Queen’s Speech
Lord Truscott Excerpts(2 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Truscott (Non-Afl)
I commend the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford on his excellent and thoughtful speech.
I am very disappointed that the proposed renters reform Bill and the second stage of leasehold reform were not directly mentioned in the gracious Speech. In saying this, I declare an interest as a long-standing leaseholder and landlord. As the Minister said earlier in the debate, a renters reform Bill will nevertheless be brought forward in the current parliamentary Session, although the second stage of leasehold reform will seemingly not, despite talk of it being dealt with in the next parliamentary Session.
I hope that the leasehold reform Bill will not be kicked into the long grass and effectively dropped. I ask Her Majesty’s Government to think again and bring forward the second stage of leasehold reform in this Session as a matter of urgency. I request that the Minister clarifies the situation and treats these issues with the importance that they deserve. I commend Her Majesty’s Government and the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, on passing the ground rent Act in the last Session.
On the proposed renters reform Bill, I support the abolition of no-fault evictions by removing Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988, which has often been seen as unfair and contributes to tenants’ insecurity of tenure. However, I add three provisos. First, landlords should always be able to seek possession in the case of rent arrears. Most landlords own only one or two properties and are not Rachman-style slum landlords. They rely on rental income to pay the mortgage—if they have one—maintenance costs and service charges, and often to supplement increasingly inadequate state pensions. Secondly, many landlords are accidental landlords, or landlords for just a period of their lives. If they personally need to reoccupy their homes, they should be able to do so. The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, referred to some of these issues. Thirdly, fair rent reviews must be built into the system. Costs go up for landlords as well as tenants, and rents should at least be able to rise over time in line with the consumer price index or another appropriate measure.
It is regrettable that, in addition to a database for rogue landlords and property agents, Her Majesty’s Government are not legislating to regulate property management agents. Estate agents are legally regulated, so I see no reason why equally important property management agents are not. The 2019 recommendations of the Regulation of Property Agents working group have been ignored. Property management agents tend to fall into three categories: those managed by right to manage companies that are professional and competent; those managed by RTM companies that are wholly unprofessional and incompetent; and professional property management companies whose sole purpose seems to be to act on behalf of the freeholder and burden leaseholders with excessive costs, including extortionate commissions and overly expensive works.
The second stage of leasehold reform is well overdue. Our feudal leasehold system is precisely that: feudal, outdated and unique to England and Wales. Abuses of the system have been well documented in this House and elsewhere. The Leasehold Knowledge Partnership and the leasehold and commonhold reform APPG—I am a member of the latter—have done much valuable work on the issues facing leaseholders, of whom there are some 4.6 million in the country.
I welcome the Law Commission’s papers on exercising the right to manage and on leasehold home ownership. For those wishing to extend the length of their leases to ensure long-term tenure and preserve value, the current system is an arbitrary nightmare. As a surveyor told me recently, freeholders think of a lease extension valuation figure and double it. Surveyors and valuers then receive commission based on how much they can negotiate the lease extension figure down from an initial valuation that has no relation to market value. Again, all parties benefit apart from the leaseholder.
Abolition of so-called “marriage value” would be welcome. The proposed online calculator would also be of benefit. At last, leaseholders will be aware of the potential cost before embarking on the exercise. Her Majesty’s Government should firmly reject the specious argument made by some hedge funds that leasehold reform will imperil their human rights as property owners. If the law has to be changed to nullify this argument, it should be. In short, I look forward to the Government pressing ahead as soon as possible with legislation in this area that will offer real hope to renters and leaseholders.
Public Transport: Face Coverings
Lord Truscott Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Vere of Norbiton [V]
I would slightly challenge the noble Earl on that. A significant communications campaign is going on at the moment and that will continue over the weeks and months ahead. We are also working closely with the transport operators, which have put an enormous amount of signage in their vehicles and at stations. They are also sending emails to their customers, as well as messages via their apps and websites, so a lot of work is going on. I think that the message is getting out there, but I can reassure the noble Earl that we are pushing on with this, although there is always more that we can do.
Lord Truscott (Ind Lab) [V]
My Lords, in the Far East, people have been wearing face masks on public transport since the outset of the pandemic. If Her Majesty’s Government think that wearing face coverings on public transport is a good idea now, why did they not think that months ago? I suggest to the Minister that this was always just a case of shortage of adequate PPE, including face masks?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton [V]
I do not think that the noble Lord is correct in his assumption. As we have said consistently throughout the pandemic, we were following the science at the time. It is also worth noting that very few people were travelling on public transport in the early days of the pandemic. The reality is that handwashing and social distancing are more critical in reducing transmission of the virus than wearing a face mask. Having a face covering on is something that we can put in place now, given that social distancing may not be as possible as it was in the early phases of the outbreak. In the early phases, almost no one was travelling on public transport.
High Speed 2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)
Lord Truscott Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Truscott (Ind Lab)
My Lords, I have spoken a number of times in your Lordships’ House on HS2—I am not alone in that—so I will try not to repeat myself in today’s debate. I welcome the Economic Affairs Committee’s report, Rethinking High Speed 2, so expertly outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean. The report rightly points to major flaws in this hugely expensive vanity project. Why, for example, is HS2 designed to be 40 to 80 kilometres per hour faster than France’s TGV, with the consequential and unnecessary damage to our environment, including wildlife and ancient woodland, as outlined by the noble Baronesses, Lady Young and Lady Bennett? I agree that the methodology and cost-benefit analysis put forward by the Department for Transport is wholly discredited, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and others have clearly shown.
The Government’s response to the committee’s report is lamentable. They blandly affirm that:
“The Department for Transport has confidence in its existing techniques, which have been developed over many years, to inform transport investment decisions.”
It is widely known that the department’s overseeing of major infrastructure projects has been an unmitigated disaster; take Crossrail, for one, which is over budget and chronically delayed, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Monks. As mentioned earlier in the debate, we were even told by the former chairman of HS2, Sir Terry Morgan, that nobody knows how much HS2 might eventually cost. The cost of this project has already doubled since 2011 to over £100 billion. I make a prediction: if this obscene waste of money goes ahead, by the time it is completed in 2040 or later, costs will have doubled again. That is because no one involved has the slightest interest in keeping costs down—not the construction companies, the rolling stock providers, or the local authorities and trade unions so desperate for investment—and the general public will pick up the tab via their tax bills.
If the north and the Midlands want investment and better connectivity, there are better ways to achieve it. Local commuting services north of the Watford Gap are a disaster and a disgrace. Even the £100 billion allocated could be better spent, providing more than the 30,000 jobs posited to be provided by HS2, whether by building and staffing more than 200 hospitals, building 1.7 million social homes, or building more than 30 aircraft carriers. Do the maths: I think you would need more than 30,000 people to build 30 aircraft carriers.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that we need significant investment in our rail infrastructure. There is no dispute about that, but is HS2 the best way to do it? I believe that it will prove to be a massive white elephant. On the continent, high-speed rail services have benefited the countries’ capitals, not the regions, so it will be London that will benefit from HS2, not the north and the Midlands.
Is it not strange that HS2 now has no vocal advocates, bar one, in the Cabinet that proposed it, and none willing to back it openly in the current one, including the Transport Secretary himself? I listened very closely to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis—unfortunately, he is not in his place and seems to have missed most of the speeches that opposed HS2. However, he has been known to change his mind—for example, on tuition fees—and I hope that he comes to the same conclusion on HS2.
Some £8 billion has been spent already on HS2, as has been mentioned today, and construction of the line has not even started. I hope that that gives enough of a warning signal. It will of course cost money to cancel HS2, but the cost can be mitigated by property and land sales. In business, it is sometimes better to cut your losses and make a better investment. In my view, we should do this with HS2, to save the environment and improve regional connectivity.
Infrastructure Bill [HL]
Lord Truscott Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Truscott (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I speak in support of the spirit of Amendment 21. As a former Energy Minister, an investor in the hydrocarbon sector and a former non-executive director in hydrocarbon companies, I have given a great deal of thought to whether I support the development of fracking in the UK.
Quite apart from the environmental risks in such drilling—and, although the degree of risk can be debated, there is always a risk when drilling for hydrocarbons, particularly given that we live on such a densely populated island—I think we should look at the broader picture. What has been ignored so far is the picture of global demand and supply that we are witnessing. The Chancellor has said that we should try to emulate the success of the United States with shale oil and gas. However, what we are witnessing globally today is a supply glut. The success of shale in the United States has partly contributed to that. Perversely, we are seeing that this glut is pushing down the price of oil and gas across the world—particularly oil—and the impact of that on a number of smaller companies is that they are going to the wall. We are already seeing a decline in shale oil production in the United States and we should not forget that with shale oil we have seen quite a dramatic decline over a couple of years. So there is a dramatic fall-off in investment in the United States in shale, a fall in employment, a number of smaller companies going to the wall and all the majors have now announced that they are cutting back investment in major oil and gas projects. Therefore my fear is that we are entering a period of greater volatility as regards energy prices.
To a certain extent the success of shale in the United States has been quite limited, both as regards scale and duration, and we are now entering a period of quite dangerous volatility with regard to investment. Therefore, although consumers currently benefit from lower energy prices for oil and gas, that may well be short-lived. In addition, with the majors pulling back on major investment and with a number of smaller shale companies going to the wall, once the existing number of companies have cut back on production in the United States, in two to three years’ time we may well see the price of a barrel of oil go back up to $200.
Therefore, if we look at the United States as a model for a number of the companies that are involved in shale—and a lot of the communities that will depend on that local investment—it appears that it is not seen as a wonderful model, so maybe it is not a model we should adopt for the UK. Shale takes a huge amount of investment to develop, and it has its environmental risks. In the UK it will take many years to go through the planning process, yet the success of shale can be relatively short-lived. In the mean time, we will have these huge peaks and troughs in the price of hydrocarbons.
Viscount Ridley (Con)
Will the noble Lord agree that if the oil or gas price shoots up, as he says, we should be all the more encouraging towards the shale industry in this country?
Lord Truscott
No, because that would be a short-term benefit. We should look at the long-term planning. That is the difficult thing with shale at the moment: it is destabilising the market for oil and gas, with the majors cutting back quite dramatically. You can have shale production, but it is short term. If, for example, you invest in a major field, it can take 10 or 20 years to develop—Kashagan in Kazakhstan, for example—it needs billions of dollars of investment, and takes many years to develop, sometimes decades. Companies have to be able to plan ahead, as that gives medium to long-term relative stability to the oil price. If you are talking about shale, you are talking about a two to three-year timescale for the development of a field, which does not provide the sort of stability we are talking about.
Of course, we should also look at increasing investment in renewables as well. Shale is one thing you can look at, but you can also look at investing more in renewables.
Lord Turnbull
The noble Lord may be confusing two different things: a well, which may have a short life, and a field. I can see that wells might run out quite quickly, but then other wells will be drilled, so that does not mean that the field runs out in the period as he is explaining.
Lord Truscott
What tends to happen is that in the United States, for example, a shale oil rig—a well—may cost $1 million to develop. You then drill in that well for a couple of years, and then you have to invest further in the next well in the same field. A number of shale oil companies in the United States at the moment face not getting the funding to invest in the next well, because it is very cash-flow intense. Therefore if you want energy security, shale oil and gas is not the way to achieve it. It is a very expensive short-term hit, and it adds to the volatility of the price of oil and gas. In a way, the success we are seeing in the United States is already unravelling. I therefore wonder whether it is worth the cost as regards the overall benefit.
We are also seeing the impact on businesses, both large and small, in the hydrocarbon sector. Ask any of the majors at the moment whether they are happy about where they are as regards medium to long-term planning, or go to Saudi Arabia and ask people what they think about the impact of shale oil and gas development in the United States and on the global market. You can say that they are game-playing, but nevertheless, it is destabilising. Is that the way we want to go? Is that a great success story? I am not so sure that when we look back on the development of shale in the United States it will look as successful as we all initially thought it would be. Therefore from that point of view, is what happened in the United States the right way for the United Kingdom to go? I am not so sure.
Lord Skelmersdale (Con)
My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, can he tell me whether he knows of any company of any size, in any part of the world, which invests to not make a profit?
Lord Truscott
That is exactly the reason. The noble Lord may know that that is why some companies are going bust—today Max Petroleum, which develops oil and gas in Kazakhstan, said that it was facing insolvency because it can no longer raise the funds to develop new fields. When the price of oil is under $50 a barrel—and we are already seeing the effect on companies such as BP, which is laying off people in Aberdeen because the price of a barrel of oil makes it uneconomic to continue to develop mature fields in the North Sea—we are facing a problem, are we not?
Lord Borwick (Con)
My Lords, I welcome this government amendment and thank my noble friend for clarifying some extremely important points. I am particularly pleased that it is now clearer that the clauses apply to hydraulic fracturing, with any ambiguity removed. However, there are some further points that I hope will be addressed in secondary legislation.
We have delayed shale exploration for too long. We have to get going so that we can show the public that there is nothing to fear. Once we start, the public will surely say, “What was all the fuss about?”. It is therefore extremely important that drilling boreholes for groundwater quality monitoring is delinked from the planning process. Permitted development rights under the general permitted development order can be used to install boreholes for monitoring water quality; that is common in the water industry. However, it is different for any development that is subject to environmental impact assessment regulations. Then, any part of the development, including the drilling of boreholes for monitoring water quality, cannot take place until full planning consent is granted. That would apply in the case of any development which includes hydraulic fracturing. It would mean, in practice, that no baseline data could be collected until full planning permission was granted, leading to a minimum of 12 months after planning before hydraulic fracturing would be permitted to take place. That would be a significant and unnecessary delay.
We should therefore allow baseline monitoring during the planning process for shale exploration. That would drastically cut the delay: doing the monitoring, then putting in the planning application, and monitoring while the planning process continues. Even if it is not a positive planning decision for industry, at least some useful data will have been obtained in the mean time during the monitoring process. More baseline data would be very welcome, so delinking from planning is a win-win whether the planning decision is positive or not. Can my noble friend therefore assure me that these concerns are noted in the amendments and will be strongly considered as the secondary legislation is formulated?
The treatment of groundwater protection zones was one of the worst outcomes of the amendments made in the other place. The Environment Agency already effectively prohibits operations in what is known as source protection zone 1, and in the lesser zones 2 and 3 the industry already has to make a convincing case to the Environment Agency. That strikes me as the right balance of regulatory oversight. That could impact on other industries, too. Shale operations take place well over 1,000 metres below any aquifer, whereas a lot more industrial activity from other sectors takes place on the surface, directly on top of the same source protection zones.
Moving away from the current regulatory framework of the Environment Agency regulatory position could have dire consequences for other industries. Furthermore, if a licence has already been purchased, it may be of no use whatever. There is no chance of that company receiving its investment back. Every investment is risky—rightly so—but this will make future investment in shale exploration all the more risky than it ought to be. Changing the rules after the licences have been awarded will not increase future licence revenue.
The government amendments mean that a decision on what is groundwater area is referred to secondary legislation. Can my noble friend assure me that those concerns will be taken into consideration as the secondary legislation is formulated?
Lord Young of Norwood Green
With due respect, I do not think that is good enough. If we are going to enter into a debate in your Lordships’ House in which assertions are made that in essence the exploration of shale gas and fracking is unsafe, it ought to be backed up now with the evidence. The noble Baroness has had the opportunity to do so.
I try to enter this debate sharing the same concerns as the noble Baroness—concern for the environment and for the benefit to the public as a whole—and I do not take any assertions from the companies that might be involved in it: I go to sources such as Durham University, which is conducting an independent assessment, I look at the House of Lords report. We keep hearing assertions about earth tremors and earthquakes, but I thought we had nailed that in the last debate. There will be continuous seismic monitoring. Operations will stop if there is a tremor of 0.5, and at 0.5, believe me, the earth would not move for anybody in this Chamber, whatever they were doing, so to allege that the Government and this House are somehow colluding with an unsafe practice is totally irresponsible.
Let us remind ourselves that we are still going to be dependent on gas. By 2025, something like 70% of it is likely to be imported. Let us remind ourselves what happens with imported gas. First, it could be fracked elsewhere, where the conditions are not likely to be quite as well protected and monitored as ours are. Then it has to be liquefied, transported and then de-liquified to be put back into its gaseous state. Are we saying that is preferable to using our own resources? I do not understand that analysis and I do not think it is borne out.
Lord Truscott
Of course, not all imported gas has to come as LNG. Some can come directly through the interconnectors with the continent or through pipelines from Norway, for example.
Lord Young of Norwood Green
I thank my noble friend, but a significant amount will still be LNG and I do not think that undermines my point. I know that my noble friend Lord Truscott has lots of experience, but I must admit that I was surprised by his analysis. Even if we are sceptical, it was a British geological survey, after all, which identified 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. If we take only 10% of that as capable of being extracted, which is a reasonably modest assessment, that is something like 40 years’ supply of the gas that we use—and we are being invited to say that we should not even consider using it.
My noble friend suggested that it was all about the current price of oil and gas. Of course we should take that into account, but as he was invited to say, is he seriously thinking that companies will invest in shale exploration without any prospect of return? I talked to companies recently about this and said, “Aren’t you deterred by the current price?”. They said no, because they do not invest at today’s prices. They are talking about a plan that is likely to take five years. I do hope that the House will support the government amendment.
On protecting groundwater, of course we should be doing that. Again, I have looked at this carefully. Apart from the fact that there has been very little evidence of methane contamination from fracking, we are talking about a six-inch pipe being drilled down. When it goes through the aquifer, which is at approximately 300 to 400 feet, multiple layers of steel and concrete contain the gas on its way to the surface and prevent it escaping into surrounding rock and groundwater.
What about the myth about the chemicals? We should remind ourselves that 99.95% is just sand and water and that the 0.05% consists only of approved non-hazardous chemicals, one of which is polyacrylamide, which is used for contact lens solution. We would be unlikely to use that chemical for a solution like that if we thought that it was seriously hazardous.
I am just as concerned about the environment and the water supply as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, but I am also concerned about those who, frankly in my opinion, misapply science and deliberately distort data rather than convey to the public the facts and the independent assessment, which is what this House should be doing. On those grounds, I hope that this House will overwhelmingly support the government amendments.
High Speed 2
Lord Truscott Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Truscott (Non-Afl)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for initiating this debate. It is high time that this House had a full and lengthy debate on this very important but, in my view, flawed project. During the debate last February in your Lordships’ House, I said that I feared with HS2 we are in danger of developing a huge and costly white elephant; with an ill-thought-out business case, social disruption and a catastrophic environmental impact. Sadly, nothing I have heard or read over the subsequent months and nothing that has been said in today’s debate has changed my mind. In fact, it has hardened my opinion.
The noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Grocott, mentioned compensation. I can only guess the anguish of those affected by this scheme faced with the offer of wholly inadequate compensation or no compensation at all.
This debate is really about the supposed benefits or otherwise of HS2. We have a project that has split views more or less down the middle; it has its supporters and detractors. The ranks of the latter, however, are swelling while the cohorts of the former are visibly shrinking. Here we have a scheme whose costs seem to go ever upwards. As a number of noble Lords, have said, the Secretary of State for Transport has already increased the cost of HS2 from £33 billion to £42.6 billion, excluding the £7.5 billion for the rolling stock which has been mentioned. The Treasury predicts that this will rise to £73 billion. The noble Lord, Lord Snape, has told us that some of the people criticising HS2 are not credible. He mentioned the Institute of Economic Affairs giving a figure of £80 billion or above. I hope that the noble Lord thinks that the Treasury is a capable source, otherwise we are all in trouble. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, earlier mixed up his millions and billions, but we are talking here about tens of billions. These are indeed serious matters. On the face of it, HS2 looks like heading the way of Blue Streak and the TSR 2 programmes, both abandoned by the Ministry of Defence in the 1960s because of their spiralling costs over a number of years.
Quite apart from the fact that cross-party support faces collapse if the costs rise above £50 billion—either now or around the time of the next general election—we have to ask whether this scheme provides value for money. The Department for Transport now seems to be moving away from the benefit-to-cost ratio analysis. Now we are told to look at the bigger picture. No wonder, as the BCR is currently one pound for every one pound spent on phase 1, and the latest figures will bring it below that.
The public subsidy currently required is £33 billion. In congratulating the Minister on her appointment, I pose a question. Do the Government have a limit to how much public subsidy they are prepared to allow for HS2?
Apart from the bogus arguments about increasing passenger capacity and claiming that no one works on the trains, only 2% of rail passengers travel on the west coast main line intercity trains—the only route to benefit from phase 1 of HS2. The rest of the national network will be largely ignored. That is the reality.
The other issue rarely mentioned, but raised by my noble friend Lord Mandelson, was that HS2 will require £7.7 billion in cuts to existing rail services. The reality will be that a number of towns will experience worse services, not improved ones.
KPMG, as mentioned, reported on behalf of HS2 Limited that the country would benefit to the tune of £15 billion. What HS2 suppressed, however, was the fact that KPMG’s report also showed that many areas of the UK, such as Aberdeen, Bristol and Cardiff, would significantly lose out to HS2. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned Liverpool missing out as well. It is obvious when you think about it.
In short, we have a scheme that, if built, will primarily benefit the capital city, not the north. My noble friend Lord Mandelson, outlined that point. This has been the experience of all other high-speed trains in Europe, if we look at the lines to the capital cities Paris or Madrid. The scheme will devastate parts of our irreplaceable environment—I emphasise the word “irreplaceable”—including 67 ancient woodlands, as referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu. The scheme will not even be the best use of the money to upgrade our rail infrastructure. Targeted, more widespread, upgrades would be more effective, and I say that as a regular rail user. Worse, it will make such upgrades unaffordable in the future.
Finally, can this country afford such monumental financial recklessness when there are other, greater national priorities, not only in terms of the rail network infrastructure but also such as developing airport capacity in the south-east?
I understand from the Minister—I thank her for her Answers to some of my Written Questions—that the forecast spend for HS2 for 2013-14 is already £378 million. For 2014-15, it will be another £442 million. These are huge levels of expenditure very early on in a programme whose costs are only going up and up. In conclusion, the Government need to think again before a penny more is wasted on this mother of all follies.
Railways: High Speed 2
Lord Truscott Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Truscott
My Lords, first, I apologise for arriving late. I was given slightly different timings, but clearly the error was mine and I will read Hansard carefully and take note of what has been said. I, too, thank the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, for initiating this short debate. This is the third such debate since last summer, and no doubt there will be many more over the coming years. The compensation scheme still appears shambolic, with many thousands of people losing out by being trapped in homes they may be unable to sell. I hope that the Minister will reassure noble Lords that the Government are finally getting a grip on the situation. Perhaps he could also inform your Lordships if the property bond finds favour with the Government.
Since our last debate in February, there have been further developments. The National Audit Office’s report on HS2 is damning. The case for HS2 is not convincing and the timetable is “challenging”. The NAO said that it was unclear how the project would deliver and rebalance economic growth, particularly in the regions. The Department for Transport had not assessed the value of time-savings correctly and had knowingly used outdated data. There was a £3.3 billion funding gap and the DfT had simply got its cost-benefit ratio figures wrong. The head of the NAO summed it up thus:
“It’s too early in the High Speed 2 programme to conclude on the likelihood of its achieving value for money. Our concern at this point is the lack of clarity around the Department’s objectives”.
The response of the Secretary of State for Transport in the other place to the NAO report sounds to me as if he is losing the plot. He attacked the NAO as a “bunch of bean counters”. Quite apart from the extraordinary spectacle of a Cabinet Minister attacking a body set up by Parliament to hold government to account, I question why the Secretary of State for Transport has more faith in his own officials, whose planning and implementation to date has not been above reproach—in fact, on occasion it has been quite awful.
There is also the question of the draft environmental statement, which is disappointing. The Government’s own forestry policy statement, referred to by my noble friend Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, states that protection of our trees, woods and forests, and especially our ancient woodland, is “our top priority”. Yet the draft summary of the environmental statement states that,
“at present there are no route-wide significant effects on habitats”.
That is patently not the case. Nor will growing an extra 4 million trees, as has already been mentioned, replace the irreplaceable. That is an environmental sop.
The proposed design speed of HS2, at 400 kph, resulting in a virtually straight line between London and Birmingham, will inflict maximum damage on the environment, including the Chilterns area of outstanding natural beauty. The Chilterns AONB is now the only one along the entire route so affected. A lower design speed following existing transport corridors, as with HS1, would have a far reduced impact, along the lines of the Kent principles referred to by the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, and by my noble friend Lord Stevenson of Balmacara.
In conclusion, I hope that the Government will listen carefully to reasoned opposition on HS2 and not descend to the mindless tactic of attacking the messenger rather than addressing the serious issues raised.