High Speed Rail (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill: Revival

Robert Largan Excerpts

Carry-over motion & Bill reintroduced & Bill reintroduced: House of Commons & motion to revive Bill: House of Commons
Monday 2nd March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dr Mullan]

Absolutely. It is not either/or; it is about working together. High Speed North is a rebranding and a new way of organising this—we should firmly hammer that point home—and it is about making this project one that is led in the northern regions by the northern regions, for the northern regions. I welcome that change in the governance.

[Robert Largan (High Peak) (Con)]

Further to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford) pointed out, people in London were not forced to choose between Crossrail and Crossrail 2. It is completely wrong to try to force people in the north to choose between HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and other key infrastructure projects.

[Dr Mullan]

Absolutely. Inevitably, projects overrun. That is unfortunate and not something that we welcome, but they do, and the fact that this has overrun should not mean that we therefore cancel it, because other people have not had to make the same choice in the south.

HS2 is a fantastic opportunity for Crewe. We have an amazing heritage and enormous local expertise in the rail industry. Crewe is and has always been a fantastic railway town. Passing the Bill and the delivery of the railway will create thousands of skilled jobs in Crewe for people helping to build the railway line.

I understand the concerns about the natural environment and I commend colleagues from constituencies where the impact will be greatest for speaking up on behalf of their residents. That is absolutely the right thing for them to do, but as I mentioned, any new major railway line connecting our cities and towns will have some degree of environmental impact. That is inevitable. We must be realistic about whether some of the strongest critics—they are not all in this House; some are outside this place—will ever really be satisfied. If we listen too closely to the voices of opposition in terms of trees and the environment, we will put a moratorium on creating major new rail and road infrastructure in this country, and that cannot be the right decision.

It is simply not feasible to suggest that we can deliver significant new capacity on our railway networks through a piecemeal approach. Network Rail estimates that it would take almost 30 years of weekend closures for even less of a result in terms of increased capacity. When this was last done on the west coast main line, the budget exploded. It might be harder to track and there might be fewer newspaper-worthy headline figures, but hundreds of smaller projects are at just as big a risk of overrunning and overspending. We need to get better at controlling costs when building infrastructure, full stop. The answer is not to halt the big-ticket items where the failings are most easily seen, because they are there on small projects, too. It is just not so easy for a journalist to add up the figures over 100 different projects and put that in a newspaper. We should not listen to that kind of criticism; it is not valid.

I recognise the significant costs involved, but this is being spent across two decades. It will work out as approximately £4.4 billion a year. The context of the timescales is too often lost when we use the headline figure. Network Rail spends around £6 billion a year on maintaining and making much smaller upgrades to our rail network, and we are planning to spend £40 billion over the next five years on other projects outside HS2. The idea that we could build a brand-new major railway line for much less than the £6 billion a year already being spent is fantasy. Let’s be ambitious for our nation. Let’s look forward, not down at our feet, get on with delivering this project and send the message to the world that the UK is open for business.

Transport

Robert Largan Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a huge pleasure and privilege to follow our new colleague the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali), who spoke with passion about some incredibly important issues. I was particularly pleased to hear him talk about National Apprenticeship Week. So many of us have had opportunities to interact with it in Parliament this week, and will continue to do so when we are back in our constituencies in a couple of days. The hon. Gentleman’s own career is clearly a very impressive back story, and I think it is abundantly obvious to all of us that he will be a great asset to this place.

Climate change is the defining challenge of our age. Although there is still so much to be done, we can take some pride in the fact that this country has been decarbonising faster than comparable countries in the G20. Much the greatest part of that reduction so far has been our success on energy supply; transport is now the sector with the most emissions, and we must therefore prioritise it strongly.

I do not know where the figures in the Labour party’s manifesto come from, although, to be fair, not knowing where the figures come from is hardly a novel experience with today’s Labour party. I challenged the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), the shadow Secretary of State, to say what had happened to transport emissions under the Labour Government, but he declined to engage in that conversation. I can tell him that, in fact, they rose in the 10 years after Labour came to power in 1997. At the time of the financial crash of 2007-08 they did fall dramatically, but for all the wrong reasons. Then, when we returned to government and started to rebuild the economy and build up employment, they rose from their level in 2012-13, but not to anywhere near the level to which the Labour Government had taken them in 2007.

It turns out that, although our success on energy is something of a stand-out story, our experience of transport emissions being stubborn and difficult to reduce is rather more common in other countries. The European Environment Agency has added together domestic emissions and international aviation emissions, and has found that between 1990 and 2017—the latest period for which it has figures—the change in transport emissions in the UK was basically the same as that in France, and comparable with what happened in Germany. Only Liechtenstein experienced substantial decreases in its transport emissions, and I am afraid that in the EU28 as a whole they rose by 28%.

[Robert Largan (High Peak) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way—he is very generous. Does he agree that one way of reducing transport emissions would be to site train stations in areas to which people can walk rather than drive? As the Rail Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), is listening, may I now make a pitch for a new station for Gamesley?

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend has made a good point about walking. Along with cycling, it is an important part of the picture, as are buses, which so many Members have mentioned today. I hope that the potential for “on demand” buses will benefit constituencies such as mine. We have also talked about rail electrification. As for heavy goods vehicles, there is a strong link with the development of autonomous vehicles. I am pleased that the UK continues to take a strong line internationally on aviation and shipping; it is important to remember that the targets for international aviation and shipping are set internationally.

We have heard more this week—encouragingly, I think —about alternative jet fuel technologies. As was mentioned by both my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) and the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), hydrogen remains potentially a very exciting technology for the future. However, the single most important element in transport is roads, and within that it is cars. In 2018, this country was the second largest European market for ultra low emission cars and the fourth largest for battery electric cars, and a fifth of the battery electric cars sold in Europe were made here. We now have far more charging points—over 22,000—and a penetration of rapid charging points relative to the extent of the road network that compares very favourably with the continent of Europe. Of course, there are many Government subsidies and support programmes that go with that.

We clearly need to do more, however. We had a debate in Westminster Hall the other day in which I talked a lot about how we can try to help consumers through questions about cost and help them to understand that it is important to look at the whole-life cost, particularly now that so many people are getting their vehicle through personal contract hire rather than buying it, even on finance. That comparison should be a lot easier. Clearly, we need to carry on working on the infrastructure network and do more on roaming, interoperability and the visibility of charging points. We also need to ensure that new homes have charging facilities. In my discussion with the Minister in Westminster Hall, I also mentioned that we need to do more on last-mile deliveries, given the huge growth in home shopping. Amazon lockers are great for Amazon, but that is a proprietary system. Can we start to use our post office network as a hub and spoke facility? That would be a good way of reducing the need for last-mile journeys as well as bringing useful footfall and business into post offices.

I will finish now because I know that others want to speak. It is possible to recognise that there is a huge amount to do while also recognising the progress that has been made. People need to know that we in this place understand the gravity of the problem, but also that we are committed, together, to doing what is necessary, and that we can and will do that. It would be so much better if we could return to doing that on the basis of the cross-party consensus that we have had in the past.