Standards in Public Life

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Blunkett on his wonderful opening speech. I took away four issues—procedures, processes, transparency and trust—and many other noble Lords have spoken about these, as well. I will give the example of what I believe is a disgraceful standard in public life, as applied by the Government to HS2. I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Adonis is in his place, and I am not going to start criticising whether it is the right project or not; I am talking about its management and the way that Parliament has been misled. I hope we can have a few lessons learned.

I remind the House that this is the most expensive public sector project on the Infrastructure and Project Authority’s annual review of government projects, and it has the dubious record of having the longest run of amber/red designations—seven years—followed by a red one. That means

“successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable”.

I believe this is a good example of a project that needs regular and detailed scrutiny, instead of what we have, which is a massive, long-lasting cover-up of costs.

This week, we received from senior managers in HS2 —I think you can call them whistleblowers—85 megabytes of files, so big documents. That is interesting because, for the first time, it says that they had produced a detailed estimate of this project from the beginning. They had always denied that to me and to many others, but they have an estimate and the problem is that it came out at £48 billion, at a time when Ministers were telling the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House that the cost was £23.5 billion. It was on the basis of that £23.5 billion that the House approved phase 1 of the HS2 Bill.

Everybody knew about this; it is clear from this documentation. I can list all the people who knew about it, and it goes back to a meeting in Oxford, at the Saïd Business School. The present Prime Minister was not there—this was in 2016—and the notes of the meeting, which we have, indicate that Ministers and officials knew that the project could not completed for the figure that they had given to Parliament. Somebody wrote an email to the current Prime Minister when he was assuming leadership of the Conservative Party, saying that the cost would be over £120 billion, when they were saying it would be £20-something billion. This is a serious misleading of Parliament and a breach of the ministerial code.

I wrote to the Cabinet Secretary on 7 July, suggesting that Ministers appeared to have misled Parliament on the costs and timescale, and asked him to set up an inquiry. I also asked him to look at the role of the Permanent Secretaries at the Department for Transport, who are the accounting officers and must have known all these figures. Did they tell Ministers, as they are required to under the code, and did they ask for a letter of instruction to authorise the funding? There is no record of either.

The Cabinet Secretary passed my letter to the Department for Transport, but the Permanent Secretary there is the accounting officer. It is interesting that the Cabinet Secretary thought it the right thing for the Permanent Secretary to investigate her department’s own failings, but there we are; that is what happened. The Cabinet Secretary has now replied to me and said that the decision to investigate any matters like this rests with the Prime Minister, which goes back to what several noble Lords said, including the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Kerr.

I quote in support a comment made to me by Sir Tim Lankester, a former Permanent Secretary, who has quite a track record from the Pergau Dam issue in Malaysia, 20 or 30 years ago:

“Like you, I think the continuing deception over the costs of HS2 is an absolute disgrace. We had come to expect this from ministers, trying to protect their own backs and trying to protect the project’s credibility against mounting evidence … But what I find utterly horrible, and in some ways even worse, is the Permanent Secretary’s complicity in this deception. Her weasel words … are utterly unacceptable from a senior civil servant, or indeed from any civil servant.”


That is a very telling comment.

The project is massively over cost, at £160 billion now. One of these whistleblowers—

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Can I remind you of the five-minute limit?

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I was about to finish. The latest opening date for phase 1 is 2041, and I think this boil needs lancing. I hope the Minister, when he responds, confirms that he will pass on my comments to the Prime Minister and ask him to take some action to lance this boil.