HS2 Funding Referendum Bill

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Gillan]

I assure the Minister that I have never had any poverty of ambition either for my constituency or my country in all the years I have served both. He is claiming that the costs have now come down on phase 1. Will he tell us the new cost-benefit ratio?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The Bill suggests that we pose this question in a referendum:

“Do you support the use of …taxpayers’ money to pay for the construction of the HS2 railway?”

We are now drifting well away from the subject of the referendum and the total costs. We are discussing not the individual costs, Minister and Mrs Gillan, but that principle. I am listening carefully to the Minister, who could never be accused of not being ambitious and confident. I would like him ambitiously and confidently to return to the central proposition of whether there should be a referendum.

[Mr Hayes]

rose—

[Mrs Gillan]

I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker; I have been leading the Minister astray. However, my points have been in the interests of the taxpayers who would be consulted in the referendum. I do apologise.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

No apology is necessary; I am sure that nobody could lead the Minister astray even with the skills you show in representing your constituents, Mrs Gillan. Your points may be relevant, but we have been discussing only the minutiae and we need to return to the big picture.

[Mr Hayes]

If I may say so, Madam Deputy Speaker, you have done me a great service as well as the House—and not for the first time. Until now your generosity in allowing me to range widely has moved me. I anticipated that you would want me to return to the core of the Bill, and I will do so without further delay.

The core of the Bill is the proposal that a project—in this case HS2, but it could be any large infrastructure project—should proceed only on the basis of a further reference to the British people through a referendum. I flatly disagree with that, and it will not be accepted by the Government.

I was about to come to the end of my introductory remarks, but I am now inclined to make them my concluding remarks, given your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am minded to draw, as I briefly did earlier, on Edmund Burke, who said in 1774:

“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Weigh those words—

“if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

In other words, the representative must not lack the confidence, vigour, energy and vision to make a case on behalf of his constituents for the common good and in the national interest. It has been the business of this House for more than 150 years to usher in some of the greatest projects that the world has ever seen. Those include the railways built by the Victorians, which have stood the test of time and still prove themselves as the veins and arteries of this country. In their day, the same criticisms were made.

I have the railways Acts of 1833 and 1837 with me here today. I have seen the Second Reading debates. I know the criticisms faced by those who proposed that first generation of great railways—those big infrastructure projects; they were very like the criticisms made in the House today. Those debates were very like those that we have enjoyed about whether these things represent a threat or an opportunity. Those politicians, those Victorian leaders and those Governments did not duck their responsibility—they did what Britain needed. Today we remain grateful for their decisions, because we still benefit from them.

Let me be clear: the west coast main line, which despite having been upgraded since those Victorian times, has at last reached its capacity. Even on moderate forecasts, that line—the nation’s key rail corridor—will be full by the mid-2020s, despite the £9 billion-worth of improvements in recent years. We cannot continue to make do and mend. We must make a bold decision worthy of our nation’s future, in the spirit of those great leaders of the past, as ambitious and confident for the next generation as they were for us. As parliamentarians, we are elected to serve not only the constituents that live now but those yet to come, for the decisions we take will affect them too.

We have a duty to support this kind of infrastructural investment—to make the difference, to shape the future, not to hesitate to do the right thing—and that is precisely what we will do. That is why I ask the House to reject the arguments, however well meant and well articulated, made by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, and reject the Bill he has put before us.