Contribution
My Lords, I have Amendment 106 in this group and apologise to noble Lords for not being able to be here at the last Committee session when a number of amendments to which I had put my name were debated. I am grateful to other noble Lords who spoke so well to those amendments—better than I could have done—which was particularly helpful.
This amendment and this group are about the specifics of the target in Clause 17. It tells us that the Secretary of State must set a target to increase rail freight but does not tell us by how much. We know that rail freight has increased in the recent past, but not by the required amount—I think that it is about 1% a year on average. As my noble friend quite rightly said in moving the initial amendment, we want to see rail freight grow. We have seen substantial investment and, for a range of purposes, both economic and environmental, we want to see an increase in rail freight activity. The parliamentary task is not only to say that the target must be for an increase, but to be quite clear that it should be consistent with targets set by the Government generally.
The numbers matter. My noble friend said that there was the inherited target of an increase by 2050 of 75%. The 2% per annum was not quite sufficient to do that—I think it would have had to be in excess of 2% and something like 2.1% every year cumulatively to arrive at the target for 2050. The Secretary of State’s target of achieving 40% by 2040 is consistent with a 2% per annum compound increase in freight, so by setting a 2% figure Parliament is effectively saying that it agrees. If the increase was set at less than 2%, that would be below the trajectory that the Secretary of State has given as the target. As it happens, 2% a year between now and 2040 might meet that target, but it does not do what we need for 2050, as we would have to increase the rate of growth to 2.25% in the subsequent decade. As we have heard, the Secretary of State, in addition to setting an intermediate target, referred to a number of expectations among which, I thought quite notably, was the 65% increase in high-value goods to be carried by freight over the period to 2040. I have not extended the amendment, but I think that it is worth just stopping and saying that this means some pretty substantial increases year on year.
I want to take this opportunity to raise with the Minister—I have discussed this with him and am grateful for those conversations—that if we are going to increase the high-value goods freight traffic, a number of significant projects need to be brought forward, not least in the long-term rail strategy and the financing that the Government are going to give to Great British Railways. Noble Lords will not be surprised that I draw particular attention, as a Suffolk resident and former Member of Parliament in Cambridgeshire, to the importance of the Ely junction and Haughley junction improvements. The Ely junction improvements have a benefit-to-cost ratio of five and, as noble Lords who have been in the department will know, it is quite a rare feat for a project to show a return on investment as good as that.
We know that the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Paul Bristow, is committed to trying to make this project come forward and is doing what he can, using his resources, to tackle some of the level crossing issues. The issue is whether Great British Railways, with the support of the Government, will bring this forward. My calculation, which is only my working of the numbers, is that, if Felixstowe has about a third of UK container traffic—by definition, these tend to be high-value goods such as manufactured goods, rather than construction materials—roughly half of that goes via Ely and would benefit from the Ely junction improvement. When we look at that, something approaching 5% of total UK container traffic goes through Ely, and the improvements could increase the capacity by 40%.
So it is not an answer in itself, and there are other projects, of which noble Lords might be aware, that will help enable the freight traffic to move. But what the industry cannot do for itself is put the capacity on the line through the improvements to the route. I ask the Minister to say, “We should accept that there ought to be not just an increase in this clause but an increase consistent with the trajectory that meets the stated targets of the Government, and, in order to make that happen, certainly by the mid-2030s, we will need some major projects to increase the available capacity”.
I hope that the amendment commends itself. I take heart and comfort from the fact that it seems to be consistent with Amendment 106A, which was tabled by my noble friend Lord Grayling, who is a former Secretary of State. So I think that noble Lords will find merit in setting the target in the way that is proposed.