East West Rail: Bedford to Cambridge

Anthony Browne Excerpts

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship in this important debate, Sir Mark, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) on securing it. We have had many discussions about this issue over the years, including with my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner). My constituency is literally in between the constituencies of Cambridge and North East Bedfordshire —they border mine on either side—and both Members’ excellent speeches raised both the pros and the cons of East West Rail, which affects my constituency.

My job is to represent the views of my constituents, which are very split. There are those who are massively in favour. Cambourne, which the hon. Member for Cambridge mentioned, is the only town in my constituency that will be affected by East West Rail, and the people there are very frustrated at how long it takes to get into Cambridge city. A lot of them work there, and it can them an hour to get there on the train. A station is being built at Cambridge South, which the Rail Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman), visited recently. It will take the people of Cambourne 11 minutes to get there, and 14 minutes to get to Cambridge Central, which will be transformative for their lives. The business groups and the university are in favour of the new line, and they regularly write to me about their support for it.

On the other hand, there are villages along the line where it is all downside and no upside, such as Haslingfield, Harston, the Eversdens, Hauxton and so on. They will suffer a railway line going right through them, and probably the worst affected will be Highfields Caldecote, where the rail line will clip the corner of the village. The housing being built there now will presumably have to be knocked down. I had a very impassioned email from Jason Western, who runs the Fortitude Fitness Centre, which is an outdoor assault course. He has built it up over 20 years, and the railway line will go right the way through it, affecting a lot of jobs. I can completely understand the distress that it will cause to people like that.

I want to address whether the East West Rail line is needed at all. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire made so many good points that there is not a huge amount I can add, but I also want to raise some of the main issues. Since being elected as an MP, I have been in discussion with the Government about whether the line is needed, and there have been various wobbles. I was told at one point that it had been cancelled and that we were just awaiting the announcement. I was awaiting the announcement, which did not come, and now it has been re-announced. That was because the calculation at the time was done under the Green Book methodology—the standard transport methodology, which my hon. Friend referred to—which produces benefit-cost ratios of just 0.27. That is astonishingly poor—so poor that we would never build a transport project like that. However, East West Rail has come up with a new methodology—the “theory of change”, which he referred to. It is not from the Green Book but from the Magenta Book, and it talks about the impact of the line on overall growth in the area. The project has certainly mutated from helping people to travel more quickly from Cambourne to Cambridge, to helping to supercharge growth in the area.

I do not know quite where it fits in my hon. Friend’s ranking, but I know that the growth of housing in South Cambs over the last 20 years has been about three times the national average, or maybe even higher. In the district of South Cambs, there are three new towns. I laugh when my colleagues complain about a new town or 500 houses, because I have tens of thousands of new houses in my constituency. There are already plans to build 57,000 new houses over the next 20 years, which is as many as in Cambridge city at the moment. We will be doubling the number over the next 20 years—that is what is planned at the moment.

East West Rail’s business case is clearly predicated on massive housing growth. That growth—this is all hidden in the small print, which is so small that I cannot read it but have to interpret it—is based on 23,500 new houses in Cambourne and 19,000 in Tempsford, just south of St Neots. I do not know whether that is in addition to the housing that has already been planned or whether it is included in the previous figures, which makes a huge difference. Such growth has a huge impact on neighbouring villages, such as the gorgeous little village of Knapwell, with only 45 houses. Knapwell is very remote, and its residents are quite understandably worried about being completely swallowed up. As various Members have mentioned, we also have to worry about all the soft infrastructure when building on that extraordinary scale.

One binding constraint is not mentioned at all in the 2,000 pages of East West Rail documentation. Although we have not read it all, we have done word searches. I entered the word “water” to find that it only appears in the name Waterbeach, which is one of the new towns. This is not some sort of made-up environmental issue, whereby we are worried about things in 20 or 50 years’ time; we do not have enough water in South Cambridge to serve the current housing and agriculture. We have an aquifer, so all the water comes in locally and is not piped in from the rest of the country, but we use more each year than is replenished naturally by rainfall, so the water level drops. The ponds, rivers and streams get completely dried out in the summer, which is terrible for wildlife. We are already building all these houses, and the Environment Agency is very concerned that we just do not have enough water, even for the houses on existing projections. I hate to think what those toilets and showers will be like without water.

East West Rail and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs really need to be joined up on water supply. There is a plan at some point to build a reservoir in the Fens and pipe the water down, but the existing planning structure means that it will probably not be for 20 years or more. Will that provide enough water for all this housing? Will we need two new reservoirs? How will it fit in? It really needs to be joined up, because we simply cannot build the housing envisaged in this document without the water supply. We need to think about that.

I would love to see the proper business case. We keep being told that it will come at some point, but who is responsible for its delivery? Is it the Department for Transport, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, or DEFRA? Who will oversee it? Who will be responsible for the spatial plan? Will it be the local authority? There has previously been discussion of development corporations, about which I made my views incredibly clear. I am not opposed to development corporations in all situations, but if they are not about press releases, they are about solving a problem that we cannot solve in any other way. In this case, development corporations should only be used as a solution to an existing problem. I cannot see that that would be the case, so I see no case for development corporations.

As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire mentioned, one of the main concerns locally is the exact design. The 2,000 pages contain no detail about what the railway line will look like: no schematics, no visions, and no drawings or visualisations. It is difficult for the villagers impacted by the line to appreciate how it will affect them. For people living right by this thing, that is incredibly important to know, and makes all the difference. I will come to some of the issues for the individual villages in a minute.

My final main point is about the property blight. I mentioned my constituent who has a fitness centre, but there are lots of people whose properties have been quite severely blighted by the plan, including those who had just moved in when they found that the railway would be built next to them and they could not move away again.

My hon. Friend mentioned that East West Rail had been quite proactive. I have been strongly pushing it to address the blight issue way ahead of the statutory requirement, because the law operates far too much in favour of the infrastructure and not householders. It has introduced a scheme to help people buy properties beforehand if they want to move, but they have to prove they have a reason to move and go through a whole load of hurdles. It should at least be geographically defined, so that if people live within a certain distance of the railway, they can automatically sell their house.

The other issue is the need for additional compensation. Our compensation for compulsory purchase in the UK is not generous enough. The value of a house is not just its market value. My constituent has built up his business over 20 years—who knows the value of that piece of land? I do not know whether he has planning permission, but he will have to end up moving his business, and that is a huge disruption. I know of many homeowners who have built up their houses over 20 years and made it a forever home but will suddenly have to sell it. I urge the Department for Transport to look at giving people 10% or 20% above the value of those houses, because it is not fair on them to say, “You’ve got to move. We’re just going to give you the market rate.”

I want to put on record some of the impacts along the route, because these are questions that my constituents and their various campaign groups are asking. There are lots of campaign groups in my constituency, such as Cambridge Approaches, that are doing valuable and important work on this. I mentioned Highfields Caldecote, where the railway line is literally going through the top end of the village. Is it going under the A428 at that point, which is what East West Rail says? I cannot see how it can do that, because the A428 is pretty sunken underground already. At one point, there was going to be a huge embankment 30 feet in the air. Will it be at that level, or will there be a cutting? If it is under the A428, which is right next to it, there would have to be a cutting. This makes a huge difference to people, but there is no information about it.

In the villages of Great and Little Eversden, will there be an embankment at ground level or a cutting? Again, there is no information about that. The line goes through Chapel Hill, which is an iconic local hill where we get fantastic views across South Cambridgeshire, and it is called Chapel Hill because of its historic significance. Will that be fully cut into, which was the original plan, or will it be tunnelled? I hear lots of suggestions that it will be tunnelled, but without any concrete commitment. If it is tunnelled, would it be cut and covered or bored?

There is a possible road closure between Harlton and Haslingfield. Would that be cut and severed? Would the villages be separated? In Harston, will it go over the A10—the main road into the south of Cambridge—or under it? We have no information about that. Would the junction with the King’s Cross line at Harston be a grade separated junction? Would the railway be taken right up into the air and back down again, or could it be done at grade level, which would have far less impact?

What about the road between Harston and Newton? That is not just a road between the villages; they share shops and a school. The people of the village of Newton—which is next to the village I grew up in and has a fantastic pub, the Queen’s Head—would not be able to go directly to Harston. It would be incredibly disruptive to their lives, and the last plans published said that the road would be severed.

The railway line goes between the villages of Hauxton and Little Shelford, and there is currently a level crossing. Department for Transport guidance now is that there should not be any new level crossings, so how will it be done? There is housing right by it. Will it be tunnelled? Will it be bridged? The people there are really worried that the road will be cut in two.

In Great Shelford, as we get into Cambridge, will four-tracking be required? Will the Long Road bridge have to be taken apart? Will Shepreth branch junction at Great Shelford be grade separated? Again, if it is, that will have a dramatic impact on the village, because the railway line will have to be taken right up into the air and back down. If it is grade separated, how would that be done?

There are so many questions about this, and I wanted to put them on the record. I have been trying to get answers out of East West Rail. It needs to do a lot more work on mitigation; I know that it has done quite a bit already, and I commend it on that, but clearly it has not got there yet. Where full mitigation is not possible, I urge the Government to look at how properly to compensate people for the loss of their homes and businesses, not just at the market rate before the railway was proposed but for the damage, loss of amenity and so on.

Finally, the Government need to review the whole issue of housing. Whatever the arguments for East West Rail in terms of making it easier for people to travel from Cambourne to Cambridge, it cannot be used as an excuse to increase the amount of house building, which is already one of the highest rates in the country, and there is absolutely no water. I urge the Government to address all these topics.