King’s Speech

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to take the debate back to transport: I suppose that is no great surprise. I certainly welcome the introductory speech from my noble friend the Minister, who listed all the different Bills that we are going to be discussing in this current Session. Northern Powerhouse Rail is a great idea; civil aviation, great. GB Railways: well, we started that. But, of course, the Minister did not mention HS2, because there is no legislation required at the moment. Yesterday, the Secretary of State announced that the costs would exceed £100 billion. That was the figure I gave to the Department for Transport for several years, along with Michael Byng. The department strongly denied it and stated that they did not recognise my figure. Well, now they do.

In his speech half an hour ago, the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, mentioned that this project was started by the Labour Party under my noble friend Lord Adonis. I remember having strong arguments with Andrew at the time. He said, “We’ve got to have the best in the world. We’ve got to go fastest, it’s got to be the most comfortable, all on a straight line linking Glasgow and Edinburgh and many cities in between with London. And by the way, we’re going to start in London”. I asked why, because the existing railways outside the London area were a hell of a lot worse than they were around London. He said, “Yeah, well, the business case is better if you start in London”—and of course that is probably true, but it was not the right reason.

Anyway, it trundled on through however many years of Tory Government, and the Secretary of State finally got angry in her press release yesterday: regretting that taxpayers, communities, contractors and workers have been swindled by the failure of government. She is right. The whistleblowers, other professionals and landowners have all been silenced by some pretty horrendous NDAs. One wonders what the Cabinet Office, the Department for Transport and the Treasury have been doing, because they are all implicated in what may turn out to be a massive cover-up on costs, or even fraud.

The one thing I find particularly surprising is that Ministers are normally required to give permission for projects to exceed budgets: I think it is called a “ministerial direction”. This project is costing roughly six times its original budget, but I can find no record of any ministerial direction—so somebody has been asleep at the wheel, I think, probably intentionally.

We must not blame only the civil servants, however, because Parliament has failed too. MPs and Peers love going to London faster, regardless of cost: we are all guilty of it sometimes. Local services are used by many more people to attend school, college, shopping, visiting friends or whatever—“Yeah, but it’s important to get to London”. You have only to look at the service provided by CrossCountry trains, which must be one of the worst, to see that it does not go to London, which is a big mistake. My noble friend Lady Dacres outlined the need for better local rail infrastructure, and she is absolutely right.

There are lessons here that must be learned. Yesterday, the Secretary of State said they were going on to Euston, but I have not seen any plans. The boring machines are going, but normally when you build a tunnel you know where it is going to end up, and it is a bit unclear here.

We have had a big debate about the type of trains to be used, and there is a fellow called Chris Gibb who is highly experienced in west coast main line traffic. He suggested a much better solution, for which he has been sacked: again, that is no great surprise.

So there are lessons to be learned and I hope the new Government, when they start building the northern powerhouse and everything else, will learn those lessons, keep it small and keep everything within budget.