National Networks National Policy Statement

Motion to Regret

Moved by

That this House regrets the Government’s decision to lay the National Networks National Policy Statement, laid before the House on 6 March, without carrying out the systematic review of road projects recommended by the Climate Change Committee; addressing the risk of insufficient environmental action by the Department for Transport highlighted by the National Audit Office; or joining up their policies with the missions presented to Parliament under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023.

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to introduce this short Motion tonight. I think the text of the Motion is pretty clear to noble Lords: in simple terms, I believe that the Government have introduced the latest national networks national policy statement without proper consultation and I fear that it will end in tears.

These NNNPSs have been around since they were set up with the Planning Act 2008 and are supposed to be produced every five years or so. They can be debated in both Houses. The present one was debated in the other place. I think there were 10 Members of Parliament present, and everybody had the feeling that it was being pushed through by the Government. The same legislation basically requires any debate in the Lords to take place within what they call a “relevant period”, otherwise you do not get the benefit of a response from the Minister. I was only told about this particular need for a debate quite recently by the Transport Action Network, for which I am very grateful, but we are actually out of time already.

The Government have not actually designated this NNNPS yet, and I hope to get comments from the Minister in this debate to explore what they are going to do next. Last week, the Government lost a case in the High Court on climate change issues. The case was led by Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and the Good Law Project. They took legal action over the targets that the Government had put in the NNNPSs, having successfully challenged the previous budgets. The High Court ruled that Britain had breached legislation designed to help reach the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of keeping temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, which required a new plan. The court effectively ruled that the NNNPS was illegal.

So my question to the Minister is: what next? Given that surface transport caused over 29% of UK emissions last year, it would be pretty foolish if the Government were to designate—in other words continue with—the NNNPS now. A lawful climate plan will inevitably require a fundamental and radical shift in transport policy, and we have not seen it yet. There is no sign of it. There are many examples that I could go through, but I will not, because a number of colleagues wish to speak. I have noted examples from organisations such as the Institution of Civil Engineers, the House of Commons Transport Committee and a lot of the other organisations that have submitted evidence. They are name-checked in the NNNPS, but just mentioning their names does not actually mean that the Government will do what the particular organisation says that they should do.

The Climate Change Committee’s report to Parliament stressed the importance of a

“systematic review of all current and proposed road schemes”.

That was in 2023. I am wondering where they are; maybe the Minister will be able to tell us. Many things in the Environment Act 2021 have not been translated into the NNNPS. Policy issues on cycling, wheeling, walking et cetera—particular interests of mine—are totally missing.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to support the regret Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, even though I think that regret Motions are pathetic, frankly. At least it means a debate.

It is better than nothing.

It is better than nothing. As somebody who has watched this Government for a long time now, I cannot believe that they have backtracked on so many of their plans. Actually, they had very few plans to start with, but they seem to have backtracked on all of them about delivering net zero. They seem to not even understand what net zero means.

As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, the Government were taken to court because it is obvious that the UK is going to fail to do its bit to save the planet—and they lost in court because they no longer believe in doing the right thing. They are now fighting another court case because they cut £200 million from the promotion of walking and cycling, a key part of delivering net zero.

I almost think that I—or someone else, possibly on this Bench—ought to write the Ladybird Book of Transport Policy for Climate Change Deniers, because, really, you do need to understand what we are going to see in the future. As has been said, transport accounts for nearly a third of emissions and, despite a million electric vehicles on our roads, those emissions have hardly changed in a decade. All the road building has led to extra cars and longer traffic jams. Instead of switching people away from their cars by creating places to live that are within easy, 15-minute walks of shops and services, this Government have run down bus services and built sprawling suburbs that actually increase the use of cars.

One big reason for the Government doing the wrong thing, rather than the right thing, is the millions that the Conservatives have received in donations from the oil and gas industry. Gas and oil people want drivers to spend longer driving to the shops and to fill up at petrol stations, because that means more money for them. Gas and oil do not really like people cycling or walking—all those cheap, easy things—because those people are not making them money. The big polluters finance Tufton Street think tanks and social media bots, because they want to squeeze as much money out of their planet-killing business as they possibly can.

I do not expect this Government to change their mind. I expect them to lose the general election and then have nothing to do with transport policy and not be a political force worth talking about for the next—

For a few years.

How many years in Government does the noble Lord want? Maybe a couple of terms. As such, I will focus my next few remarks to those in the next Government, because these national policy statements were Labour’s idea—and they are a really good idea. To make them work, we have to make sure that the Treasury listens and that the next Government get the funding to deliver real change.

When I was the Deputy Mayor of London to Ken Livingstone, I told him that, if we were to be serious about creating more cycling routes, we were going to need hundreds of millions a year. There was a huge shudder of shock around his whole office. It was eventually accepted that, if you want to change things and to get people more safely walking and cycling, you need the sort of money that we might spend on a new road. The truth is, if you build those opportunities, people will take them. We need to imagine a future that is better than what we have now and spend the money building that future.

My Lords, I have two interests to declare. First, I am a practising Silk. At the planning and environment Bar, I act for a range of parties affected by national policy statements. Secondly, in February this year, I was appointed by the Prime Minister to undertake a review of the processes relating to legal challenges to development consent orders for nationally significant infrastructure projects.

In the course of that review, which is still to report, I have engaged on NSIPs with various stakeholders from all sides of the spectrum, including environmental NGOs, the public sector and the private sector. Obviously, I will not comment on matters within the remit of the review, but I want to draw the House’s attention to one point on which there is broad consensus among the stakeholders. It is not directly relevant to my remit, but it has some relevance to this debate. There is broad consensus that national policy statements need to be kept up to date, and that there have been shortcomings in that respect in recent years. The NPS that we are debating tonight replaces one from 2014. That is the status quo; it is 10 years old. The disbenefits of a national policy statement being out of date include, first, that the function of an NPS—to set the framework for development consent and streamline the consenting process—is undermined if it has been overtaken by events. Secondly, the propensity for and risk of legal challenges is greater if people can point to a mismatch between current circumstances and an out-of-date NPS.

Voltaire probably did not have in mind nationally significant infrastructure projects when he said that the perfect is the enemy of the good, but he might very well have done, because the adage is no less applicable, and possibly more so, in this context than it is in any other. Even if the national networks NPS could be improved with further reviews of the nature the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, suggests, the status quo during the time when it was subject to that review would be the 10 year-old and even further ageing 2014 NPS. I suggest that it may well be better to have a 2024 NPS—which on any view is more up to date than its decade-old predecessor—complete with a commitment to be reviewed within five years or earlier, as the new NPS commits that it should be. That review would be in light of any further environmental policy developments that took place in that five-year period. Is that not better than maintaining the status quo of 2014 while we conduct further reviews in the meantime?

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Woodland Trust and president, patron or vice-president of a range of environmental organisations. I support the Motion to Regret tabled by my noble friend Lord Berkeley. He got to the Table Office about 30 seconds before I did with my version of the Motion. He will pay for that in future.

I want to challenge the previous statements, with all respect to Voltaire. This is not a question of it not being necessary to update the previous policy statement. It is very overdue to update the previous policy statement, but, alas, this version is badly out of kilter with a whole suite of other policy commitments that the Government have already made, including environmental and other targets. Voltaire might have said that the best is the enemy of the good, but this is far from being “the best”—and it is not even “the good”. Let us press on.

It is amazing how many respectable bodies have criticised this policy, because this revised version has significant implications for the delivery of the key objectives of the UK Government on climate and the environment. The Government have missed many of their targets for years. In its most recent assessment of the Department for Transport, the National Audit Office gave a “black” rating—the worst possible rating—to the likelihood and impact of the risk that the Department for Transport would

“not deliver sufficient action in the transport sector to provide carbon savings, meet air quality and biodiversity targets, and adapt to climate change”.

That is pretty forthright. We have to remind ourselves that these targets are, for the most part, enshrined in law.

The Transport Select Committee had a go at this. It was highly critical of the draft NNNPS, but the Government rejected the vast majority of its findings. The Climate Change Committee’s 2023 progress report to Parliament stressed the need for

My Lords, as it seems compulsory in this short debate to quote Voltaire, perhaps I might take us to his wonderful creation, Dr Pangloss, who continues to assert:

“All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”

even while the horrors are descending around him. I feel there is something of that in the statement; it is a bit Panglossian. As noble Lords have already said, we face a climate emergency and crisis, and this statement is not adequate to the seriousness of the situation that we are in.

In Greater Manchester, we have made a commitment through our combined authority to become a net-zero city by 2038. It is no good us doing that if everybody else is going the opposite way. My wife is a priest in a parish underneath a motorway interchange. Motorways are, of course, exempt from all the clean air regulations that apply to many other roads. We desperately need every policy to be thoroughly tested to ensure that it will get us to net zero in the time and at the pace that we need, and at the moment, this is not good enough.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is quite right to highlight the Government’s failure to carry out the systematic review of road projects recommended by the Climate Change Committee, and addressing the risk of insufficient environmental action by the Department for Transport that was highlighted. I just want to speak about the effect that has on the levelling-up agenda, which it links to. All these actions are interactions, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Young of Old Scone, are quite right to highlight the environmental impacts of these decisions. However, there are even bigger and more important issues, which I will highlight to the House.

As an aside, my need to stay for two nights in London to take part in this debate tonight is also relevant, as well as the thousands of people who were going to come London today but who cannot do so because of a national rail strike. That is not directly connected to this but it is symptomatic of how the Government are dealing with the people who deal with that infrastructure. After two years, ASLEF has still not resolved a pay dispute, but it is not all its fault. This is on the record: I am not having a go at Avanti trains tonight. The infrastructure—Network Rail—is to blame along the way as well. Trains are blocked and lines are down and not working. I can tell you where they are; people need to know where they are. If you go to Milton Keynes or Watford, lines are down. It affects the travel anywhere around that area and affects everything coming into London, including people.

It is the failure of joined-up thinking that is causing me angst and making me want to stand here tonight in this short debate and just try to explain why. The draft statement says: