Steff Aquarone

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship again, Sir Desmond. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) on securing such an important debate; she has made a number of salient points that I wholeheartedly agree with, in particular about the impact of losing local voices in the planning process. As Liberal Democrats, we believe the Government should be doing things with people, not to them. Their planning reforms are another example of where we could gain the confidence of far more people in planning decisions if they were properly involved and consulted. I was pleased to hear the excellent speeches of my hon. Friends: my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello) talked about housing growth pressure; my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) reminded us of the importance of doing the right things in the right order; my hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) spoke about the importance of money; and my hon. Friend the Member for Henley and Thame (Freddie van Mierlo) spoke about getting the balance right between different types of transport. Most reasonable people would think that decisions about transport and planning should go hand in hand. Planning decisions lead to transport requirements and transport provision will inform planning decisions. However, like so much of the creaking and archaic machinery of the state, the predetermined silos for those two areas sit separately and often work in conflict rather than in harmony. What people want is for decisions to be made with a focus on them. How do we best plan infrastructure and transport to support people? Even within transport, there are silos within silos. The different modes of transport and transport integration are not considered together, despite how interconnected they are. Those levels of bureaucracy and failure to deliver a working transport system are not what people want. They just want decisions to be made that help to get them where they want to go, when they want to go. If that is really beyond the ability of the state, we should all despair. Talking about alterations to the machinery of government might sound like wonkery, but in cases such as these it is clear to see where making the state work better would make our constituents’ lives better, too. Rarely am I desperate to give credit to the planning system, but it does succeed in taking a more holistic view of transport into consideration when making decisions. It can assess the needs and uses of a wide range of transport modes. It understands the interplay between housing, employment and transport, and it thinks about where people are going and when, and what steps might need to be necessary to improve their experiences. However, the planning system has little real power to actually make changes. The closest it can get is by creating a sizeable enough housing demand and hoping that the transport decision makers notice and deliver the necessary improvements. That means that many people end up in disconnected new estates or working in employment areas without any real accessibility other than by private car. There is a fundamental lack of an overarching strategy for too many of these decisions— and that could make the experience of people living in newly built areas and those seeing change in the ones they already live in immensely better. For Norfolk, I believe a key way for us to secure that strategy was through devolution, which I have been trying to deliver since my first county council campaign kicked off nearly a decade ago. Devolving transport powers to local areas means that decisions on wide-ranging strategy and aims can be made closer to the people they impact, with real local buy-in. The promise of seeing those powers in Norfolk made me feel that we might finally crack the rural transport problems that have held our area back for too long. Instead, we have seen a double whammy of let-downs on that front in recent months. First, the Labour Government pushed our mayoral election down the line to 2028, meaning more years without the power to deliver the change that my residents need now. Secondly, in the past week we have seen the Conservative leader of Norfolk county council launch a titanic tantrum over local elections and refuse to work with the Government on any further devolution discussions. Because she felt jilted by the Government, she has abandoned the opportunity for progress and money to pursue a personal vendetta against the Secretary of State, calling him things that I frankly cannot repeat in this Chamber. I have strong disagreements with the devolution process, but I want to put Norfolk first, not the ego of someone who is supposed to be a local leader. She tried to throw Norfolk under the bus—although, without any transport powers, it is unlikely that one would show up. To go back to the matter in hand, there are improvements that we Liberal Democrats want to deliver and could deliver at local and national levels. We want to see more buses with more people on them, and these need to work out alongside the planning of new developments. For young students and workers, we have proposed a bus fare discount, enabling easier access to work and education or just getting to socialise with friends. We want to expand walking and cycling access with a boost to budgets and a drive to create more active travel routes that get people out of cars and on to paths where possible. On our railways, we want to make the commuter experience better, back passengers with a new passenger’s charter and give people the confidence to move their journeys on to public transport. Now that the local elections are back on in Norfolk, I am sure many of my Liberal Democrat colleagues will find themselves at some point over the next few weeks lost inside a rabbit-warren estate with a dodgy phone signal and a bunch of undelivered leaflets, asking themselves the key question: was this place designed for people to live or for cars to drive? We have to make transport and planning work more cohesively, because they deliver tangible benefits to our constituents’ lives and could do so quickly. The Government can and must do more to restore faith in the planning and transport systems so that all our residents reap the benefits.