High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend Lord Snape. We were in the Commons together, and every time I take a train to Manchester and we go through Stockport and Edgeley sidings, I think of his younger days when he was doing very important work there. I am grateful to the Minister for the meeting that she arranged for us with officials last week. It was very helpful and certainly clarified a number of issues. I missed the previous debate on this so I do not have to apologise for repeating myself.

I do not believe that the argument in favour of HS2, which I fully support, is one of sentiment but I must confess that I have some affection for railways. I wonder if I might just mention a little story. I ask your Lordships to imagine New Year’s Eve December 1947: I was quite young, my mother was taking me back from London, where we had been over Christmas, and we were changing trains at Preston to go on to Blackburn. It was a cold, snowy and damp evening, the waiting room had no heating and there was nowhere to get any refreshments. The railways were to be nationalised on 1 January, the following morning. We were sitting there waiting for this non-existent train to Blackburn, and someone in the cold waiting room said, “Well, from tomorrow morning we can blame the Government for all this”.

That was a story from way back. I have one other bit of sentiment—actually, it is not really sentiment, it is harder than that. When Beeching’s report led to the closure of a lot of our railways, he did this country an enormous disservice. We closed lines that we wish we had now, not because they would replace HS2 or anything like that but simply because we lost something important. They were wonderful triumphs of Victorian engineering. I remember the line behind Tintern Abbey, the Chepstow-Monmouth line, which was a wonderful bit of engineering but is now derelict. I wish that they would reinstate the line from Penrith to Keswick, which could be reinstated—there is enough of the infrastructure there—although then going on from Keswick to Cockermouth and the coast would be impossible because it has been built over by the A66. Even then, though, reinstating some of these railways would have helped.

I suppose that those are bits of sentiment. What I am concerned with are the harder arguments in favour of HS2. I have reflected that if the financial estimates for the cost of the Channel Tunnel had been accurate, they would of course have been much higher than they were and we would not have built it because it would have been too costly. We have had enormous benefit from the fact that they were wrong. My point is that if we had deployed the arguments that some people are deploying against HS2 against the Channel Tunnel, it would never have been built and the country would have been much worse off because of it. I am not arguing that we should throw all financial estimates to the winds—not at all. I am arguing that we need to be careful before we reject some imaginative infrastructure schemes.

I am bound to say that as a country we are not very good at thinking about infrastructure and developing it—we tend to find too many arguments for not doing it. Sometimes those arguments win the day and sometimes they delay things enormously, but at other times we overcome them and then we get the benefit, and the Channel Tunnel is an example of that.

I fully accept that there are sensitivities in building new railway lines, although there are more sensitivities in building or widening motorways. I understand those sensitivities, though, and I hope that some of the concerns raised by my noble friend Lord Stevenson will be reflected in the details of the Government’s scheme as it goes through the Chilterns. Having said that, I still believe that we have something important afoot with HS2.

I was reading Middlemarch not long ago. I could not find a particular reference—it is quite a long book—but there was a lot of discussion of local opposition to building the railways. I thought that some of the arguments could have been applied to today’s debate. George Eliot used slightly more elegant language than many of us use, but nevertheless the arguments were there at the time.

When I am not living in the Lake District, we have a house in London. For a long time, we had a house in Paddington that overlooked the main line out of Paddington station, the underground and the motorway that becomes the M40. It was pretty noisy. The reason we could just about afford it was because people did not like the noise. We put all the bedrooms at the back overlooking the little gardens, and that was fine. The trains got quieter, the shunting in the middle of the night stopped and it became much more bearable. Then the foxes got in and the noise of the foxes kept me awake more than the noise of the railways. Although I was opposed to fox hunting, I wanted to make an exception for some of the back gardens in Paddington. Some of my friends did not like that argument.

My point is that the noise of building is very hard to live with. Crossrail is causing a lot of anxiety where I used to live in Paddington because of the excavation and so on. However, once these infrastructure works are completed, the noise of the railways is perhaps not as bad as all that. It is not wonderful; I would not want to live a few yards from a railway, as I did, but at least it is more acceptable.

I use the west coast main line a great deal these days. I am conscious of the enormous disruption that there was for years—referred to by some of my noble friends—when the work was going on. Frankly, it was so awful that we could not travel on a Sunday. We said to friends of ours, “Don’t ever come up at the weekend because it is absolutely hopeless”. By the time you have changed buses and changed at Preston, the journey time is unpredictable. I shudder at the thought that we might do the same thing with our existing west coast and east coast lines; it would be absolutely intolerable. That is one of the many reasons why I would much prefer HS2.

One only had to travel for years, as I did, on the west coast main line—it is much better now but it is getting very full—to know that we do not want years of infrastructure work and disruption. Nevertheless, the trains are pretty full. On at least one occasion when I failed to book a reserved seat, because I could not predict my time, I had to stand all the way to Preston. Quite often, there was no space and that is north of Birmingham, not just from the Midlands southwards. These trains may not be full on a Saturday night, but they are full most of the time when most people want to travel. So I very much welcome the commitment to extra capacity which would be the result of building HS2. I hope that some of the freight on the motorways will move on to the railways, although I suspect that they will have to absorb additional freight rather than transfer freight from the roads as they do now. Unlike some noble Lords, I would like to see people travelling not by car, but using the railways. I was lobbied by somebody who said, “Don’t worry about HS2, flying will always be cheaper”—not a very environmental argument. I believe that HS2 and the building of it will also have strong environmental benefits when it is completed.

I have two regrets. First, I wish we could get on with it, instead of taking so long. Secondly, I wish the plans would include going further north than Birmingham. Let us get on and link the north of England and get on to Glasgow and Edinburgh. If we do not do this, the next generation will never forgive us.