North of England: Rapid Mass Transport System

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Moylan]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what consideration they have given to the construction of an underground Maglev rapid mass transport system between cities in the north of England.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have thoroughly investigated whether our forthcoming major investment in connectivity between northern cities should be maglev rather than rail. We concluded that rail remains the best option for a number of reasons, the most important being that new conventional rail infrastructure can better be integrated into the existing network.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, maglev is a great British invention increasingly deployed in Asia for high-speed travel. As our world-beating British tunnelling engineers have shown, constructing railways in-tunnel can be cheaper than constructing them on the surface, provided that it stays in-tunnel. However, it seems that every proposal for maglev that comes from the Department for Transport is rebuffed. Can my noble friend explain why her department is so wedded to a 200 year-old technology that, when constructed on the surface, can both cost more and be very annoying for local voters?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I am sure all noble Lords will agree that, just because something is old, that does not mean it is useless. We must look at all technologies, and that is precisely what we do. My noble friend makes an important point in saying that systems around the world use this, but just one operational high-speed system does so at the moment: the Shanghai City maglev. There are many others operating at lower speeds—that is, less than 100 mph—and obviously, there is one in construction in Japan, but it is coming up against some cost pressures.