HC Deb 11 November 1959 vol 613 cc549-60

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Legh.]

10.48 p.m.

Mr. Geoffrey Hirst (Shipley)

I should like to crave your indulgence, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, for having very little voice because of a bad cold. I hope that I shall be forgiven on that account.

Tonight, I raise a matter of great importance to the country as a whole as well as to Yorkshire, in which my constituency lies—the extension of the Birmingham motorway, or M.1, as it is called, through Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Yorkshire. If that were under construction today, as I claim it should be, there would have been no need for the Questions, petitions, Motions and Adjournment debates which we have had on this matter.

The first signpost—to use a rather inappropriate term for a non-existent road—in this sad story appears to be in November, 1957, when the then Minister of Transport, the right hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Watkinson) answered a Question, which, to save time, I will not read out, saying: I am very anxious to get on with it, but … there is great difficulty in Leicestershire over the line …"— [OFFICIAL REPORT, 13th November, 1957; Vol. 577, c. 936.] That strikes me as interesting, because, as we all know now but certainly did not know then, the Leicestershire County Council approved the line for which the Minister asked and a formal letter confirmed that. That might have been known to be on the way, if not actually available to the Minister at the time.

We never had a statement on that. In fact, after that there is a great gap and I cannot find any reference to the read at all. There was not even what is called a "planted" Question to give the Minister an opportunity to make a statement. That strikes me as odd because six months later, on 14th May, 1958, the then Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, in reply to a Question, said: The proposed line is still not decided … and we are awaiting the further views of the County Council."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 14th May, 1958; Vol. 588, c. 407.] Of course, that was not on the same line, but another line altogether.

A further Question came on 4th February, 1959, and the then Minister stated that The difficulties … have not yet been resolved and went on to indicate that they were so great that we should: examine going ahead with the Yorkshire section independently…."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 4th February, 1959; Vol. 599, c. 375.] By that time this was all a bit too much for the hon. Member for Leicester, North-West (Mr. Janner), for I see that on 16th February he asked why the Minister had not approved an alternative route approved by the county council on 30th December, 1958, and the Minister replied that he had great difficulties.

Further Questions followed in a steady stream, with all sorts of brands of "stone-walling" Answers and, on 17th March, there was a full debate on the roads programme. The hon. Member for Normanton (Mr. A. Roberts) made a speech which took up three columns of HANSARD. In that speech he stated that he was disturbed that the Minister in opening the debate had not referred to this matter, but when the Parliamentary Secretary replied, half an hour later, he did not say a single word on the subject in his 3,000-word speech.

The great day, if I may so refer to it, arrived when the hon. Member for Leicester, North-West, got the Adjournment and, if he will forgive me saying so, presented the case exceedingly well. The Parliamentary Secretary replied: the northern section of the London-Yorkshire Motorway has never had a firm place in my right hon. Friend's five main projects, although it has been much talked about."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 13th April, 1959; Vol. 603, c. 778.] What did the Minister mean way back in February when he said We must go ahead with the northern section."? I know that he was referring to the extended third part each time, but I suggest that there was order, counter-order and, in the event, disorder. The same sorry tale went on, and from time to time I could not get a clear picture. On being pressed strongly at Question Time, on 8th July, by, among others, the hon. Member for Leicester, North-West, who asked: When does he propose to take some step to expedite its construction? the then Minister answered: The hon. Member should address his questions to the local authorities."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 8th July, 1959; Vol. 608, c. 1357.] I took the strongest exception to that and I hope that it will be realised that I have written to the right hon. Gentleman telling him what I was going to say tonight, in addition to telling the Parliamentary Secretary who is now concerned.

What was anyone to get from all this? What was one to get from the meeting which took place at which about 30 to 40 Yorkshiremen were present in the conference room downstairs? It was the same thing all down the line, possibly by omission rather than by attention, but the inference was that the nigger in the woodpile was the local authorities in Leicestershire, whereas the real nigger in the woodpile was the Minister of Transport.

Letters of all sorts flowed. One was to the Yorkshire Post, of 20th July, 1959, to fit in with the Minister's visit to the Yorkshire region, when I put a whole range of questions knowing that someone would give it to him to read to improve his journey to Yorkshire. I gathered that that was done. I paid tribute to him for all he had done generally to get things moving, but criticised him on this subject. That caused considerable trouble—not for me, but for a number of people.

The council wrote me a letter, which I did not solicit, stating that its attention had been drawn to my comments, and that it had instructed the town clerk to bring to my notice certain facts. The town clerk said: My Council believes that if the true facts were before you you would be convinced that the delay which unfortunately occurred in fixing the line of the road through Leicestershire, was not due to any act or default of the Leicester County Council … That is absolutely true. Whatever the difficulties may have been, I should like to know why instructions have only recently been given for the Derbyshire section of the road.

As time is short, I must jump forward and put my next point. I agree that for the construction of this motorway as far as Birmingham we would all pay tribute to the contractors. They assembled about £5 million worth of plant and were all ready to go forward with the work if there had not been this unholy mess-up, with all this vacillation between one line and another. The equipment has now been dissipated, to a great extent. Some is still penned up and awaiting use, but some other has been used on the Maidenhead by-pass and for similar projects.

It is no good trying to get an industry geared up to do this work unless the programme can go forward all the time, without hold-ups and bottlenecks. I cannot praise the civil engineering industry highly enough. Given the opportunity it has made it quite clear that it can easily work at double the present rate of progress.

I am aware of the state of the roads programme when the Conservative Government first took office. It obviously had not been touched by the party opposite. There may have been reasons for that. At any rate, a good deal has been done to get things going. But even now the average rate of expenditure per vehicle is only £20 7s. 1d. as compared with £20 6s. 5d. exactly a quarter of a century ago. That is a difference of only 8d., whereas at modern prices the figure should now be about £55. So we must not congratulate ourselves too soon.

We have only to read the excellent debate which occurred in the other place, a few days ago, to appreciate what we are up against, and how ill we can afford the mistakes which have been made. We can also appreciate the lack of forward-thinking in strategic road planning. There are 8,500,000 vehicles on the roads today, and before this Parliament ends the figure will have risen to 12 million. What do the Government intend to do to match that increase? A year-by-year programme for financing is no good. We must have a much longer-term object than that. The programme must be backed with adequate powers, which will greatly streamline the present requirements, which involve about three years. I see that in the other place four years was mentioned, but I think that three years would be more accurate—or is it four years?

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Mr. John Hay)

indicated assent.

Mr. Hirst

Then that is all the more shocking. I am not blaming my hon. Friend, but it is even worse than I thought.

The programme must be stepped up. I hope that I shall not hear too much poppycock in reply. I hope we shall not hear the stuff with which Lord Chesham, in the debate in another place, ended his speech. He said … we cannot bulldoze our way through the rights of the citizen."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, House of Lords; Vol. 219, c. 414.] Four blinking years! Those are the tactics of the turtle and not the bulldozer.

10.59 p.m.

Mr. Barnett Janner (Leicester, Northwest)

I am grateful to the hon Member for Shipley (Mr. Hirst) for affording me a few minutes to say a few words to supplement what he said. I endorse practically all he said. It has been a terrific struggle. Many Questions have been put by hon. Members on both sides of the House, and particularly by myself, over a very long period concerning this road, and evasive replies have continually been given. Those replies have excited the anger of a large number of people, especially in and around my constituency.

The Minister must be aware that not only in 1957, but even in 1956—and, indeed, for some years before that—there was some pressure about the need of this road; that the Leicester County Council had been doing all it possibly could to help the Government of the time to put a plan into effect. I know that not only the county, but Leicester itself, part of which I have the honour to represent, has been urging all the time for something effective to be done.

I would like to refer to a leading article that appeared in the Leicester Evening Mail as far back as 6th February, 1959, which, I think, fairly covers the points that the hon. Gentleman and I wished to bring home this evening. That article said: At the height of the Save Charnwood petition controversy—concerned only with the Forest route early last year— this was written in 1959, but it refers to 1958, of course: he declared bluntly"— that is, the Minister that if Leicestershire did not make its mind up over where it wanted the motorway to go, he might have to spend his money elsewhere. Subsequently, when he received the petition he told Leicestershire to hurry up and produce an agreed line. This they did—last September. While the unanimous Leicestershire scheme was settling into the Whitehall pigeon holes, he was quoted as saying at a Ministry Press conference that Leicestershire delays were holding up the road. They ask and I ask what the difficulties are.

That this road should have been held up for so long is very serious not only for us in Leicester but also for the country as a whole. I am glad to hear, as I am sure will be the hon. Member for Shipley, that, at long last, something is to be done, but I would ask the Minister not to delay any longer; that when the plans that have been in the hands of the Government for a long time have been approved he will take the other steps as speedily as possible so that the road may be constructed and so satisfy the considerable needs of Leicester, Leicestershire, Yorkshire and the other places concerned.

11.3 p.m.

The Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Mr. John Hay)

Despite the handicap, which he admitted in the opening of his speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Mr. Hirst) has laid about him quite considerably, and I hope that he will forgive me if I do not refute each of the allegations he made. In the rather short time left to me I should like to tell the House the plain, unvarnished story of what has happened to the northern section of the London to Yorkshire motorway.

The House will know that the intention is to build this motorway in three parts, the first section being from London to Birmingham; the second, from Crick, near Northampton—that is the Birmingham end of the first section—up to the Doncaster by-pass, and the third being a spur road running between Sheffield and Rotherham to Leeds. The controversy has raged round the section between Crick and the Doncaster by-pass, and that section runs through Leicestershire.

Before I go to the story of what has been happening, I have two observations to make. I want to make it absolutely clear that my right hon. Friend who was at that time responsible—who is now the Minister of Defence—and his Department, have been obliged throughout to follow the procedure laid down by Parliament in the Special Roads Act, 1949. The intention of that Act was to safeguard a number of rights—the individuals' property rights, the interests of local authorities and local communities, preservation of amenities, and agricultural interests, to mention only a few.

The procedure which is imposed upon us in cutting the line of a motorway and getting it constructed falls into a number of stages, and there are a whole series of opportunities for objectors to be heard and to have their views ventilated. As I said in interrupting my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, when he said it took about three years, it can take four years.

Mr. Janner

Disgraceful.

Mr. Hay

It is not the fault of the Minister, or the Ministry. If the fault lies anywhere it is with Parliament, for having produced the machinery we have to work.

Mr. Janner

The machinery has not been started.

Mr. Hay

The hon. Member is more or less right, we are still only at the first stage of this long procedure, I regret to say. It has been all the way through our hope that we would be able to obtain agreement upon the provisional line of this motorway. It has taken a long time, I agree, but I believe there are, at last, reasonable hopes of agreement, and that the succeeding stages will go through as quickly as possible.

The story began in 1951, when consulting engineers appointed by the Ministry were instructed to survey the whole of the route from London to Yorkshire, and for the section north of Leicester they proposed a route to go through Charnwood Forest. Shortly, I understand that north-west of Leicester there is a ridge of three hills, now covered by Charnwood Forest, a well-known beauty spot. To the east of the forest, between Leicester itself and Loughborough, is the Soar Valley, an area of fine agricultural land. When they heard that there was a possibility of a motorway through Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire County Council protested to the consulting engineers, who then proposed an alternative route through the Soar Valley, which would skirt to the north of Leicester and southwest of Loughborough.

This had a number of advantages, engineering in particular, avoiding hilly country, which is rocky in some places and marshy in others, and would have been closer to Leicester and Loughborough. Our intention with the motorways is to try to get them as near the main centres of population as we can.

In 1955, the new motorway programme was announced, and the agricultural objections to the Soar Valley line, the second thoughts of the consultants, were strongly pressed. Negotiations then began, and they took a very long time, with the object of trying to get general agreement on the Soar Valley line.

In 1957, it became apparent that we were just not going to get agreement on the line at all, because the agricultural objections were so strong. We asked whether our consultants would again explore the possibility of the route through Charnwood Forest, to which the county council had objected in 1951. This was done, and in December, 1957, the county council told us it was prepared to accept a line through the forest. But when this became known there was an immediate outcry from the many people who see in the forest a natural playground and a place to go to at weekends. I expect that is the organisation referred to in the Press cutting which the hon. Member for Leicester, Northwest (Mr. Janner) read out—the Friends of Charnwood.

In March, 1958, a deputation of protest was brought to see the then Minister, now my right hon. Friend the Minister of Defence. As a result, since we had been arguing for three or four years almost on these different lines, my right hon. Friend said bluntly to Leicestershire County Council: "Will you please talk to all these people and see whether you can yourselves, within the county, bring into contact all the various interests and suggest a route which will be acceptable to all of them?" That decision has been the subject of criticism—the hon. Member for Leicester, North-West criticised it just now—but I claim, and I ask the House to agree, that my right hon. Friend had every justification for taking that line at that moment.

When trying to carry through a big engineering undertaking of this nature, there is little point in advertising a line and forcing through with the rest of the statutory procedure when one knows that one is foredoomed to the most violent objection, because built into the whole of this procedure under the Statute is a whole series of opportunities for objection, including, where the highway authority itself—the county council-objects, the opportunity of claiming the special parliamentary procedure, with which some of us are acquainted, and which can delay a matter of this kind for two, or even three, years, and this in the middle of this long series of procedures through which we have to go. That was in March, 1958.

Whatever may be the criticism of my right hon. Friend's decision, the plain fact is that it worked, because by September, 1958, the county council had come to more or less agreement with everyone and came back to us and suggested a compromise line going through the forest, not the same line as the consultants originally thought of in 1951, but a line, nevertheless, through the forest which up to that time had been almost universally attacked.

It was a line which contained a number of drawbacks from our point of view. Not only had it some engineering difficulties, but it would require a good deal of excavation and blasting of rock and it would have involved higher gradients for traffic using it. The House knows that our intention with the motorways is to try to keep the gradients as flat as possible, particularly for the heavy vehicles. It would, incidentally, have been more costly than the rather longer route through the Soar Valley.

Accordingly, my right hon. Friend at that time instructed that a general review of the whole situation, a re-examination of all these lines, should take place and a last attempt be made to get agreement on one or other of them, if possible upon the Soar Valley line, which we still believed was the right one. It became apparent, however, that the county council's compromise line through the forest, despite all these engineering, traffic and, from our viewpoint, financial disadvantages, was, and is, the only line on which one can be reasonably certain that there will be the minimum of opposition.

Accordingly, my right hon. Friend, at the meeting to which my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley referred, informed a number of Yorkshire Members of Parliament last July that he would accept, at last, this county council compromise line, although, frankly, we did not like it. We would still prefer to have the Soar Valley line.

That, as shortly and as clearly as I can put it, is the story of what has been happening and why it has been so difficult to get agreement. The present position is that the consulting engineers are now going into the detailed preparation for the fixing of the provisional fine of the road between Crick and Doncaster, including the Leicestershire portion. We hope that by the end of this month, we shall have their detailed plans. Thereafter, we must proceed to the next stage in the process, the stage of publishing a scheme. When this scheme, with all its attached plans, defining the road in great detail, is published, there will be every opportunity for everyone who objects to those to bring forward his objections, to claim a public inquiry and to go through the whole machinery of objection, which could slow us up. I hope, therefore—and I address these remarks particularly to the hon. Member for Leicester, Northwest—that all those who can help to get this project through now will do their best.

I have tried honestly to outline what our troubles have been in trying to get a line provisionally drawn. Now that we have got fairly close to agreement, I hope that we can go on and proceed as quickly as possible. There have, of course, been criticisms in the House—my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley has mentioned them again tonight—of the delay and the muddles. In recounting to the House the story of this matter, I have tried to deal with those as I went along.

I ask the House, however, to accept this. As early as 1956, it was quite clear that our obligation to follow the statutory procedures, together with the volume of conflicting objections to the various proposed lines, would make it quite impossible for us to keep to our original plan of completing the whole London—Yorkshire motorway as the first major motorway project in the country. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley I and the present Minister deplore the fact that by circumstances we have been forced to ask the contractors who have done this great job on the London to Birmingham section to disperse their equipment and their team. I regret it.

Mr. Hirst

The responsibility for drawing this line is not the county council's. It is the Minister's. He cannot back out of it.

Mr. Hay

I have tried to explain this as clearly as I could. I would ask my hon. Friend to look at HANSARD tomorrow morning and at the explanation I have given.

Mr. Hirst

It is a fact.

Mr. Hay

I have tried to make it clear that what throughout we sought to do was to get agreement on a line. Frankly, what the present Minister of Defence did, and my predecessor did, was to try to bring these parties together on the ground in Leicestershire, and when eventually, we said to the county council, "You take over, you try to get agreement", it worked, and it worked in two or three months.

Mr. Hirst

And put the road back years.

Mr. Hay

Up to that time we had all been unable to agree. I think that Yorkshire Members and the people in Yorkshire generally have been very disappointed at the delay. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] I can understand.

Mr. Janner

And in Leicestershire, too.

Mr. Hay

I am glad to hear, in Leicestershire as well.

I hope that some additional action my right hon. Friend took will have been of some help. When it became clear we were to be delayed on the motorway he gave orders for the modernisation of the Great North Road, the A.1, to be proceeded with apace, and that involves dualling of the carriageway on the road between London and Newcastle, a total length of 168 miles. This is going very well. Sixty miles of new dual carriageway on the Great North Road have already been done and 60 more are under construction.

I think that the story shows that delay is inseparable from this process of consultation and reconciliation which is forced upon us by the Act of Parliament under which we have to work. It is not for me—as you, Mr. Speaker, would remind me if I tried to do so—to forecast any future legislation which my right hon. Friend may want to bring to the House on this matter. All I can say is that is the line of policy we have followed up to now, not to ride roughshod over many interests. I have not been involved in this before, I come to the matter with a fresh mind, but I cannot see how more could have been done or done more quickly. It is very easy for the critics to snipe and criticise, but very often it is the critics who are the very first to talk of land grabs and dictation if we proceed too quickly—

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at eighteen minutes past Eleven o'clock.