High Speed 2 Compensation
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Michael Fabricant(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Ind)
I commend the hon. Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) for securing this debate.
The motion states:
“That this House calls on the Government to provide compensation to people who have been affected by the construction of HS2.”
I take a bit of exception to the word “construction”. There has been a great deal of cost and a great deal of injury, especially for the taxpayer. In my constituency, 22 miles of which have been affected by blight for more than a decade, there is certainly plenty of injury and need for compensation, but there has never been any actual construction.
As the House knows, HS2—the second project of the high-speed rail system—was initiated by the Labour Government before the 2010 election. I think it was Lord Adonis’s little pet project, which he formulated on the back of a fag packet as a gimmick for the Labour manifesto, but unfortunately George Osborne picked it up and ran with it.
Michael Fabricant
Did the hon. Gentleman know that before Lord Adonis got his grubby hands on it, a design for HS2 was made by Arup? HS2 would have connected with HS1, and would have gone into major transport hubs such as Birmingham New Street and Manchester Piccadilly. It would have been possible to travel directly from Manchester Piccadilly to France without any changes at all, and do you know what? It would have been cheaper as well, because there would have been no tunnelling through the Chilterns.
Andrew Bridgen
If we were to debate the many failings of HS2, we would need more than the time available today. That will be for another debate, and I have no doubt that the Government have learned lessons, as they always do, but they will have been very expensive lessons for the taxpayer. HS2 is the white elephant that got ever bigger on taxpayers’ money. I opposed the project before it even started. I voted and spoke against it at every opportunity for a decade, but the elephant got ever larger.
My constituents let out a collective sigh of relief when phase 2b was finally dispatched. Today’s debate is about compensation, which is defined as an award, normally money, paid in recognition of loss, suffering and injury. Although my constituency did not see any HS2 construction, we certainly had plenty of loss, suffering and injury. We had 10 years of blight, with an area the width of two football fields, running the whole length of the constituency—22 miles—being sterilised.
Countless houses were never built and at least one factory, at the Lounge coal washing site, had to be cancelled—that factory would have created 1,200 jobs. We have had this blight for 10 years. My constituency is fortunate to have the highest economic growth in the country, but that economic growth and prosperity would have been far greater without the blighted land running through the middle of the constituency for more than 10 years.
What compensation can the Minister offer my constituents? Some of them went to their grave, and the biggest worry in their life was that HS2 was supposed to be going through their back garden. I reassured them that it was never going to happen. Despite all the bull and bluster from the Government, it was always going to run out of money. When the route was announced in 2013, I said it was going to end up costing over £100 billion —it is in Hansard—and the House laughed. It was right to laugh, because it was not £100 billion, was it? It was £160 billion at its peak.
The hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) is right that the project was supposed to move people seamlessly around the country. As the Government could never afford to get HS2 into city centres because of its burgeoning costs, they quickly ended up aiming to move people from nearly London to nearly Birmingham. If phase 2 had proceeded, it would have gone to nearly Manchester. I do not know anyone who wants to go from nearly London to nearly Birmingham, but the project had to continue.
HS2 has blighted my North West Leicestershire constituency, but I want to talk about one community in particular. The village of Measham was the most affected settlement on the planned route. Nowhere south of Measham had the number of houses and businesses that would have been disrupted, without any mitigation. Knowing it is one of the most deprived communities in my constituency, we had a regeneration plan to work with a fantastic company called Measham Land, through which 450 desirable new houses were going to be built on wasteland in the middle of the village. Working with the Ashby Canal Trust, it was going to fund regeneration projects, including two aqueducts, to bring the canal back to Measham, with a café culture around a large basin at the end of the canal system where people could bring their longboats. There was going to be huge investment in the village until HS2 was announced.
The route went straight through the middle of the Measham Land site. The regeneration of Measham has been delayed for 10 years. The people of Measham have suffered loss and injury, but where is the compensation? Okay, the regeneration will now go ahead, but it is 10 years late. The project would have been completed by now. We have seen that all along the route, not just in my constituency.
Who else has been injured? I will declare an interest: I am probably the only Member of Parliament who had to sell their house to HS2—a house that I bought in 2011. It was a substantial Georgian rectory with outbuildings and 14 acres of grounds, and I was forced by a judge to sell it under the extreme hardship scheme. I sold it in 2015 to HS2. Being a Member of Parliament, I thought, “I can’t deal with HS2 myself, so I’ll employ some consultants to deal with it, so that it’s an arm’s length transaction.” They charged me £25,000. It took 18 months, and I went through the system. I explained to the Government afterwards how HS2 has swindled everybody along the line with its property prices, and I will explain to the House how it is done.
It appears to be a transparently fair system, but I can assure hon. and right hon. Members that it most certainly is not, given the psychology behind it. Everybody along the whole route is presented with the same options. If HS2 wants to buy a property or someone has to sell their property—whether it is land, a factory or a dwelling—for various reasons, they will be offered a list of 10 valuers by HS2. The valuers will be mainly London estate agents, of whom the seller will have no knowledge. They may know the names—some of the very big estate agencies are on the list of 10 valuers—but it will be dealt with by the London offices, with which people in the midlands or the north are unlikely to have ever had any contact. They will be asked to choose one of the valuers to value their property, and HS2 will choose another, which sounds pretty transparently fair. They will both come to the property, land or factory to do an valuation. If the valuations are within 10% of each other, HS2 will say, “Let’s split the difference and call that the valuation.”
On paper, that sounds very fair, but think about the psychology of it. Those 10 valuers are the valuers for the whole route. They will only ever work for an individual who chooses them at random, because no seller has any knowledge of them whatsoever—it is a purely random choice. By choosing a valuer, someone has done all they can for them; the valuer will get paid their fee from HS2 for doing the valuation. But what the valuers on the list all want to be is the valuer that gets chosen every time by HS2. Given the pressure from the burgeoning costs of the project and the evidence given by whistleblowers who have left the land procurement side of HS2, which of the valuers do hon. and right hon. Members think HS2 will choose on the next occasion: the valuer who puts in the highest price to buy my house and land from me, or the valuer who puts in the lowest price for my property and land? The fact is that the system used by HS2 was always going to drive down the land and property prices paid to those affected by the route, and it is provable that that is exactly what it did.
There have been two notable whistleblowers who have left HS2, and I have spoken to both of them over the years. A former director of HS2, Doug Thornton, was put in charge of planning and performance. He was later put in charge of a £2.8 billion project to acquire all the land and properties that were needed along parts of the route. He went back to HS2 and said, “£2.8 billion is not enough. You can’t make a budget and just say we’re going to buy all the land and buildings for £2.8 billion.” He said it was nearer £4.8 billion, but he was told that he had to buy them for that price. Does that sound like HS2 was ever paying a fair price for the properties it needed to acquire along the route?
I have also recently spoken to Andrew Bruce, who was in charge of buying land and properties for HS2 until 2016. He had told his superiors that they had never paid a fair market price for any of the land and buildings that he bought while he was there, and he was asked to shred a report that he had done on that.
The two whistleblowers suffered loss and injury as well, because I am told that they were unable to get another job in the industry after they whistleblew on the practices that they experienced in HS2. They might need some compensation as well. We should protect whistleblowers, because without them we would still have a continuation of the Horizon/Post Office scandal. I maintain that individuals and communities have been damaged by HS2, and I would be interested to know what compensation the village of Measham will get, and what we are going to do for every householder and landowner along that route, who I can prove did not get the right price.
The Minister has promised me a meeting twice in the last two months, and I still do not have a date for it. I really hope that he will come through for me. I hope that lessons have been learned by HS2 and the Government. It has been a week of scandals— Horizon/Post Office, the loan charge, HS2—and the Government have not covered themselves in glory.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
I thank my near neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) for introducing this debate. We have heard a catalogue of problems from various colleagues here on both sides of the House. The sad thing is that they are not unique. They are repeated up and down the country.
When I was a Whip, I instituted a system—I am looking at my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards), who is the Whip, to see whether this system still operates—where we would look at our Members of Parliament to see how many staff they got through in a short period, because clearly there was a problem if someone could not hold on to their staff for long. We would think that the Minister or Back Bencher in question was seriously flawed in some way. How many chairmen and chief executives has HS2 gone through? It has gone through a lot, because they are flawed in a serious way; they are dysfunctional.
Andrew Bridgen
That is made even more amazing by the fact that they have gone through all these senior staff at HS2, and yet it is the highest paid role in the civil service.
Michael Fabricant
It is extraordinary, and it just demonstrates what an organisation this is—not only dysfunctional, but unfair. In an intervention, I talked about my constituent Siân Froggatt, who is not being allowed to reclaim land that was compulsorily taken from her, even though the land is now not needed because the railway is not going ahead on phase 2a. I might add that she is still waiting to be paid—waiting to be paid, and still unable able to reclaim that land.
I took the opportunity of looking at my cellphone during the debate, not because I was looking at tractors or anything like that, but because I was doing some research about the Crichel Down rules. It says on the Government’s own website that
“The Crichel Down Rules require government departments… to offer back surplus land to the former owner or the former owner’s successors at the current market value.”
It has to be offered back to the same people. Not only is it not being offered back at a reasonable price, but it is often not being offered back to the same people.
I came in at the very last moment to speak in this debate, so I will not take up a great deal of time. I will listen with interest to the Minister’s response, which I suspect might be the same as the answer he gave yesterday in a different debate regarding the Handsacre junction, which happens to be in my constituency. I ask that in these dying days of HS2—dying days in one way or another—the Government get a grip and ensure that, just we asked in the previous debate, justice is done for our constituents. The sense of justice we have in this nation extends not only to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, as in the previous debate, but to HS2 Limited in this one.