High Speed 2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, this is 330 miles-worth of line. If it could all be put in place in one phase, that would be great. However, setting up a project of that size all in one phase would carry huge risks. Again, I hesitate to keep pointing this out to the House, but all of this has been considered: whether there should be one phase of HS2 with 330 miles of line or whether it should be divided.

I want to make a final point—

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Adonis]

My noble friend will be speaking in a few minutes, so he can make his point in his own speech.

The Mayor of the West Midlands is a Conservative, and a man who I hold in high regard as a former managing director of John Lewis. He has a very strong sense of the economic imperatives driving his great county. He has written to your Lordships, and these are the concluding words of his letter:

“So far the promise of the new high-speed rail link alone has had a transformational impact on the Midlands. Inward investment is increasing, evidenced by the 43% increase in the number of jobs created in 2017/18. On top of this, HS2 has the potential to add £14 billion to the West Midlands economy and support 100,000 jobs in the region. No other planned infrastructure project can come close to that, and if the government is serious about ‘levelling up’ the UK’s regions then HS2 is the place to start.”


I agree with him. HS2 is the place to start, so let us not pull the whole thing up by the roots again and end up doubling or trebling the cost.

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[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, for his excellent report, with most of which I agree, and for today’s debate. I was particularly interested in one of its recommendations about the north being a priority. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, has repeated that.

I recall having a discussion with my noble friend Lord Adonis when this was all starting. I said, “We should start this in the north.” He said, “Maybe, but we can’t because the cost-benefit analysis shows it should start in the south.” I still think we should have started in the north and that the CBA is a load of—well, not fit for purpose. Anyway, we are where we are.

I spoke about my dissenting report two weeks ago in the Queen’s Speech debate on 9 January—the reference is col. 178; I will not repeat what I said there.

I emphasise that I am neither for nor against HS2 but I am against the cost, which I think is unnecessarily high. I also do not believe that it delivers what it says on the tin. I do not think it helps people to commute to work in the centres of Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield any better from the towns and villages outside. Although it would get the managing directors and us politicians to London more quickly, which is more important for the economy? I suggest that it is the commuters. It is my recommendation that something like £25 billion needs to be spent on upgrading local commuter lines, including many lines that noble Lords have spoken about today, and then we can see whether or not we want HS2 as well.

One of my main concerns is the capital cost, which, as noble Lords have said, is over £100 billion. Add on inflation and the costs of trains, and we are getting near to £125 billion. My noble friend Lord Adonis said that Parliament approved this project, but it did so in the 2013-14 Session on the basis of an estimate of expense for phase 1 of £19,390,000,000. It is now £54 billion. I suggest that Parliament should have been given an opportunity to approve the figures or not before it was too late. It is not quite too late yet but it very nearly is.

My other big gripe is, as the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, mentioned, the number of trains that have been used to plan HS2, which is 18 trains an hour in each direction. I checked as part of the review where else in the world any high-speed line ran 18 trains an hour, and the answer was: nowhere. Thirteen or 14 was the absolute maximum. I will leave China aside because I think we could spend quite a lot of time talking about China.

Two issues flow from this. One is that the service has been sold to the destinations on the basis that they will get so many trains an hour, and if they cannot run 18 then they will not get so many trains. Who will lose out? We do not know. Of course, that dramatically helps the cost-benefit analysis. Assuming that all trains are running full—as other noble Lords have said, that seems to be part of the deal—improves the CBA no end. I wonder whether that has been done on purpose to help to get through the Treasury Green Book rules. I hope that I am not right on that, but there has been a lot of secrecy in this project. The noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, mentioned whistleblowers, and I have come across a few myself. All this secrecy is not a good way to run a project. On that issue, I end up wondering whether the company is a fit and proper one to take the project forward; even if it does go forward, it does not have to go with that company. That is something that we will probably need to look at.

As I said, the trouble with HS2 is that in addition it needs the connections, electrification, frequency and capacity of other lines in the northern powerhouse area and beyond and in the Midlands, east-west in particular. It needs four-tracking so that fast trains can overtake slow trains and so on. Obviously it needs electrification. I have a list of projects that we are checking with Network Rail, and which I hope we can make available quite soon, of what needs to be done to improve the commuter services into these major centres. The major centres are actually doing quite well economically; it is the towns outside that need help.

The other issue is that the work on some of these things could start quite soon if the Government authorised the money. This is nothing to do with HS2, which has to go through the hybrid Bill process and so on. I am talking about things like having two more platforms at Manchester Piccadilly for through trains so that there are not jams there. There are 400 electric coaches sitting in sidings at the moment because the Government cancelled the electrification projects. People might be able to get on the train, but they are not doing it because they do not work. There need to be longer platforms at Leeds. I give just a few examples. There are a lot more. There are some oven-ready projects which could really help people in the region get a better service.

In my report, I offered alternatives to bits of HS2. We certainly need the bits of HS2 in the north, but Network Rail has done some work to see whether upgrading the existing lines from London and many of the lines that go across in those areas could be achieved more quickly and more cheaply. What is interesting is that the number of passengers that it calculates could be added to the services to London are not that different from what HS2 plans to provide. With HS2, it is 170,000 passengers per working day and, with Network Rail, 144,000. I appreciate that there will be possessions and everything, but the costs are probably about half of HS2 .

Ministers will have to make a choice, as many other noble Lords have said. To me, the choice is about building HS2 at a cost of £106 billion, plus the other things, making £140 billion, plus the local improvements which have to be done whichever route you go down, making it, say, £160 billion. You could save money by not going to Euston, as other noble Lords have said. Alternatively, you could build the northern parts of HS2 around Manchester, Leeds, Preston and Sheffield, and integrate this with Network Rail’s improvement. That would probably cost about half of that. You might save somewhere between £50 billion and £80 billion by doing that. Is HS2 worth it to go that bit faster? That is the question we have to ask Ministers.

It is easy to have a high-speed line. You sign one bit of paper and it goes ahead. All these other things that need doing to improve the local commuter services will have to go through the Department for Transport’s grinding mill to get approval, which is a sort of four-stage process. You probably spend more on consultants than you do on building the thing. It takes years. We have to get a commitment from Ministers to do that, whether HS2 goes ahead in its entirety or not. That is something that we should reflect on very carefully, because that is where the need is greatest. I shall very much enjoy hearing other noble Lords speak and hearing what the Minister has to say at the end.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I am delighted to take part in this debate. I will be looking at this from a West Midlands perspective but I should perhaps declare myself as a friend of Euston station—not, I hasten to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that I think it is architecturally of any merit whatever; it is just that I have a flat very close to it. I confess that I thought that the WC1 postcode signified that I lived in central London, which I think is where Euston station is.

[Lord Berkeley]

Come on.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

It depends where you look at it from.

We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, who has certainly been consistent over the years. He talked about despair, but I want to reflect to him the despair that would be felt in the West Midlands if HS2 were cancelled. It would have an absolutely devastating impact on our economic well-being. We are very vulnerable. With Brexit, the motor car industry is hugely vulnerable. Cancelling HS2 at the same time as there is economic uncertainty would be devastating for a region that, over the last two years, has grown more than any other apart from London.

My noble friend and the noble Lord’s committee have produced some very salient points about the HS2 budget and the appraisal system. There is no getting away from that. The question is: is that enough to cancel HS2 as a whole? To be fair to both noble Lords, that is not what they are saying. They are raising issues that need to be answered, and that is fair.

The noble Lord’s committee also focused on the north. It focused on the railway connections and referred to the 90 minutes that it takes to travel the 75 miles between Liverpool and Leeds. I do not dissent at all from what the committee has said about issues in the north, but I am disappointed that so little attention was given to similar issues in the Midlands. For instance, it takes 57 minutes to travel to Leicester from Birmingham, which are 46 miles apart, while the 51-mile trip to Nottingham takes 76 minutes. There is a large flow of people and work but it could be much, much bigger. There is no question but that road congestion—journeys take ages by road—and the very poor railway connections are impeding the development of a Midlands-type economy.

[Lord Berkeley]

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. How does HS2 improve the railway journey time between Birmingham and Leicester? It does not go anywhere near Leicester.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I am not a railway expert but I do know a little about railway maps. The point I was going to make is that this is part of an appalling railway system in the West Midlands—something with which I know my noble friend agrees. We have a local service operator called West Midlands Trains. Its record of 44.8% of services arriving on time between October and November last year is a symptom of our hugely overcrowded and cancelled trains. That is a feature of commuting life in the West Midlands. Part of the reason why we need HS2 is that our line is absolutely chock-a-block. Creating extra capacity is essential. I know that my noble friend does not disagree with that because it is what he said in his minority report.

Let us turn to the comments made by a number of noble Lords, which are, essentially: “If you cancel HS2, don’t worry because the money will be available, we can sort out the capacity issues both in the north and in the Midlands, and all our troubles will go away.” My noble friend’s report is very interesting because he took the trouble to look at what the alternatives might be. For instance, I do not believe that we could deal with the capacity issue in the West Midlands without four-tracking the line from Rugby to Wolverhampton, but that would be hugely disruptive. I do not know how many bridges there are; I suspect my noble friend knows—

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[Lord Berkeley]

No.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

But there are quite a lot. There is a lot of housing, the NEC, the airport—a host of difficulties for four-tracking. But if you do not four-track, you will not solve our major congestion problem.

The other option pointed out by my noble friend is the Chiltern line, a good line which many of us use when going to a different part of London. As he says, it would have to be four-tracked in certain places and would need to be electrified. My noble friend is doubtful about my railway geography, but the one thing I do know is that a lot of the Chiltern line goes through Buckinghamshire. Can you imagine what would happen if the Government announced that the alternative to increase capacity is four-tracking and electrifying the Chiltern line? All noble Lords who come from Buckinghamshire would rise in protest. The Chiltern line is saturated—