Transport: HS2

Baroness Wilkins Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, I declare an interest as I was brought up in Amersham and have family and friends living there and in other areas being blighted by this scheme. They are not nimbys but are among the thousands of people throughout the country who have examined the arguments for HS2 and find them utterly unconvincing.

The Government claim that HS2 is in the national interest and that it will serve to bridge the north-south divide. Yet, according to public policy expert, Professor Mike Geddes, that claim has no factual basis, with the likely movement of money and people being towards London rather than back to the north. International studies show that it will just strengthen London’s dominance. HS2 Ltd itself admits that seven out of 10 of the jobs created for phase 1 will be in London. Far from increasing connectivity between our cities, as the Government claim, some UK cities will have a worse service than at present. The Government are pressing ahead with this project despite the fact that it is based on flawed assumptions and calculations about its costs and benefits. The Public Accounts Committee in the other place has today pointed to the basic errors made by the DfT on the west coast franchising fiasco, which wasted at least £50 million of taxpayers’ money.

One of the most glaring flaws is that more than half the benefit claimed to derive from the shorter journey time—55%—is based on the fallacy that time spent on the train is all wasted. We are in the 21st century, with iPads, mobile phones and the internet. Will the Minister explain why his department ignores the extensive research, let alone the evidence of its own eyes, which shows that business travellers work on the train? Why is his department using out-of-date, 11 year-old data and incorrect assumptions on the value of time? Will he also explain why an outdated forecasting model is being used to project demand? I understand that the old model significantly overstated the growth forecast of long-distance trips, and so inflated the growth in demand for HS2.

I am nearly out of time, but any fair cost-benefit analysis would factor in the cost to the thousands of people whose homes have been blighted by this route, the farms that have been cut in two and the businesses ruined, yet the proposed compensation arrangements are derisory. Overall, less than 2% of blighted homes can hope for compensation. Thousands are trapped, unable to move, or can do so only by accepting large losses. As we have heard, one mortgage provider has valued a property 500 metres from HS2 at nil. I do not deny that the country needs infrastructure building, but it needs to spend £33 billion on houses—and on houses built now to draw a halt to the misery being caused by inflated rents, rocketing house prices and the iniquitous cuts to the housing benefit system. It does not need to blight existing houses, and it does not need HS2.