High Speed 2

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for securing this debate and I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, to her new responsibilities. I declare an interest since I live in Little Missenden which is directly on the current route and therefore I qualify under a number of people’s acceptance to plead my special case. I will do that a bit, but the interesting thing about being a nimby is that because you spend a lot more time working out why these things are happening to you, you understand the overall picture a lot better than many others. It is for that reason that I want to speak today, not particularly because of the problems in Little Missenden, although there are many, not least the appalling compensation proposals which do not measure up to the rhetoric.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, and others, I am a supporter of the case for investing in improving transport services in the UK and in particular of upgrading our rail capacity using the most appropriate technologies. However, as my noble friend Lord Mandelson says, the supporters of HS2 have to do better than rely on dodgy forecasts and puffed-up consultancy reports. This is not an icon; it is a major investment decision for the UK, so it is right that, at a capital cost of £50 billion with ongoing subsidies, everybody should be convinced by the case before it is approved. To achieve that, we must debate and agree a proper economic argument which explains convincingly not only what problem we are trying to solve and why HS2 is the answer but also why other cheaper solutions do not do the trick. The Government have caused a lot of confusion on this point. First it was green and then it was speed, or was it the other way round? Then it was the need to fuel economic growth in the regions, recently clarified as “some regions but not others”. Now it is capacity on the west coast main line and connectivity with HS1, albeit that that constitutes an embarrassingly large gap in the current plans.

This debate is on the economic case for HS2. On the facts so far available to us, there is no doubt that the economic case for HS2 is very weak. A project that costs £50 billion in capital needs a better case and value-for-money justification than we have seen so far. No wonder it has so many critics, ranging from the press to the Institute of Economic Affairs and the TaxPayers’ Alliance, from Alistair Darling to David Davis and many others, including the National Audit Office whose value-for-money report suggests a number of problems with the existing cost-benefit study and the Treasury Select Committee whose report published on the 2013 spending round concludes that only when HM Treasury has decided its own comprehensive economic case for supporting the decision should the Government formally reassess the project before deciding whether to proceed. In other words, there are very substantial blocks to moving forward on this proposal.

So far all we have seen from the Government is the KPMG report, which, as has been said, far from proving the Government’s case, suggests that there will be as many losers as winners in the regions. The problem is that HS2 has been designated solely as a point-to-point railway line, lacking any proper integration with the classic rail network, the UK’s only hub airport or HS1. As such, the project exemplifies the silo approach of UK transport planning where decisions on aviation, classic rail and high-speed rail are taken in isolation, let alone thinking about the implications for things such as high-speed broadband. Current HS2 proposals need to be improved to ensure that the route connects into more of the UK, integrating with other transport networks and co-ordinating with the work of the Airports Commission.

Surely we should not be considering in the early 21st century a transport solution which inflicts serious damage on our natural heritage. These may be old arguments but they are still real. The Woodland Trust has demonstrated that the Government’s preferred routes for both phases of the scheme will cause loss or damage to at least 67 irreplaceable ancient woods. The Chilterns AONB, which is where I live, is now the only AONB along the entire HS2 phase 1 and phase 2 route that would be adversely impacted by the proposed project. Actually, it would be destroyed. The draft environmental statement consultation published on 16 May accepts that a tunnel through the Chilterns AONB would perform better on environmental grounds compared with the current tunnel option. It would also reduce the operational noise impact and, for certain locations, would result in a reduced construction impact. It is feasible in engineering terms and I recommend it to the Minister.