HS2 Funding Referendum Bill

Debate between Christopher Chope and Jim Cunningham

Friday 23rd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

First, let me thank my right hon. Friends the Members for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) and for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall), and my hon. Friends the Members for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), for Welling- borough (Mr Bone) and for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) for their support for this Bill. I am pretty certain that, had he been free so to do at the time, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) would also have been sponsoring the Bill, and I am delighted to see him in his place today. I am also sure that if the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) had been on my radar when I was collecting the signatures, I would have been able to recruit him, too. Again, I am pleased to see him in the Chamber.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

What about me? The hon. Gentleman has mentioned my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), but I have consistently opposed this high-speed rail.

[Mr Chope]

I plead guilty to a serious omission, as I should indeed have mentioned the hon. Gentleman, as Coventry is one of the areas that is probably going to suffer as a result of HS2; not only is it not going to benefit from HS2, but there will be an adverse economic effect on Coventry. We may hear a little more about that later.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Chope]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to look at proposals on an integrated basis. That is one of the messages that comes out loud and clear from today’s report by the Transport Committee, “Investing in the railway”, which was published just after midnight. The Committee emphasises the importance of planned investment right across the railways to maximise the benefits of that investment. It is critical of the idea of just putting a certain amount of money into the HS2 project on its own.

When the Government realised that the project could not be justified on the basis that it would reduce demand at Heathrow airport, they started the line that it would reduce long-distance journey times. However, it was clear that the cost-benefit analysis that was carried out overvalued business time on the basis that business men did not spend any of their time on trains working. All the benefits were calculated on the basis of an improvement in speed that would mean that 15 minutes could be knocked off the time it took to get from London to Birmingham. My constituency is about 100 miles from London. This morning I got on the train at Hinton Admiral and arrived here two hours and 10 minutes later. Given the nature of a lot of our rail infrastructure, people expect to spend that sort of time travelling such distances.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

As a result of HS2, the existing frequency of services on the west coast main line could be curtailed, to say the least, while fares would rise. While we might now have three trains an hour, that could go down to one an hour or even fewer, and yet, as the hon. Gentleman knows, fares are far too high—beyond the public’s reach.

The first person I ever heard proposing HS2 was the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, when she was shadow Transport Secretary, although the hon. Gentleman is right that Labour picked up the idea. To return to the point made by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), a lot of the money for HS2 could be spent on increasing nurses’ pay and stopping cuts to local authority budgets, and therefore providing better public services.

[Mr Chope]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. He will be aware that the New Economics Foundation published a report in June 2013 entitled “High Speed 2: The best we can do? Creating more value from £33 billion”. The essence of this debate is that if we are to spend that amount of taxpayers’ money—assuming that that is affordable—are there better ways in which to do so?