perfectly placed to serve continental Europe--if we could only sort out the bridge.
Two years ago, the port was in competition with other United Kingdom and continental ports for a huge contract with a car importer. The port already imports cars for Citroen, Mazda, Volkswagen, Peugeot, Hyundai and Chrysler. The deal was done in that hands were shaken on it. The port management was chuffed as it had again proved the excellence of the port. Twenty minutes or so later, the car importer phoned from his car cancelling the contract--he was caught in an horrendous tailback of traffic as a result of the bridge being up.
The current bridge is a single-span lifting bridge. At the time of the closure of the docks, Percy Wells--our best ever Member of Parliament for the old constituency of Faversham--had campaigned for 20 years for a new bridge. He had been told by the Admiralty that it had to be a single span, as the other two bridges had previously been. How amazing--just before the bridge was built, the Admiralty left Sheerness. The bridge design was already redundant.
Every time a small yacht or a small tanker goes through it for pleasure or en route for Ridham dock, the bridge has to go up. In the summer, because it is a concrete bridge, it expands, and it has to be hosed down manually before it will come down again. It might be thought that such a small irritant, causing a waiting time of perhaps 20 to 30 minutes, is not much to shout about in the general scheme of things, but that would be wrong.
Ridham is expanding. In 1987, there were 442 liftings a year caused by the dock. By 1995, that had risen to 1,034 liftings a year or three a day--an increase of 120 per cent. The bridge was built in 1960 for traffic flows with a design capacity of 13,000 vehicle movements a day. Now the flow is just over 24,000 vehicle
movements a day, or 85 per cent. over the design capacity. At the weekends it can double or treble. In April 1997 the Kent county council 12-hour traffic flow recorded 21,063 vehicles, including 3,003 heavy goods vehicles.
The heavy goods vehicles equate to 14.25 per cent. of all traffic using the bridge and according to a Swale borough council report, there would be serious problems for the port, should the HGV traffic continue. We hope that it will continue, because Railtrack wants to make Sheerness a nodal point for rail freight, linking the port ultimately through the channel tunnel to Europe. That would not only create more jobs for Sheerness, but substantially increase the HGV traffic over the bridge.
As public transport declines--it cannot get any worse for us on the island--more and more people have to consider the car as the only way of getting around, notwithstanding the helpful changes in the Budget for rural transport. Over the past three years the problems relating to the bridge have been compounded by the new A249 dual carriageway, as well as a series of awful accidents on the bridge itself and either side of it, leading to delays of up to 10 hours and queues of 12 miles or more.
The Conservative Government, in their wisdom, decided that the solution to the bridge was to build the new A249 first. The A249 connects the M2 motorway to a roundabout, which in itself has caused unnecessary accidents because it is so poorly designed. The roundabout is 200 yd short of a single road leading to the bridge. In other words, 1,750 cars and lorries an hour travel on the new dual carriageway, only to meet a roundabout and then a single track across the bridge, which in the summer goes up eight times a day, but sometimes fails to come down.
It is not surprising that the group of Tory Ministers responsible for that decision are known as the East Ham group--East Ham being one stop short of Barking on the underground. Of course it had been their intention to build the bridge. Plans had been drawn up and £2 million of public money--our taxpayers' money--was spent on its design before the public inquiry was due to get under way last June.
The scheme was seriously flawed. It was back to front. It was the island that needed to be connected to the mainland, not the other way round. The islanders' needs should have been addressed first.
I support the transport review being conducted by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, even though it has led to a delay in our bridge, because it is wrong to waste taxpayers' money on schemes that have no Treasury Bills attached to them and which do not fit into a UK-wide transport strategy. Moreover, I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Paymaster General, who has reversed the previous Government's private finance initiative policy, by not insisting that PFIs take the risk of paying for planning inquiries.
The results of the current review will be published in July. Whether our bridge goes forward fully funded depends on five criteria: accessibility, safety, economy, environment and integration. On accessibility, safety, economy and integration, I make the score 10 out of 10. I could be biased. On environment, we have had some problems, but all the environment groups have bought into
the need for the island to be connected to the mainland. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds must be especially congratulated on seeking a practical solution for the bridge.
To those like the Council for the Protection of Rural England who want a tunnel, the Highways Agency responded earlier in the week. It stated:
That the Bill be committed to a Committee of the whole House.--[Mr. McFall.]
Question agreed to.
7.23 pm
"A tunnel crossing has been considered in detail but rejected primarily on environmental grounds. You will be aware that the Swale and its surroundings are Special Protection Areas under EU legislation, Sites of Special Scientific Interest under UK legislation and an internationally important Ramsar wetland site. Our proposals are required to have the smallest possible ecological effect on any option considered."
The Highways Agency went on:
"In conclusion, the ecological effects of the proposed bridge would be less than those of a tunnel, and it must be borne in mind that it is the ecological aspect of the environment for which the Swale area is protected."
There is one criterion missing from the list: the Isle of Sheppey's psyche. Such a concept does not fit neatly into the way in which civil servants frame regulations, and cannot easily be understood by Ministers who never visit the island and have no real understanding of it.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |