Lord Snape
Main Page: Lord Snape (Labour - Life peer)Publicly Funded Infrastructure Projects
Lord Snape Excerpts
Lord Snape (Lab)
My Lords, I have not made any secret of my support for this great project. For me as a former railwayman and as a resident of the city of Birmingham, it is not just an ethereal paper concept; it is a great contribution to the regional and, eventually, the national economy. In and around Birmingham cranes can be seen all over the place. Values are rising and hundreds if not thousands of jobs have been created. It is not just in the city of Birmingham, of course; between Birmingham and London there are 250 sites where work has already commenced. Almost 10,000 jobs have been created and 2,000 businesses are already benefiting from this project before it has even properly commenced. Incidentally, 98% of those businesses are British.
I respectfully remind those who oppose this project, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, that it is not just ex-railwaymen like me who are in favour; virtually the whole of British industry happens to be in favour of HS2 in its entirety. In June 2019 business leaders including the CBI, the Institute of Directors, the Federation of Small Businesses, the British Chambers of Commerce and London First published a joint open letter calling on the next Prime Minister to commit to delivering HS2 in full.
My noble friend Lord Berkeley and I have been friends for approaching 40 years now, and I hope we remain so after this debate. We first met when I was an officer —I think I was the chairman—of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Channel Tunnel. In a different capacity, he was an accurate and hard-working paid advocate of that concept. I remind him respectfully that, when completed, the Channel Tunnel cost £4.65 billion, around £12 billion in today’s funds, and was 80% over budget at the time. Although I have listened to him on many occasions, I do not think he pointed out at the time that that great project could and should have been cancelled because it was likely to be over budget.
Lord Snape
No, I just said that my noble friend did not say it should be cancelled, despite the massive cost overrun—about which I do not remember him complaining at the time, although I might be wrong. Because of the nature of the way that we do business in this country, most of these projects overrun.
The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, touched on that point during her refreshing and accurate contribution. The fact is that these projects overrun, not just in this country. We have a habit of flogging ourselves and thinking that only we can get things wrong but these great infrastructure projects overrun all over the world. Fly to Berlin and try to land at Brandenburg Airport; building commenced in 2006 and the latest opening date is 2020, although even that is not particularly certain, and it is eight times over budget, yet we are born and brought up on the myth of German efficiency. I do not know whether the German equivalent of the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, is wandering around Berlin shaking his head sadly at the overrun of that project, although I am sure that there are similar gloomy outlooks.
I am not surprised at the noble Lord being a member of a committee set up by the Taxpayers’ Alliance to look into this project, but I am a bit surprised at my noble friend. I have to say to him that I have never been a fan of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Right-wing self-appointed guardians of the public purse do not normally attract members of the Labour Party so I am a bit concerned and surprised that my noble friend should have agreed, particularly as the organisation produced a brochure about a better way to spend the billions. The picture on the front is of a motorway junction, so there is a bit of a clue to where the Taxpayers’ Alliance would like money to be spent.
I do not think that the doom and gloom that we are seeing about this project is sustainable long-term. In my view it is a great project that should continue and be implemented and opened as quickly as possible. One thing that I never hear from its critics is any alternative, although I hear ethereal stuff about spending the money on “something else”. Let us look at the west coast main line, the area of railway that will get most relief from the completion of HS2. I picked a random hour of arrivals and departures at Euston station. Excluding the Underground, there were 42 trains in and out of Euston station between 10 and 11 am this morning. Three of them went to Birmingham, one through to Scotland, one direct to Glasgow and three to Manchester.
Where will these trains go? These days, it is impossible to modernise a railway system and run trains at the same time. It did not used to be. In my younger days—I confess that I remember the first electrification of the west coast main line—much of the work was done between trains, although there were lots of alternative routes. The Manchester trains went over to Great Central. The brains that run this country decided to close that line, so the trains went on the Midland main line, now closed between Matlock and further north. There are no alternative routes. The Liverpool trains went on the Great Western from Paddington to Birkenhead. That does not exist any more; indeed, part of it is a tramway through my former constituency.
There is no alternative to HS2, and I hope that the gloom mongers, sincere though some of them may be, will have their arguments refuted and that this great project gets the go-ahead.