High Speed 2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Turnbull Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Turnbull (CB)]

My Lords, at various times in government, business and private lives we find ourselves faced with a choice when things are not going well. Do we press on, having invested time, money and reputation, or do we step back and rethink? This dilemma was faced by Macbeth:

“I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

HS2 may not be in blood, but it is certainly in red ink.

What are our choices? We could press on, as a number of speakers have recommended, although we notice that Macbeth pressed on and it did not work out well for him. However, I expect that if we did, the total cost would be very high indeed and would exceed what is rumoured now. I also believe, however, that the benefits have been substantially underestimated, as I shall explain. It would not be a white elephant, but it might not be the optimal way of developing the rail network.

Alternatively, we could follow the sage of Framlingham and scrap the whole thing as too expensive and the benefits too uncertain. Supporting him are the wishful thinkers, who believe that the internet makes HS2 unnecessary. The web, however, has been around for 30 years and the appetite for rail track in that time has grown significantly. There are also people who I call “the fudgers”, who believe that it could all be achieved by upgrading existing structures—longer platforms, longer trains, better seating and all that stuff. But we have tried that already on west coast main line. It brought some improvements but also a decade of disruption to existing services.

The problem with this approach is that the original railway lines use one line for all types of service: express, commuter, cross-region and freight. The beauty of the modern lines is that long-distance passenger traffic is given a dedicated line, producing not just faster speed but greater reliability and punctuality. When I make a journey in this country, I am absolutely fed up of always having to go for the train in front of the one I really need because I want to be on time.

The present plan was always meant to increase capacity, but it was heavily oversold on the basis of speed, hence its misleading name: high-speed rail. More importantly, however, the benefits were largely measured in time savings for business passengers. HS2 has been the victim of railway engineers’ hubris; they want a line not only as good as the continental railways but one that could get up to 400 kilometres per hour. Physics will tell you that the cost of building the track and the energy needed to drive the train rise sharply as speed increases. A maximum speed of about 300 kilometres per hour is quite sufficient for our landscape. HS2 has been planned for a densely populated area, running for roughly 200 miles from north to south and for 100 miles from east to west. There is just no room to get up to these very high speeds before you have to slow down.

What should we do? The first thing is to merge the separate brands HS2 and Northern Rail, creating instead a single plan for rail modernisation. This should be developed in a sequence that produces most benefit fastest, and starting where the current service is worst. I was told that my granddaughter got on a Pacer train the other day, turned to her mother and said, “What on earth is this?” I have never been on a Pacer train myself and I do not look forward to it.

Secondly, we have to identify the benefits fully. They are not just speed; the most important productivity gains come from widening the range over which families can access work—their travel-to-work area—and widening the range over which businesses can recruit talent. Then we have to identify and take account of the value of changes in land use. This is crucial. It is disgraceful that the response from the Minister admits that this third dimension has not been adequately covered, but offers no serious effort to correct it. This revamp of the methodology of the cost-benefit analysis is very important.

We also need to change the mindset. Rather than trying to reduce a journey time of one hour and 50 minutes to, say, one hour and 20 minutes, we should focus on maximising how far people can travel in a given amount of time. I would suggest 50 minutes, which is the average commuting time.

All this leads to the following conclusions. It was a strategic error to start with the part of the route that has most recently been modernised. We are now at the stage where the present phase 1, from Old Oak Common north to Birmingham, should go ahead but, thereafter, we need to give greater priority to connecting the major cities of the north, from Liverpool to Hull and the cities in between. Then, in the decades after that, these lines should be linked back to London. The present proposal adopts the opposite sequence: the communities that need improvement most urgently are at the back of the queue.

We come now to the question of Euston, and here we should stop and think. Euston is a terminus station and, as has been pointed out, these are inherently inefficient. You bring a train in and it is 20 or 30 minutes before you can use that platform again. When eventually the new network reaches London, it should go into the centre and out the other side. There is already a proposal for this, called Cross City Connect, or CCC—I hope noble Lords will look that up. I am in the camp that believes that Old Oak Common can provide, via Crossrail, links to many parts of London that are superior to those from Euston itself, while this rethink takes place.

Will the Government have the courage to make these changes? I do not know, but the appointment of a former chairman of the project, assisted by officials in the Department for Transport, to conduct the review—that is, to mark their own homework—is not encouraging. But if the Government can screw up the courage, the end result could be a project that may well cost more than the original estimates but which would yield much greater benefits much earlier and to more people, starting with those who need it most, and would help to close the yawning divide between north and south.