High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Lord Brabazon of Tara Excerpts

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

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendments 1 and 6 are also in my name. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has set out the reasons behind them very clearly, but there is a continuing worry about what is proposed at Euston. I think this is the eighth attempt by HS2 to come up with a scheme. If you produce something eight times, you begin to wonder what the problem is. The latest scheme is going to cause 19 years of construction or rebuilding of the station itself. That is a very long time for any project—very much longer than London Bridge, and that is not a great success—and there are ways of doing it much more cheaply. It would work to do it more quickly and within the Euston width —many people have heard us speak about that before—but my worst worry is about the cost, and I shall speak on that more generally in a minute.

In one of his helpful responses in Committee, the Minister said that lots of cost estimates had been done for both Euston and the whole scheme. The fact remains that the last one that was published—Additional Provision 3, issued about 18 months ago in September 2015 by Simon Kirby, the then chief executive of HS2—said that the total cost of the additional provisions was £66 million and that the cost of compensation was £97.8 million. Only a few months later Professor McNaughton, who was the man leading on HS2, told me and several colleagues that the compensation cost was actually going to be £1 billion at Euston. I cannot see how anyone can be happy with something that is out by a factor of 10. I think that there are still civil engineering problems there and, as one noble Lord asked about in Committee, that there are still plans to redesign the portal; we hope that it will be an improvement. It would be nice if noble Lords were told about this. There are quite a few residents I know in Camden who know about this, but none of us has been told, in spite of quite a lot of asking.

Euston may well be the right location, and we can debate the best way into Euston. In France and Germany, when a high-speed service has been built over the years, the last few miles into the city centre have generally been on the classic tracks because of the cost and disruption of knocking down enormous numbers of properties. Why we should be different, I do not know—we can ask ourselves the question. The reason for this amendment is to try to squeeze out of the Government their plans for Euston. If they do not have any, let us see if we can have an interim station that would really work at Old Oak Common, as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said.

Amendment 6 is grouped with this amendment. I will not repeat what I said in Committee, because it is clearly on the record. We organised costings with Michael Bing, a quantity surveyor who has written the textbook of costings for Network Rail; that is two years old now, so I hope that it will implement it soon, because there are problems with costs on the classic network. He concluded that the cost of HS2 at Euston, with the tunnel as far as Old Oak Common, was £8.25 billion. That did not fit well, in my mind, with the total committed expenditure limits from the Government for the whole of phase 1 of £24 billion, because it is about one-third of it for eight kilometres out of 200. So I asked the same gentlemen, using the same methodology and rates, to cost the whole of phase 1, and it came out at about £54 billion, which is actually double the Government’s estimate they published in a Written Answer to me on 21 December.

I am very grateful to the Minister: we had a meeting on this last week and agreed to look at it further. However, my worry is that the original costings that we produced have never been challenged by government. You would think that the Government would have come to me or my colleagues to say, “You’ve got it wrong. You are using the wrong assumptions and the wrong design”, or whatever. Well, we could not use the wrong design—it was their design that we were using—but nobody has come back to me to say that we got it wrong. That rather leads me to believe that we probably got it quite right—or nearly right. The consequence of that is that the £54 billion we have calculated for phase 1 is actually the total expenditure limit that the Government have announced for the whole project, including phases 2 and 3. As the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said, we do not want to stop at Birmingham. It is the sections north of Birmingham that are, in my view, more in need of improvement—at Manchester, Crewe, Leeds and beyond—than the southern sections are in the first phase.

It is very important that we get a handle on the costs. It is right that we should be talking about this at Report because it is surely up to us as parliamentarians to challenge the Government so that they know what the costs are before they start work. It is very easy on a project to start work and, then, after a few years, to scratch your stubble and say, “Oh dear! I got it wrong”, and go back for more money. It is quite possible to get the costings right. Noble Lords may have heard somebody from Crossrail on the “Today” programme this morning talking about its success. It really is a success: it is on time, I believe, and it is certainly on budget. So it is possible to do it. My argument, and my plea to the Minister, is: can we not get the same discipline attached to HS2, before it is too late?

[Lord Brabazon of Tara (Con)]

My Lords, I have one question. Perhaps it is for my noble friend the Minister or perhaps it is for the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. My understanding was that if Old Oak Common were to be used as the terminus for this railway, even in the interim, a completely different design would be required for Old Oak Common than is currently in the Bill. It would therefore require the Bill to be re-hybridised, and would put an almost endless delay on the whole thing.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I find it somewhat bizarre that we should be discussing these particular amendments at this particular time. I find it even more bizarre that these amendments should be moved by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley—both of whom are normally extremely supportive of railway matters. The effect of accepting either or both these amendments, as I am sure the Minister will tell us, would be to delay considerably the project as a whole. I am sure that that is not the noble Lord’s intention, but I hope he will agree with me that that would be the result. He shakes his head—he can come back to me on that in a moment.

I do not think that you could have a re-costing of a project this size and then say, “We will have Third Reading of the Bill in a week’s time, and that’s the end of it”. If the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, is saying that, he is an even bigger financial genius than I thought he was previously. The fact is that there would be further delay. It is seven years since my noble friend Lord Adonis, as a Minister in the last Government but one, came forward with the project—and here we are at the end of a seven-year period discussing two amendments that would, I would guess, have the effect if not of putting the project back another seven years then certainly putting it back for some considerable time.

As far as Old Oak Common is concerned, I say again to the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, that he has to answer the point put by the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, a former Transport Minister. The fact is that Old Oak, as it presently is, is in no way suitable to be a main terminal. I do not mean to be facetious when I say that if you asked people coming to London where they were going to when they got there, comparatively few would say Old Oak. In Great Western days there was a steam engine shed there, I understand, so trainspotters might well have gone there 50 years ago—but I cannot see there being a great demand to terminate trains at Old Oak, no matter how good the connections will be.

The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, talked about developments at Euston. He has an amendment which I am sure we will be discussing later about access around Euston station, which is the natural terminus. He makes the very relevant point that, for example, on the TGV in France, high-speed trains stop short of the main terminus, which is the reason for the delays that quite often occur. It seems to me to be a much more sensible engineering prospect to run high-speed trains into the centre of a city rather than making them share crowded tracks with other trains, as they do in other countries. So perhaps on this occasion we got it right.

Finally, whatever estimates are made of these projects often turn out, in the long term, to be unrealistic. My noble friend talked about Crossrail. I was on the Crossrail Bill, and it was said at that time that the estimates for Crossrail were unrealistic—but they proved not to be so. With all due respect to my noble friend’s opinion, he is no better a financier than the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, as far as this project is concerned. So if the noble Lord presses this to a Division, I hope that those of us who want to see this project, after seven years, get the go-ahead will vote in the Not-Content Lobby.