High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill

Debate between Lord Howard of Rising and Lord Faulkner of Worcester

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope that the House will forgive me if I do not follow the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, in all the points he made. Needless to say, I disagree with every single one of them. On the question of cost—

[Lord Howard of Rising]

How flattering.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

On the question of cost, to which he referred, if he reads the speech by his noble friend Lord Heseltine to the Royal Town Planning Institute, he will find that a number of those issues are addressed and answered very fully. I draw his attention to the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, refers to the Government selling a 30-year concession in 2011 for High Speed 1 to a Canadian pension fund for £2.1 billion. I understand that something in the order of £10 billion could be realised for a similar concession on HS2, and there is a great deal more of the same.

I start by thanking the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer—for convening the meeting for Peers with her officials last Tuesday. I certainly found it helpful and informative and left the Committee Room hopeful that this Bill and, indeed, the whole High Speed 2 project are in good hands. As we had such an excellent debate on High Speed 2 in your Lordships’ House on 24 October, there is no need for me to go over the ground that I covered then. However, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for quoting a sentence from what I said that evening.

The important thing that came out of the debate was a demonstration of the overwhelming need to add capacity to our railways as a consequence of the phenomenal growth in demand for rail transport over the past 20 years. Passenger demand has doubled since 1995. As the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, is still in his place, I will go back to 1976 and recall a conversation that Sir Peter Parker had with Tony Crosland, who was then Secretary of State for the Environment, which Sir Peter wrote about in his autobiography. He said that he was depressed by Tony Crosland saying to him:

“Peter, I see a future for BR as a smaller, sensible little railway”.

Spare capacity was ruthlessly removed throughout the 1970s and 1980s as BR desperately tried to cut costs to meet the financial objectives imposed on it by the Treasury, about which my noble friend Lord Adonis spoke so eloquently earlier. Therefore, it is no wonder that more capacity is needed for the railways now.

Given the gloomy forecasts for passenger and freight demand produced at that time, which were all proved hopelessly wrong within 10 years, I am reminded of the words of the great economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who said:

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”.

The lesson we should have learnt, post Beeching, is that you must keep your options open, retain the flexibility for future growth and never sell the track bed as it is a resource that must be protected.

At the Minister’s meeting on Tuesday I pointed out that the task of building a high-speed railway to the Midlands and the north would have been much easier if previous Labour and Conservative Governments had not closed the Great Central Railway—the last main line to be built in Britain until High Speed 1, and the only main line, until High Speed 1, built to the continental gauge. One of its routes to Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield went straight through the Chilterns, including the towns of Amersham, Great Missenden and Wendover. I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Stevenson is not here to—