HS2 Reset

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I can indeed absolutely assure the noble Lord of that. One of the difficulties I found in coming into this position is that clearly the previous management of HS2 thought it was a construction project—I think there are some lessons from Crossrail here too. There was a view that somehow it was a big construction project and at the end you incidentally got a railway. That cannot be right. The original justification for this was the capacity constraint on the west coast main line, which is still there, and the projected inability to do anything serious about its capacity without years of disruption. What has resulted is a project that has created years of disruption, but somewhere else other than on the railway. I have it in mind constantly that this project will produce a new railway for the United Kingdom that will be regarded as part of the railway network by its customers. I refer to the ludicrous proposition that Euston should have had two platform 1s. Nobody cares anything about that. What they want is a train to Birmingham or a train to Manchester, and they want it to run reliably. We have that very much in mind. Indeed, Mark Wild, as the chief executive, knows perfectly well that he needs to turn this present construction activity into a railway, which is what he did with the Elizabeth line, and I have every confidence that he will do it again.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a necessary but pretty depressing Statement announcing, as it effectively is, that when it comes to major infrastructure projects, whether they are railways or power stations or airports, this country does them very badly indeed. I hope we learn some lessons from that. I ask my noble friend to reflect that, on timescale, the Victorians managed in a period of 30 years, from 1830 to 1860, to build the whole rail network, and we cannot deal with one line in less time than that. I remind him as well that in the international context, pretty well every other country in the world—Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and others—has been building, is building or has planned major high-speed rail systems. Will my noble friend give us answers to these questions? Why do these projects take so long when we know from our history that it is possible to do them much more speedily? What can we learn from all these other countries that do not seem to have any of the headaches, disasters, mismanagement and overspend that we have in building a very necessary railway because the old Victorian one, wonderful though it was, is crumbling?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

My noble friend is not quite right. We do not always do these things badly. Indeed, I deliberately referred to the trans-Pennine upgrade in my previous remarks because it is a very large project. It is very complex because it is being carried out on an operating railway. Its current value is £14 billion. It has been through innumerable scope changes, sadly, but it is now being delivered on time and badly.