High Speed 2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Debate between Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Lord Adonis

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, when I was Secretary of State for Transport, they called me the “thin controller”. Whether or not that was true, I bear some responsibility for this scheme and should therefore participate in the debate.

My noble friend Lord Hollick referred to the National Infrastructure Commission, which I had the privilege of founding and was its first chairman. I agree entirely with him that it should be put on a statutory basis. We need much stronger and more robust long-term infra- structure planning in this country. Having a permanent commission on a statutory basis would be a good step forward. However, when I chaired the National Infrastructure Commission, one of my principle recommendations—I urge it on the House very strongly —was to avoid the curse of stop-start infrastructure planning, which has bedevilled our development of infrastructure over the past 100 years, and which we are in acute danger of doing again with HS2.

I pay great tribute to the work of the Economic Affairs Committee and the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, but he presented his report as if these issues were being considered for the first time when the committee debated them. They have been considered exhaustively since the scheme was first announced, and I had the privilege of presenting it to this House on 11 March 2010. Not only have they been considered exhaustively but they have been decided by Parliament. Four years ago, on 23 March 2016, the legislation that is now being implemented to build the line from London to the West Midlands was agreed by the House of Commons by 399 votes to 42 votes. That is one of the most emphatic votes in favour of a large project in the history of Parliament. That came after months of consideration by a hybrid Bill committee of the other House looking at all the issues which my noble friend Lord Hollick and the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Kerr, have raised.

The issue of whether to terminate at Old Oak Common or go through to Euston was considered exhaustively by the Select Committee—I could go through all the arguments for the House. It is true that a lot of passengers will wish to transfer to the Elizabeth Line when it is completed—another project that is over budget and delayed. But it is also the case that there are big resilience factors in having the whole of the rail traffic in this country coming from the north and the Midlands—as my noble friend Lord Hunt said, the Midlands is a crucial part of the scheme—decanting at one station on to just one line. You have only the Elizabeth Line if you terminate at Old Oak Common, whereas coming through to Euston, which the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, does not seem to think is in central London, there are another three lines—I am all in favour of the arch coming back, like the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, but one could debate that too. Once you join up properly with St Pancras, which is part of the scheme, you will also link in with High Speed 1 and a whole array of other services.

The issues of commuter and freight services have been raised. They were considered exhaustively by the HS2 company that advised me in 2010 and by the hybrid Bill committee before that vote of 399 to 42 in the House of Commons. A key issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, in respect of commuter and freight services is the freeing up of capacity by HS2, by taking all the long-distance trains off the west coast main line; a lot of them off the Midland main line, because the service is to Sheffield; and a lot of them off the east coast main line, which goes up to York and Newcastle. They would all go on to the HS2 line, thus freeing up huge capacity to run additional commuter and freight services into the West Midlands, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester and Newcastle.

The other vitally important issue is that there is no such thing as a free lunch—I wish there were. If we are not going to invest in HS2, we will have to do massive upgrades of the existing lines. When I was Secretary of State for Transport, the very first public engagement I undertook was to reopen the west coast main line after the upgrade which had taken place. It was a modest upgrade by comparison with HS2 to allow for the faster running of some trains, some additional train lengthening and some additional trains. Many noble Lords will remember that upgrade. For the best part of 10 years, services were disrupted on the west coast main line almost every other weekend. The price, as it was then—now you would have to double or treble the figure—was £10 billion, of which £1 billion was spent on compensating the train companies for not running any trains. I can tell noble Lords that if you are running a train company, the easiest thing you can do is to have big upgrade work done on your lines so that you are given huge payments for not running any trains at all. That is what train operating companies love most: being paid billions of pounds for not running any trains.

If you proceed with the conventional upgrades that would be required—they are huge; you are conducting open heart surgery on a moving patient—you will end up with a colossal cost, estimated by advisers in 2010 to be more, in cash terms, than the cost of HS2. When the Cameron Government made their alternative evaluation, they came up with a credible alternative upgrade scheme that would provide a quarter of the capacity of HS2 for half of the cost. All that is out there: this is not new information; it has all been published. The issue facing us is whether we are now going to do what Parliament itself authorised and build this line. It is under construction at the moment; we are not talking about giving it the green light. Colossal construction is already taking place at Euston: £9 billion has been spent and 2,000 people are working on the scheme. It is being constructed.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, is absolutely right to differentiate between sunk costs and future costs, but the crucial point is that if we are going to proceed with this scheme, to pull it up by the roots now with another big evaluation that would add further to the costs would be simply to repeat the curse of British infrastructure planning. The reason we have such a substandard infrastructure compared with so many other advanced industrialised countries is that we start projects, stop them, start them up again, stop them and then start them again. That is an accurate description of what has happened with HS2; this is the fifth review that has taken place since 2010, and the third since Parliament voted in favour of it by 10 to one.

My noble friend Lord Hunt is absolutely right to stress the importance of this project to the West Midlands. This is not a scheme that predominantly benefits the south. Some 200 of the 330 route miles of HS2 will run between the West Midlands and the north-west to Manchester, and the West Midlands to West Yorkshire up to Leeds. This will be transformational for connectivity between the Midlands and the north, and within the north. A large part of the northern powerhouse will depend on HS2, and the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, mentioned the line from Liverpool to Manchester. Half of the northern powerhouse railway from Liverpool to Manchester will be on HS2 lines, so they need to be, and should be, drawn together.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

Why is all that not part of phase 1? Why is phase 1 all about tunnelling under Primrose Hill?

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, this is 330 miles-worth of line. If it could all be put in place in one phase, that would be great. However, setting up a project of that size all in one phase would carry huge risks. Again, I hesitate to keep pointing this out to the House, but all of this has been considered: whether there should be one phase of HS2 with 330 miles of line or whether it should be divided.

I want to make a final point—

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Lord Adonis

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

I would not want to attribute sinister motives to the Government—I think that somebody managed to get the word “cock-up” into Hansard the other night. Conspiracies are very rare. It is possible—and there are some who believe—that the 26 will lean on Dublin; that is perfectly possible. It is unlikely, and it is of course the case that the European Council decides by unanimity, so if one were looking for a settlement in the European Council which meant that the 26 leaned on Mr Varadkar, Mr Varadkar would have his vote and could say that he did not agree. However, I have seen no signs of the 26 leaning on the Irish. It looks to me from what Mr Tusk said when he went to Dublin the other day that we are heading for another European Council where the Irish position on the hard border and our position on the hard border are recognised by everybody. Nobody wants a hard border.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, surely when he speculates on these matters, the Foreign Secretary himself has publicly contemplated the prospect of a hard border, and his minute to the Prime Minister has been published.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

Certainly, I was unwilling to impute evil motives to the Government, but I am even more unwilling to try to interpret the tergiversations of the Foreign Secretary.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Lord Adonis

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

Exactly. I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has just said. I would like to be helpful to the Minister—it is my main purpose in life. I detect that this debate is at present all going one way, although I do not know if the Minister agrees with me on that. If he is a cynic, he might say that that is not altogether surprising, as the collective noun for a group of chancellors, vice-chancellors and university chairmen is the House of Lords.

It is important that the Minister should listen to the Cormack-Deben advice. It really would not do to answer this debate with the same answer he started off with to the last debate about medicines and Amendment 11—where, as I recall, his line was that publishing a strategy would introduce an unwelcome, undesirable and impossible delay to commencement. I may have misunderstood him, but it seems to me that the time when we need such a strategy—the strategy that is called for in this amendment—is now. We need it to be helpful to the Minister because if on Report we do not see a strategy, there is absolutely no doubt how the House would vote. This debate has made very clear, from all sides of the House, that continued membership or a close relationship with the research framework programme and with Erasmus is seen as sine qua non. If the Government do not give us the strategy which they think may achieve that, I am confident we will vote for these amendments.

The strategy would have to contain a little more than a declaration of intent. In relation to Erasmus, it would, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, have to include something about visas. I think it would also have to include something about fees. It is relatively easy to see what one would have to say. On the much bigger issue of research, it would have to include something from the Treasury. If the sensible suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Patten, was accepted by the Treasury, that would be excellent. But it seems to me that the Treasury is going to have to accept a lesser commitment, which is that when it is pay as you go—which is what it is going to be, as my noble friend Lord Hannay has pointed out—we will pay for whatever we get. That seems to me to be a sine qua non.

It is of course the case that we will not be taking the decisions or laying down the policy anymore. But it will still be essential for our universities to have access to these networks. This would not just be helpful for the Minister on Report and in the negotiations in Brussels, where such a Cormack-Deben voluntary offer would go down extremely well, but also be something to deal with the uncertainty problem which the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, drew attention to. We are no longer desirable partners in research networks, because it is assumed that we will be country cousins or non-players.

We are no longer receiving the same demand from foreign students to come here to research. We are damaging the sector now—this is an area where the damage of Brexit precedes the deed. So in three contexts, it would be helpful to the Minister if he would say that he will take this away and think about producing a government strategy in both areas before Report.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I agree with every word that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has just uttered. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, said that we were not expecting miracles from the Minister. I think even the Minister’s most ardent admirers do not credit him with miraculous powers, and he is not going to able to produce any rabbits out of a hat for us this evening. But it is not miracles we need here: all we need is a continuation of the status quo. This is one of those areas we come back to time and again—we had it in the long debate on Euratom last week: all we need to do is to avoid massive, self-inflicted damage.

There is no need to create whole new programmes and ways of working. We have Horizon 2020 and Erasmus; the latter has been going on for the best part of 30 years and is a highly successful programme. When you are doing something well, the usual trick is just to keep on doing it. There are so many things that do not work that the idea that Parliament and Government should be spending their time dismantling things that do is clearly crazy. What we want to hear from the Minister is simply that he is open-minded to continuing with the present arrangements. The sooner the Government are prepared to say that, the better.

The most telling contribution to this debate came from the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge. In the higher education world, there is—I shall choose my words slightly diplomatically—a pronounced air of self-congratulation on how excellent everything is in this country and how brilliantly we do it, and if only the rest of world copied us then they would be a great deal better off. In many areas that is true, but in one we have a very poor international record: the propensity of our students to study abroad. According to the Erasmus figures, twice as many European students come to Britain as Brits go abroad. The noble Baroness was right to say there is a big problem with students from poorer backgrounds studying abroad. When I was preparing figures for this debate, I found that it looks as if Singapore, a country less than one-tenth the size of the UK, has about as many students studying abroad as we have in our entirety.

The fact is that we do not have nearly enough of our students studying abroad. When I visited Singapore as Minister for Schools, they were aiming—by about now, so maybe they have achieved it—at requiring all students at the National University of Singapore, regardless of their course, to spend at least six months, one semester, studying abroad. Can your Lordships imagine if we had anything like that commitment here? It might be a good thing if in due course we did. The great irony is that one of the great slogans to emerge from this Brexit policy as it has developed is “Global Britain”—but how can there ever be a global Britain unless far more of our students go and see the rest of the globe and spend time studying there? The first requirement for that is that we should not make the situation worse than it currently is.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, was right that what we seek from the Minister is not a miracle; we are clearly not going to get that from the present Minister. We simply expect a commitment to continue with the current programmes, and it is absolutely within the scope of the Government to say unilaterally that the negotiating position of Her Majesty’s Government now, in 2018, is that these programmes will continue with full British participation after 2020. If the Minister does not say that, he is staring at near-certain defeat on this issue on Report.