High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Young of Norwood Green

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, it is nice to be thanked for one’s work. I see several Lords from the eclectic group who served on that committee, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe, whom I must congratulate on the way he handled both the hearings and the committee.

I have recently been reading a book—I hope this slight digression will be acceptable, as it relates to this amendment—called Mr Barry’s War, by Caroline Shenton, one of the archivists. The bit that I like is when she talks about an attempt by Barry and a group of architects—someone called William “Strata” Smith, a great geologist, was also involved—to find stone to build this place. They travelled all over the UK. They get to Lincoln, with its magnificent gothic minster, the Ancaster stone quarries—said to be Roman—then Grantham, Stamford and nearby Burghley House. Once they get through Kettering and Northampton by coach, they,

“made their way back to London by the novel means of Robert Stephenson’s thrilling new London and Birmingham Railway, which had opened along its whole length just five days previously on 17 September. This was the first London intercity rail line, and Euston station the first mainline terminus in a capital city anywhere in the world. Its magnificent Doric Propylaeum”—

I do not know if I pronounced that correctly—

“or entrance archway, made of millstone grit, stood for 125 years until pulled down by modernist planners in 1962”.

I could not help feeling that that was rather a propitious bit of reading prior to this debate.

We did not debate the overall cost—that was not in the committee’s remit—but we certainly debated some costings by my noble friend Lord Berkeley and his expert witnesses. I regret to say, however, that they did not stack up. Neither did Old Oak Common. I had to smile when someone said, “It’s just an interim stop”. We all know that if it finishes at Old Oak Common it will be a real stretch of the imagination to believe that that will be interim.

The noble Earl, Lord Glasgow, said that the route had not been decided. It has been decided, and we had a debate, I assure noble Lords, on whether it would be more desirable to terminate at Old Oak Common. That was not the view of the committee after listening to a range of expert witnesses and for some of the reasons cited by my noble friend Lord Faulkner.

We can all have a view, if you like, about people’s motives and intentions—I will assume that they are motivated by the best of all reasons—but one thing you cannot assume is that the process would be speedy, for either the first or the sixth amendment. This will be a lengthy process, and, as has been said, we are now seven years—I was going to say “down the track” but that is an unfortunate pun; if only we were. We have some way to go. As someone who, like the noble Lord, served on Crossrail, I remember just as many criticisms of that. Now it is all enthusiasm, but it was not at the time, I assure noble Lords; there were just as many doubters and naysayers.

My view—and you have heard from other colleagues on the committee—is that we gave this a thorough examination, and I am certain that we also debated it in Committee. I cannot remember how many times I have heard this debate. As a former Attorney-General once said, repetition does not necessarily enhance the value of your contribution. I am beginning to feel that way in this case. I hope noble Lords will not support these amendments; I do not believe they add anything to the existing analysis. As I recall, in the recent Grand Committee debate the Minister reported to us that the National Audit Office has run its calculators over this. Every time there has been a challenge on the costings done by HS2—the classic one was on the tunnel costings in Wendover, which we may unfortunately return to again—they were independently checked. The proposed tunnelling at Colne Valley was independently validated and HS2 was found to be correct in those circumstances. I listened carefully to the argument but I incline to the views expressed by so many of my fellow committee members, and by my noble friend Lord Faulkner.

[Lord Adonis (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I echo my noble friend Lord Faulkner’s thanks to the Select Committee. There are no greater tasks which Members of your Lordships’ House take on than being members of these hybrid Bill Committees, which are like the Committee of Public Safety. I think they were sitting for four days a week over many months. Those noble Lords made a huge commitment to the work of the committee and at this very late stage—this last stage of the Bill’s passage through the House—we should certainly not seek to substitute our judgment, on the basis of a short debate, for the exhaustive examination which your Lordships’ Select Committee gave to this issue, among many others which are on the Marshalled List for later in our debates.

I hesitate to arbitrate between my noble friends Lord Faulkner and Lord Snape on the beauty of Old Oak Common, which depends very much on whether you have a great admiration for railway architecture of the Victorian age. It will become a thing of great beauty when the High Speed 2 station and all the wider development is completed there, but that will take some time. I do not think anybody could pretend now, when passing through it at not particularly high speeds on trains coming out of Paddington, that it is a great beauty spot—it is next to Wormwood Scrubs. However, a critical issue for us to consider this afternoon is its utility as a transport interchange. That was the issue considered by the Select Committee.

It is important for the House to understand that once HS2 is completed, we would be talking about all the traffic from Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and the East Midlands coming in to one terminus if you allow only for Old Oak Common to be built. That is the equivalent of the entirety of the intercity traffic which currently goes into Euston and a good part of the intercity traffic which goes into King’s Cross. All of that would be going into one terminus station and all served by one line, Crossrail. As my noble friend Lord Faulkner emphasised, the resilience of that arrangement could not remotely be regarded as adequate for all the traffic going from the Midlands and the north into one station.

The estimate has been made that a third of passengers will transfer to Crossrail. I think some will get off at Old Oak Common and transfer on to Heathrow, which will be 10 minutes away in the other direction, but most of them will transfer on to Crossrail going east. That proportion may be higher. It is hard to know what transport patterns will emerge but when that interchange is available, it will be an extremely rapid and efficient connection not just to the City but to the West End as well. The next stops up from Paddington will be Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon and then Bank. It then goes on to Canary Wharf, so it will offer a range of fast and high-quality connections.

However, even if you stretch that third to a half—since no one can be sure what patterns will develop—still a very substantial proportion of the passengers would, on the projections made, wish either to regard Euston as their destination or to interchange there. By having the interchange at Euston we would then serve another large swathe of London directly, including that huge and important centre which Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras will form themselves. Massive development work will be taking place there, which will be attracted there in no small part because of the development of the HS2 station. We also have there the Victoria and Northern lines, and in due course Crossrail 2, which will serve the new Euston terminus as well. When one considers that these termini will have to deal with all the traffic coming not just from Birmingham but from Sheffield, Crewe, Manchester and Leeds, as well as services going further north up to Scotland, it looks as though there will be a requirement for more than one dispersal point.

All these issues were gone into at great length by committees of both Houses. Their conclusion was that the Government’s proposals were correct in requiring an extension from Old Oak Common through to Euston. At this very late stage in the passage of the Bill, to pass an amendment calling for a further review—the only impact of which could be substantial delay and uncertainty—would not be wise.

High Speed Rail (London–West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Young of Norwood Green

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 12th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Adonis (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley are well taken, particularly in respect of facilities for the disabled, flexible space for carrying light freight and proper facilities for families and those looking after young children. There has been a tendency on the part of the railways to move in the Japanese direction of regarding freight and luggage as a bad thing and making it almost impossible for passengers to carry such items in comfort. I do not think that that is a direction in which we want to go.

However, the area where I am more doubtful is about facilities on high-speed trains or the next generation of trains in general for the carrying of bicycles. It is not that there should not perhaps be some facility at the margin for doing so—though I am not sure, even with the great wisdom and expertise of your Lordships’ House, that trying to design a train by committee is a good idea, so the figure of 10% that my noble friend Lord Berkeley has specified might be a bit too precise. If there is spare luggage space on a train that is suitable for carrying bikes, then that is fine. But the real issue in terms of encouraging much more bicycle use in relation to trains—which is out of all proportion more important than the capacity to carry bikes on trains themselves, which will only ever be marginal, particularly with very busy trains loading and unloading hundreds of people at a time—is decent cycle storage and rental facilities at stations, so that passengers do not need to convey bikes on the train in the first place. With the best will in the world, you are only ever going to be able to carry a handful of bikes on trains, but you can have thousands of bicycles, either privately owned or for rental, provided for at stations. By and large, our mainline stations, which were not designed for bicycles or indeed anything else modern, including in most cases decent retail facilities, have lamentable facilities for storing bikes. It is a telling indication of the big problems that we have in managing bicycles, even with all the improvements in London, that the cycle rental scheme does not embrace most London termini, because how to deal with the big issues of location and of shipping bikes backwards and forwards has not yet been worked out.

The contrast with best European practice in this area could not be more stark. I shall never forget visiting Amsterdam station and other major stations in Holland. Where you come out of the station, you have huge areas reserved for bikes, including rental schemes, along with bike workshops, so that you can get repairs done, and proper supervised bike facilities. It is a completely different situation from the one we have here. We are not yet at the stage of detailed station design plans for HS2 but I hope that, when it comes to the design of these hugely forward-looking stations that we want to see at Euston, Old Oak Common, Birmingham Curzon Street and other locations going north, there will be exemplary facilities for cyclists with significant space made available for cycle storage, repairs and rental schemes. In terms of a path-breaking approach to integrating cycling with railway use, seeing that there are state-of-the-art and capacious cycle facilities at stations is far more important than any provision that it might be possible to make in respect of the trains.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, as somebody who puts his Brompton bike on a train every day when I come here, I partly disagree with my noble friend, not on the substance of the point that he makes—that we cannot accommodate hundreds of bicycles on the train; there is a balance to be struck—but in that there are a significant number of people like myself who ride to the station and put their folding bike on the train and then get off at the other end and cycle a bit further. The other usage that I have is on my annual cycle tour, when I do want to take a bike on a long-distance journey on a train. At the moment, the facilities are very limited; you have to reserve in advance, which is probably what will obtain. While I agree with my noble friend that trying to design a train by committee is not a wise thing to do, it is wise to have this debate and raise these issues, which are important.

I certainly concur with the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, on disability. It is not just about the number of wheelchairs—it is about ensuring that you have level surfaces so that you can go from platform to train in an easy and effective manner, rather than what you see at the moment. I think that we briefly raised that in one of the Select Committee sittings, but I am not absolutely sure about that. I look forward to the Minister’s response.