HC Deb 27 March 1963 vol 674 cc1497-506

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

10.51 p.m.

Mr. Harold Davies (Leek)

After the interesting and valuable discussion we have just bad on the British Museum I must take the House to a matter of local importance, although it is linked in a way with the general problem of transport.

In many ways as well as being a historic day for the British Museum today will be a historic day for British transport. Apparently the British Museum is short of space. If it wants some repositories in which to place its priceless possessions I suggest that it might be able to make use of some of the 2,000 railway stations which will not be used any more if Government policy goes through.

I am grateful to the Parliamentary Secretary for waiting so long for this Adjournment debate. At least, he has been able to hear a very interesting debate on the British Museum. I wish to raise with him a matter of vital local importance, concerning the closure of our canals.

Our canal and railway systems are in danger. Their accumulated value today—they having been built in the old days, when only pick, shovel and muscle power were available—must be thousands of millions of pounds. Not long ago we introduced a Bill which brought the control of the canals under the British Waterways Board, and we are still waiting to know what the exact policy will be.

Before considering the case of the Caldon Canal, in North Staffordshire—and especially the most beautiful part of it, which is in my constituency—I want to consider the general position. We have about 1,600 miles of canals, about 1,100 miles of which are narrow gauge. This means that the locks through which the barges have to pass can take only narrow-gauge boats—perhaps 70 ft. long, and only about 7 ft. wide, carrying a load of about 30 tons.

Every mile of canal that is closed will cost the Government £10,000.

The canal in which I want to interest the House this evening is about 17½ miles long, and it links up with the Trent and Mersey systems. The nation must not sacrifice everything to the god of Mammon. I hope that I shall not be departing from Parliamentary language when I say that it is no good bitching about Beeching if we expect a system to work merely on a profit margin.

Although I do not agree with what is being done about the railways, whatever Government are in power must have the courage to co-ordinate railways, canals, roads, shipping, all kinds of transport. We must realise that these canals are not only of material value. There are 400 or 500 miles of canals which are earning money and of material value, but there are 1,000 or 1,100 miles of canal which are of immeasurable aesthetic value because of their peace and quiet They make long ribbons of green park which are natural reserves for fauna and flora. In some parts of Britain the only bit of greenery is along the towpath of the canal.

About 3 million fishermen fish from the banks of inland waterways. This is of immeasurable value to people who can rest at week-ends after working arduously on tasks demanding speed and amid a cacophony of noise. Are we to sacrifice all this in the name of profit? A famous and beautiful canal at Llangollen has been closed to cargo, but now it is a marvellous stretch of water used by pleasure craft for the enjoyment of large numbers of people. The canal I am speaking about tonight is a stretch which is as beautiful. I know Europe and many other parts of the world. I believe this is one of the most beautiful stretches of canal in Britain and, may be, in Europe. If it is to be closed, is it to be made a great ribbon of concrete? If we want only efficiency, why not run all transport on broad stretches of black asphalt?

In the general principle of the closing of the Caldon Canal and of the canals throughout the Trent and Mersey system, compensation is a vital issue. There are three categories of compensation which the Waterways Board will have to consider. The first is the compensation of common law. The next is the interests protected under the original canal Acts. I have spent some time in research in the Library going through many of those Acts, but in this short debate I cannot go into that in detail. There are also the rights of people using land on the banks, farmers and others, and their interest in maintenance of culverts, bridges and drainage systems. All this has to be taken into consideration and it makes up the cost of £10,000 a mile in the closing of a canal.

As the Parliamentary Secretary will know, there is a new tendency in agriculture, strange as it may seem considering the rainfall, to have a system of irrigation. Irrigation for agriculture is growing and canals are of great value for this purpose. We beg the Minister to make sure before these canals are closed that he is not acting illegally. At present, the Caldon Canal is not closed to navigation. The Leek section was closed by legislation which was pushed through this House in 1944, in the midst of war. At present, there is not commercial transport on the canal, but not long ago five commercial boats were using it. They had to stop, because nobody now accepts the responsibility, despite the Act under which they are liable, to maintain the canal in a navigable state. In law the Caldon Canal is not closed to navigation. It cannot be closed, unless an Act of Parliament is passed.

I feel sure that the Parliamentary Secretary will agree that it would be a tragedy to close all these beautiful stretches of canal, despite the fact that they may not have commercial cargo. Will he explore the possibility, together with other bodies, one of whom I will mention later, of keeping canals open in some areas, especially canals near great industrial areas, for fishermen, pleasure craft, farmers, for drainage purposes, and for others?

There is, first, the original purpose of the canals—to carry commercial transport. There is, secondly, the supply of millions of gallons of water daily to industry, some of which, as I shall show later, could be of vital consequence to local employment. There is, thirdly, the fact that canals are needed to dispose of effluent from some factories. Canals are of great value for fire-fighting services. There is also the possibility in the future of canal towpaths being used for pipeline development.

The aesthetic use—namely, use by anglers—is well known. Anybody going to the Midlands and other parts of Britain at certain times of the year can see in progress the great angling competitions which are carried on on the canal banks. There is also the use to which canals are put by pleasure craft. Today, 30 firms deal in the hiring of cruisers and pleasure craft.

This week I have looked at the programme of the Stoke-on-Trent Boat Club. I have had no time to study it properly. It is a magnificent and expansive programme, offering to such an industrial area pleasurable activities in the fresh air and in some of the most peaceful areas which can be found in that country.

Close these canals, and for the young and the old this wonderful amenity will disappear. We must not measure these matters all the time in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. Sometimes—as in my area when we had a drought—the canal is an excellent emergency supply of water for farmers. It is a magnificent means of land drainage, which in this valley is essential. If this canal is blocked or ribboned with concrete, the entire drainage system of the valley will create a problem for engineers and local authorities, and there will be danger of flooding.

I have been talking of historic monuments. This canal was the last job of James Brindley. If the House wishes to preserve a historic monument to Brindley, let it preserve this one. This was the area in which he worked. He lived in the main town of Leek, in my constituency. He worked on this canal and died whilst building this famous section of it. It was built originally for the limestone from the Caldon quarries and to connect with the Trent and Mersey Canals. It went up to the mills at Froghall.

I wanted to make sure that I knew my facts. I wrote to the famous copper firm of Thomas Bolton and Sons Ltd. They replied, saying: The River Churnet feeds the Caulden Canal at Consall, some two miles above our Froghall Works. The water we use therefore emanates from the river and, of course, from any seepage from the hills direct into the Canal. We take water from four points on the Canal for steam raising to heat our factory and for process work, including water for cooling purposes on plant. Recently a landslide has necessitated the British Waterways to dam off a 100-yard section of the Canal some 400 yards from our Works, but in order to keep us supplied with water they inserted a length of 18"dia, pipe. If the Canal is closed and emptied, then no water would feed through the above pipe and this would close down the Boiler House, and the closure of the factory would result in unemployment for 1,600 people. This proves that there is a vital economic reason for keeping this canal in this glorious valley. This famous copper works, developed in the last century, needs the canal to maintain the output of its products and to keep its staff in employment. The Minister may be interested to know that this firm deals with English Electric Ltd. and the Standard Telephone Company.

Unfortunately, time does not allow me to develop this part of my argument at length. I hope that the Ministry will seriously consider this matter and that the Parliamentary Secretary will tonight be able to assure the House and the people in this area—and he has received a petition from 12,000 of them—that no action will be taken without discussions having been held, particularly with bodies such as the National Trust and others, which realise that while this canal cannot be kept open in isolation, it should be included in the list of British waterways which need not be abandoned.

If a loan—of £10 million or even less—were made to the National Trust the canal could be kept open and that money could be returned at the rate of about £2½ million, perhaps, for sixty years. I hope that the House and the people of North Staffordshire will receive an answer tonight which will give them hope that this lovely stretch of inland waterway will be kept open for the use of our people.

12.8 a.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (Vice-Admiral John Hughes Hallett)

The hon. Member for Leek (Mr. Harold Davies) pointed out that he has had to wait for some time for this Adjournment debate. I was comforted by the thought while he was speaking that, wherever the Library of the British Museum may be, his words in introducing the subject, and mine in reply, will be recorded there for ever.

I would like to begin by assuring the House that we recognise that transport is by no means the only purpose for which canals can be used. We agree that they are of value for many other purposes, such as for water supply, drainage, recreation and fishing. But they do not necessarily have to be kept open for commercial navigation to enable those uses to continue. The hon. Member for Leek will recall that in the 1959 White Paper on Inland Waterways the Government endorsed the views of the Bowes Committee on the need for a positive approach towards the redevelopment of canals. This lay behind the setting up of the Inland Waterways Redevelopment Committee, which did much useful work from 1959 until last year, and it is now the statutory duty of the new British Waterways Board to review canals and prepare proposals for putting them to the best use.

As the 1959 White Paper indicated, the Government consider that those who benefit from such use of canals should pay a fair price for what they receive. The hon. Member said that it would be retrograde to dismiss the Caldon Canal as "uneconomic" and I would agree that it could be said to be a thing of beauty and a historic monument. But so are many other parts of our canal system. It is the maintenance of hundreds of miles of derelict canals that have carried no traffic for years that largely accounts for the present operating deficits on the nationalised inland waterways.

It is quite true that statutory obligations to maintain canals and statutory rights of navigation can be extinguished only by a further Act of Parliament or by a Warrant and Order of Abandonment from my right hon. Friend the Minister. However, the Transport Act, 1962, has suspended for five years the liability of the British Waterways Board to maintain any of its inland waterways in a better condition as regards navigation than it was in the six months ended 2nd November, 1961. This was done to give the Board time to formulate and carry out its policies.

I am not quite sure whether the hon. Member has raised this matter on the assumption that the Caldon Canal was threatened with immediate closure to navigation, but I can assure him that that is not the case. I am aware that various local bodies interested in canal preservation have organised a campaign to save the canal from closure. This campaign is, I believe, based on an alleged public announcement that the Waterways Board intended to restrict the use of part of the canal and to close the remainder. No such announcement has been made, and there is no foundation for any belief that the canal is under immediate threat of closure to navigation. As I have said, the statutory rights can be extinguished only by Act of Parliament or by an application to my right hon. Friend. No application for closure has been made either by the British Transport Commission or, subsequently, by the Waterways Board.

On the legal issue, the hon. Member may have felt that the exclusion of this canal from the scope of pleasure-boating licences is an attempt to deny the existence of statutory rights of navigation. It is not for me to interpret the law, but the view of the Board is that there is no public right of pleasure boating on most of its artificial canals, including this one. The Board considers itself entitled to say that certain canals, which it does not regard as suitable for pleasure craft, are excluded from the terms of its pleasure-boat licences, and that this is quite a different thing from closing a canal to navigation. It considers that, apart from special rights of riparian owners, it is only commercial traffic which, generally speaking, enjoys statutory rights of navigation—and then only subject to the five-year moratorium to which I have referred.

The hon. Member has mentioned the importance of the water supplies from the canal to agriculture and industry, particularly the supply to Bolton's copper works. The importance of water supplies to all the consumers involved is fully recognised and, indeed, the water supplies to consumers in the Milton area provide by far the greater part of the remaining income on this canal. The supply to Bolton's works is not particularly remunerative to British Waterways, but its usefulness to the firm is well known to the Board, and it has recently discussed with the company how to ensure the continued availability of the supply. I do not therefore think that the hon. Member has much to worry about on this score.

The hon. Member suggested that there was a firm in the Consall area that tried to continue use of five boats from Etruria, but was unsuccessful because the canal was not maintained to statutory obligations. I think that he has been misled about the facts in this case. Since 1953, there has been no commercial traffic beyond the first half-mile. Such traffic as there was, left the canal for the roads. In 1955, however, on the assurance that an independent carrier would convey 100 tons of pottery material a week from Runcorn, via Etruria, to Consall, British Waterways carried out improvements at a cost of £5,000, so that barges drawing 3 feet of water and carrying 18 tons could navigate to Consall. After this had been done, the traffic never materialised.

There also seems to be same misconception about the value of the assets in the canal. The hon. Gentleman did not himself refer to this, but it was mentioned in a letter circulated by the Caldon Canal Committee on 6th March, a copy of which was kindly sent to the Minister, and which said that the Committee had been … given to understand that the canal has been valued at £20,000,000 in the national assets … The Committee went on to argue that it was foolish to let this go if the waterway can be restored for a figure between £10,000 and £20,000. So it would be. Those figures, however, are not correct. We have no knowledge of the original construction cost of the canal, but I can say that the present book value of the whole 1,800 miles of the nationalised inland waterways system is only about £20 million.

If restoration were to be carried out to full commercial standards it would cost about £160,000. Restoration to slightly lower standards for pleasure traffic would cost about £140,000. Either course would involve an increase of several thousand pounds a year in the maintenance bill, without taking into account the interest charges.

Mr. Harold Davies

I should like to know whether the Ministry is negotiating with the National Trust.

Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett

I was giving the cost of restoring the canal as a navigable waterway. I will come to the hon. Gentleman's point in a moment.

Those estimates of the cost of restoration are much greater than the estimated cost of possible alternative methods of redevelopment. To give one example, it is estimated that by spending £78,000 the canal could be partly restored as a water channel and partly eliminated and that a modest working surplus could probably be maintained from the sale of water. I mention these figures only so that the House will be under no illusion that it would be cheaper to restore the canal for navigation than to redevelop in some other way.

The hon. Member has referred to the information about the canal which the Waterways Division submitted to the former Inland Waterways Redevelopment Committee. It is true that this dealt with a number of possibilities for redevelopment. It referred to closure to navigation, the retention of part of the canal as a water channel and the disposal of the remainder. This was mentioned as a possibility. The Committee ended its existence, however, on 31st July last year, before reaching the stage of making any formal report.

Moreover, one of the prospects which the Committee tentatively considered was the possibility of transfer to the National Trust. Preliminary discussions had already taken place between the Trust and the Committee, but they had not been pursued because the Trust understood that there was no immediate prospect of closure.

The new Board will certainly have to consider the future of the Caldon Canal and will, no doubt, produce its proposals. What these proposals will be can at present only be a matter for speculation. The hon. Member may be sure, however, that the Board will bear very much in mind the points which he has raised tonight and the views which the local bodies have expressed to my right hon. Friend.

Mr. Harold Davies

And the National Trust?

Vice-Admiral Hughes Hallett

The Board is also willing to consider any proposals that the National Trust may wish to make for the leasing or purchasing of the canal. I hope that in what I have said, I may have gone some way to allaying the hon. Gentleman's misgivings.

Mr. Davies

Yes, certainly. I am obliged.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at nineteen minutes past Twelve o'clock.