King’s Speech
Earl of Glasgow Excerpts(5 months, 3 weeks ago)
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The Earl of Glasgow (LD)
My Lords, I was deeply depressed when the Government announced they were abandoning HS2—or at least, it seems the most important part of their purpose, anyway. It was always a bold and exciting enterprise, allowing increased capacity to the lines going north and bringing the major northern towns closer to London. It was a challenging and expensive project, but one that I thought totally worthwhile. I have long believed that half our transport problems would be solved by having a comprehensive and efficient railway network, and HS2 could have been seen as the flagship.
Now, for a number of complicated reasons, mainly rising costs and incompetent management, the Government have decided they can no longer afford the new route to the north and will keep only the least important of its features—the high-speed train between London and Birmingham. Apparently, in exchange for that, the money saved will be used for improvements to existing lines in the north, something we had already been promised anyway. Maybe I am forlornly hoping that this scrapping of HS2 is only a temporary postponement and not the final death knell of the whole project. Maybe it can be revived when the Government’s financial position improves, or when we have a better Government.
In the meantime, though, we must not sell back the land already bought from landowners to establish the proposed new railway line. All we have achieved, or will have achieved, so far from this whole fiasco is a slightly quicker trip from London to Birmingham and back. The northern towns are no closer to London than they were before. Maybe we could achieve something by building a railway that affords slightly less speed than originally intended.
I would like the Government’s assurance that they have not completely abandoned the original intention and plan of HS2, but if they have, it will rightly be seen as an embarrassing engineering failure and another example of the country’s further decline.