High Speed Rail (West Midlands-Crewe) Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Baroness Barker

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th November 2020 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Barker) (LD)]

I have received no requests to speak after the Minister so I call the noble Earl, Lord Lytton.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and all noble Lords who spoke on these amendments. I am particularly grateful to those who expressed some support for the principles behind them.

I will deal with some of the points in the Minister’s response. One of her first points was that she did not recognise coercion in this. I hope I did not accuse HS2 of that in precisely those terms, because clearly these are matters that have been presented to me by others; I do not have direct experience of dealing with compulsory purchase cases with HS2. However, my later Amendment 12 revolves around a copy of a letter I have received. I do not know whether we will get to that amendment this evening or whether time will be curtailed, but in so far as the Minister has not seen the letter—although it was sent to the Department for Transport back in June—I will make sure she gets a copy of it.

The Minister went on to say that tenants’ rights are complex and ones of balance. I absolutely agree. I assure her that I do not believe there is anything fundamentally wrong with the compensation code as such, it is just that certain things can slip through at the edges. I am concerned that the way this is being approached is being driven by other considerations. It is not about the compensation code as such but may be about the way it is administered. The Minister is therefore right about the legal position and the way this is set by the MHCLG in the compensation code.

The Minister touched on this question of losses. The difficulty one has when dealing with laypeople is that it is not always easy to demonstrate the losses that you have suffered; the burden of proof is on the claimant to make and substantiate a claim. The risk is that, however genuine one might feel the claim is, the view tends to run from Treasury circles and through all those which it funds that if you cannot prove the loss, you do not get compensation for it. There are potential issues there, because this is not about putting an extra burden on the public purse but, to a degree, about fairness and compassion in dealing with these things. The Minister touched on temporary possession; I will say only that it starts as temporary but in some cases it seems to have ended up being rather less than temporary. Perhaps that ought to be more straightforward.

Turning to what other noble Lords have said, I will try to be as brief as I can. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, referred to the question of adequacy of Treasury funding; that may be a driver behind this. He also referred to the fact that people get the impression that they are not being treated fairly. That is grit in the system—it causes friction and resistance for future schemes or indeed later stages of the HS2 project perhaps.

The noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, has of course the great advantage of his involvement with the Select Committee. To pick up on his point about the amendment possibly being a big hammer to crack a nut, yes, it is, but it has done what I set out to do, which was to raise the issue and give it an airing. This is a probing amendment after all, so it is not in the form in which I would think of doing it. The Minister is quite right that, taken to its logical conclusion, this could be financially destabilising. That is not my intention; my intention is to get a discussion about it.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, said that HS2 might not have had as good a business case and that there might be financial constraints. Yes—possibly. I was pleased to have at least the tacit support of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, because he is a passionate supporter of HS2. I am not passionate one way or the other; I see this as a technical matter where we need to get processes that are streamlined and which do not cause friction, and we need fairness. I also noted the points made by the noble Lords, Lord Framlingham and Lord Tunnicliffe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, made the point that a tenant’s tenure is not necessarily a guide to the compensation that might properly and objectively be due to somebody who had made a commitment with the prospect—perhaps not reflected in the length of the tenure they have—that they might be able to build a business and continue. That is something where the code possibly does not fully recognise what is going on.

I hope I have covered all the points raised by noble Lords. However, as I say, this was a series of probing amendments, therefore I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.