High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill

Cheryl Gillan Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr McLoughlin]

I will give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), but then I must make some progress.

[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way while he is laying out his case. However, the case he is making for HS2 fails to recognise that there will still have to be an awful lot of work on our classic railway. It would be wrong if he did not tell people that the west coast main line is crumbling and will still need major investment and repairs, and that our classic railway will suffer. I hope that the money will be there for those railways, too.

[Mr McLoughlin]

I do not think that I have been misleading. I have been very open about the west coast main line. I do not think it is crumbling—as I have said, there has been £10 billion upgrade on the line north of Rugby. Between 2014 and 2019, we shall be spending £38 billion on the existing railway network, on things such as the electrification of the midland main line and a number of other schemes that I have already mentioned.

Even on moderate forecasts, services will be increasingly full by the mid-2020s. If we do not create extra capacity, people at stations such as Milton Keynes and Northampton will have to queue to get on a train to get to work. That is despite the £9 billion that we have spent on the west coast main line in recent years. More upgrades like that will not provide the extra capacity that we need. A new north-south railway line is the right answer. From day one, it will improve journey times and train services to Manchester and to the north-west and Scotland, because HS2 trains will continue on the existing network. It will free up more space for commuters and freight on existing routes, and places up and down the country will benefit from more services and seats. Although it is too early to talk about precise timetables, Milton Keynes, an area of particularly close interest for my Parliamentary Private Secretary, could get 11 trains an hour to London compared with six now, and places such as Rugby would get more non-stop journeys to London.

Today's debate is about phase 1, but when it is complete HS2 will be a wider network. We have consulted on phase 2, and I know that many Members have a strong interest in ensuring that we get the plans right. That should include serving cities on the eastern leg through the east midlands, Sheffield and Leeds as well as the north-west, and we will set out more details later this year.

Of course we must design HS2 well and build it carefully, which means making sure that our young people have the skills to get the engineering jobs it will create. We have therefore announced plans for the first new further education college in 20 years, backed by HS2. Soon we shall announce the winning location for the central facility and a network of outposts. I know that many places are keen to take part, such as Aylesbury college, Manchester and Birmingham.

One of the things that matters most about HS2 is the huge opportunity it offers to the next generation. There will be 2,000 apprenticeships—not just one-off jobs building the line, but careers. The numbers involved mean that we will take the skills base in this country to a new level, so the country will not only be better connected but better trained with the skills we need to compete not only in transport but across a range of industries. This is not just investment in steel and rolling stock; it is a huge investment in our people across the nation.

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[Mr McLoughlin]

I am not sure what point the right hon. Gentleman is trying to make. If we only built infrastructure projects when we had the support of everyone concerned, we would be building very little infrastructure in this country.

[Mrs Gillan]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for acknowledging that some parts of the country will take all the pain of this project but get none of the gain, unlike with the M40, which benefited Buckinghamshire and contributed to its economy by enabling people to get on and off it. I hope he is not ruling out looking at further mitigation, particularly for the area of outstanding natural beauty, which concerns not only my constituency but that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington). If one is to have environmental credentials, it is important to protect our environment to the highest degree when implementing projects of this nature.

[Mr McLoughlin]

Of the 20.8 km of the route that passes through the Chilterns, only 3.3 km will be on the surface—at the moment the rest will be below ground level. I understand my right hon. Friend’s point, and that is something we need to bear in mind. She is right that her constituents benefited directly from the M40, and that was paid for by taxpayers across the whole country, rather than just by those in that area. I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main), as she has not yet intervened.

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[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “That” to the end of the Question and add:

“this House, while accepting the need to increase overall railway capacity, declines to give a second reading to the Bill because there has been inadequate opportunity for Members and those affected by the Bill to consider and respond to the report of the Assessor appointed under Standing Order 224A, which was not published until shortly before the Easter recess; because assessments of the relative costs and benefits of works envisaged by the Bill have been repeatedly unconvincing and still fail to demonstrate a sound economic case for the proposed works, particularly in relation to other options; because the Secretary of State has declined to publish the Major Projects Authority report on High Speed 2, with the result that Members have been denied access to highly significant evidence on the viability of the project; because the case for starting further high-speed rail construction in this country with a line from London to the West Midlands rather than in the north of England has not been convincingly made out; because the Bill will cause widespread environmental disruption to many areas of the country including areas of outstanding natural beauty; and because the Bill should be preceded by proper consideration of and a strategy for integrating high-speed rail with other transport modes including the UK’s international airport hubs.”

This cross-party amendment commences by stating that we accept the need to increase overall railway capacity, and I make my remarks against that background. It is good to follow the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), but I am afraid my speech will break the cosy consensus over this project between those on the two Front Benches, which will be no surprise to anybody in this Chamber.

It has been four years since Labour first announced HS2, and I want to thank the vast armies of people from all the conservation groups, including the Chiltern Countryside group and the Chilterns Conservation board, lobby groups such as HS2 Action Alliance, district and parish councils, individuals, and volunteer engineers and county councillors, who have contributed to trying to put this project under scrutiny. In Buckinghamshire I am most grateful for the support of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington), and to Mr Speaker himself. All our constituencies are affected by this project.

I believe that more than 50 Members have applied to speak about this project, and in the short time available I hope to register the risks associated with it and the pain and anguish that it continues to bring to so many people, and to ask the House whether this is really the top priority and the best way to spend £50 billion of taxpayers’ money. I started as a nimby, but over time I have come to look at this project and I do not believe it is the answer to the UK’s transport issues.

Let us consider some of those issues. Originally, the costs totalled about £20 billion, yet they have now doubled to £42.6 billion and we should not forget that that does not include the trains, which are budgeted at £7.5 billion. An apparent leak from the Treasury to the Financial Times estimated that the costs as they stand could run to £73 billion or more. In fact, such high risks are attached to the project, that the contingency is £14 billion. We are now on the fifth business case for phase 1 and the benefit-cost ratio is now 1.4, so for every £1 of taxpayers’ money spent, only £1.40 comes back. If we strip away the flawed assumptions and replace them with a more realistic value of time, the true benefit-cost ratio falls way below £1, and there would actually be a loss to the taxpayer.

[Mr Straw]

rose—

[Mrs Gillan]

I am sorry; I do not have enough time to give way.

Economists claim that the benefits of HS2 are also exaggerated. Some 79% of those benefits arose from the value allocated to time savings by businesses assuming no valuable work was done on trains and a huge increase in business travellers. If that is now not correct or has been overestimated, the benefits fall again considerably. Looking back, HS1 predicted 28 million passengers per annum—the reality is 9 million. Should we really trust the projections by the Department for Transport? The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee have already raised significant concerns about the project and the passenger projections for HS2, but despite that the figures have not been revised.

[Mr Straw]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Mrs Gillan]

I am awfully sorry, but if I give way to the right hon. Gentleman I will have to give way to others, and so many people want to speak that I will eat into the time allowed to them. The right hon. Gentleman can make his own speech.

The Secretary of State for Transport claims that HS2 is essential to deal with an impending capacity crisis on the west coast main line. However, the available figures show that intercity trains on the west coast main line coming into Euston are on average just 52% full in peak hours. There is severe commuter overcrowding on many commuter lines into all our major cities, and HS2 will do very little, or in many cases nothing at all, to relieve that. Is the commute into Euston really the priority over other areas?

The big picture is the claim that HS2 will heal the north-south divide. Even today the Institute of Economic Affairs has again questioned the promises of an economic transformation of the north. There is no academic peer-reviewed evidence to show that the presence of a high-speed rail line will lead to increased economic output at the levels suggested in what is now a questionable report from KPMG, commissioned by HS2. The report claims that HS2 would bring benefits of £15 billion per year. However, it assumes that rail connectivity is the only variable driving local economic growth. We know that that is simply not the case; if it were, Ebbsfleet in Kent would be a boom town.

However, London could be the winner. The majority of academic evidence available in other countries shows that where a high-speed rail line connects a dominant city to a less dominant town or city, it is the dominant city that gains. HS2 will suck skills and businesses to London rather than to our regions. If HS2 had a viable business case, it should have been built starting in the north, connecting the northern cities to each other and then eventually to London.

We are getting a project that has markedly changed since it was first proposed. HS2 was going to allow someone to jump on a train in Manchester and travel straight to Brussels, but that has now been ditched. The direct link to Heathrow has of course now been dropped, but in any event why are we not going for maximum connectivity to our airports in the south by finalising our high-speed rail policy after the result of the Howard Davies commission?

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield would also like assurances from the Government on the so-called Heathrow spur, on which he still has many questions. Even the much vaunted connections between the towns and cities are far from perfect. In fact, HS2 connects only four city centres. The proposals for Euston are not settled and Old Oak Common will require an enormous amount of work to connect it to the rest of London’s transport infrastructure. The HS2 station in Birmingham is a 15 minute walk through an underpass to Birmingham New Street, where the rest of the city’s trains come in. If we look to the plans for Sheffield Meadowhall, Toton and Derby, the HS2 stations will be miles outside city centres. The latest business case included £8.3 billion of cuts to existing rail services, affecting many towns and cities, and the KPMG report showed that many local economies away from the line of the route would suffer. The main objective to shorten journey times drastically has now been questioned by calls from the Environmental Audit Committee to decrease average speeds. That means that HS2 may not even achieve its original aims on either speed or connectivity.

Finally, HS2 is not really green. A meagre 1% of HS2 passengers are predicted to transfer from air, and just 4% from cars. The remaining 95% of passengers are predicted to be new journeys or transfers from less polluting modes of transport, and that is before we examine closely the vast amount of power needed to power the railway. If the project goes ahead, it is important that we protect the environment and the people who will be affected. People expect the project to be implemented to the highest standards, ensuring the best environmental protections and giving support to the communities and individuals who are severely affected.

The Chilterns area of outstanding natural beauty is in my constituency, as everybody now knows. It is known as the lungs of London and is the last large expanse of protected unspoilt countryside in the south-east of England. There are more than 50 million visits annually, and many of the villages, hamlets, ancient woodlands and hedgerows remain largely unchanged since Norman times. The Chilterns is designated under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, and the Government have a legal duty to adhere to those protections: anything less would make a mockery of all the Government’s pledges to protect our natural environment.

The Environmental Audit Committee’s report of 7 April was highly critical of the project and said that the Government have “significant work to do” to prove that they are prioritising environmental protection. Some 40% of the route is yet to be examined. If the project does proceed, I now believe that the only way to mitigate properly the damage to the AONB is to fully tunnel the whole area. The demand for longer tunnelling through the AONB was the most frequently raised concern in the responses to the environmental statement, with more than 8,000 people raising it as an issue. The line will already have a devastating impact on the AONB, including destroying 10.2 hectares of irreplaceable ancient woodland, as well as communities such as South Heath and Wendover.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury and I have worked together on considering HS2 and the long tunnelling option. He has said to me that if he is not satisfied with the arrangements for mitigation of the AONB and compensation, particularly where Dunsmore, Wendover Dean and Wendover are concerned, he will join me in the Lobby and vote against the project on Report and Third Reading. As it stands, Buckinghamshire will take all the pain and have no gain. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield has constituents in Denham who remain entirely unpersuaded by the arguments put forward both in respect of the generality of the proposal for HS2 and of the detail. The impact of the Colne valley viaduct travelling through a site of special scientific interest, with no details on how the noise will impact on the local community, is a source of real anxiety. His constituents have argued for further tunnelling under the Colne. It is important to remember that the voices of our Buckinghamshire colleagues in Government are as equally important as the voices of Back Benchers, if not more so. I want allies inside the Government, as well as on the Back Benches, as we scrutinise this project.

On compensation, we have had no fewer than five consultations and still those people whose homes and livelihoods have been devastated by HS2 have had to wait for over four years for the final compensation scheme to be announced. The eventual compensation announcement on 9 April was not popular. I know that the concerns are shared by Mr Speaker. He believes that the fact there is no provision for homeowners whose properties are further than 300 metres from the line but who have seen their property fall in value as a result, is unacceptable and so do I.

[Mr Cash]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs Gillan]

I am sorry.

People blighted by HS2 will not only be negatively affected by the line itself, but by the construction, noise, traffic, impact on our blue light services, decrease in tourism, and the disruption to our waterways; I need not go on. The effect of these has not been explored fully to any adequate degree.

Lastly, what worries me most, and what is in my reasoned amendment, is this: if the project goes ahead, this House should be aware of the risks. Many people are concerned at what I consider to be the wholly deplorable position of the Government in not publishing the Major Projects Authority’s reports into the project. The Information Commissioner is now challenging the veto placed on it by the Government in the courts and maintains that the release of the documents is in the public interest, as do I. The reports rate the project as amber/red, meaning that successful delivery is “in doubt” because of major risks or issues in key areas. The Government expect the support of Members to carry the Bill, so they should be expected to produce this information and make it accessible to Members of this House. All projects carry risk. It is unacceptable that we should not be aware of the risks when we are spending such vast sums of taxpayers’ money.

I will be voting for my reasoned amendment to halt the project and I hope that colleagues will join me in the Lobby. I know that many colleagues will abstain, but I hope that the vote tonight—even though this is David and Goliath and for once Goliath is going to win—will ensure that, as the Bill passes through Committee, our colleagues who are scrutinising it will be able to support the maximum environmental protection and compensation for those communities and people who will be paying the highest price for this project with their homes, businesses and local countryside. They will be gaining none of the benefit. Whoever joins me tonight in the Lobby, I am grateful for their support. I do not expect that we will win the vote, but my goodness we are giving notice to the Government, and any future Government in charge of this project, that it will be scrutinised inch by inch.

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[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

In the ridiculously short time available, I will have to confine my remarks to the impact on my constituency.

I should point out the ridiculous situation whereby the hybrid Bill before the House proposes major works in my constituency, none of which the Government now intend to carry out. The Bill also provides for a link from HS2 to HS1. That ridiculous proposal has been abandoned altogether. The Bill provides for the option 8 design of the station at Euston. That ridiculous proposal, we are told, is shortly to be abandoned, but the design, cost and construction timetable for the alternative to it have not yet been worked out, so there’s nowt to vote on.

The neighbourhoods to the east and west of Euston station and its railway approaches are densely populated with a variety of uses. Most of the streets are overwhelmingly residential. They are home to large numbers of residents living in high densities in settled and varied communities, with a wide range of incomes, housing tenures, jobs, ethnic origins and religions. Most of those residents want to continue to live there. They rightly resent patronising references to their neighbourhood by the much lauded chair of HS2 Ltd and have asked me to remind him and everyone else that where they live is not like the Olympic site. It is not a brownfield site, ripe for redevelopment.

The HS2 project as now proposed would wreak havoc on those neighbourhoods. It would expand Euston station by 75 metres to the west, demolish the homes of 500 people and subject 5,000 more to living for a decade next to the construction site or beside roads that will be made intolerable by the heavy goods vehicles servicing the main site and the 14 satellite construction compounds. No consideration has been given to the cumulative harm that all this would do to the quality of life of my constituents. The proposed working hours regime enables work to proceed at any hour of the day or night. Every little park and play space near the site is to be taken over. Small, locally owned and locally staffed businesses, especially cafes, shops and restaurants in Drummond street, face financial disaster. Between 40% and 70% of their business is passing trade from pedestrians going to and from Euston station, which, for the duration of the works—10 years—will be cut off by a solid, 3.6 metre-high security fence.

The people I represent believe that HS2 should not go ahead. Failing that, they believe that HS2 should terminate at Old Oak Common, at least temporarily, to test its capacity and permit the assessment of any capacity needed at Euston to be based on experience rather than the guesswork used so far.

[Mrs Gillan]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Frank Dobson]

No, I do not think I should.

If the Government insist on Euston, local people want the new station to be designed to fit within the curtilage of the existing station. HS2 has failed to properly appraise such alternatives, including the double-deck down design put forward by local professionals, who also want the bulk of the space created above the station to be devoted to housing that local people can afford or low-cost units available to spin-off companies developing and exploiting products of the biomedical research organisations in the area.

In December 2010, the right hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond), then Transport Secretary, told the House:

“it is right and proper that individuals who suffer serious financial loss in the national interest should be compensated.”—[Official Report, 20 December 2010; Vol. 520, c. 1207.]

That promise has not been kept. The arrangements for compensation in my constituency are infinitely worse than those in the rural areas. Right-to-buy leaseholders—Mrs Thatcher’s children—will get compensation, but not enough to buy an equivalent property in the area. People living next to the site—within 5 metres, not 500 metres—whose houses are not demolished will not be entitled to a penny of compensation. That is ridiculous. Neither financial nor practical mitigation measures are being offered to enable the diverse communities in Euston to survive 10 years of turmoil. They do not object to the railway; they object to 10 years of destruction.

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[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

Everything about my background, and recent history in Parliament in particular, suggests I should support HS2. I am the co-ordinator of the RMT parliamentary group and have supported every campaign for investment in rail over the last 17 years in Parliament. I have also used the argument about high-speed rail and taking capacity from aviation on to rail to obviate the need for a third runway at Heathrow. However, I cannot vote for the Bill tonight—I will be voting for the reasoned amendment—because I must be one of the few MPs who does not know what is going to happen in his constituency.

Initially, when high-speed rail was put forward, I was told that there would be consultation on the main route and then, last autumn, that there would be consultation on the link between the main route through my constituency to Heathrow. I was looking forward to that, because we were told that we would look at about nine options and have a detailed consultation, and that I would be able to organise community meetings and we would come to a view on whether or not we supported the link to Heathrow from the main route—or at least on what option we would support. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) alluded to the fact that a grubby compromise was subsequently made, including across the Front Benches, whereby an Airports Commission would be appointed, in order to get every political party off the hook before the general election about deciding honestly what they supported on aviation expansion. Howard Davies’s commission has already confirmed that it could report by next January but has been told to go away on holiday between January and the general election and not report until after it.

Therefore, my constituents, like others, will not know what the political parties’ views will be about their options in respect of expansion at Heathrow, Gatwick or elsewhere. That has meant that the whole process of consultation about high-speed rail’s link to Heathrow has also been delayed. So I am the only MP in this place who cannot go to their constituents before the general election to explain to them what the implications of HS2 are. What does that mean? It means blight. It causes upset and distress for those people whose homes, businesses and community resources will be at risk, and it causes long-term blight in the area. My area is already blighted by the threat of a third or a fourth runway, but we are now blighted by the threat of a high-speed rail link that could go under us, over us or through us. We do not know which way it will go. That is just unacceptable politics.

[Mrs Gillan]

Does it also not send out a poor signal internationally that it is taking us so long to decide where our airport capacity lies? Surely we should be ensuring that we have the best connectivity internationally because, after all, we are in a shrinking global marketplace in which we should be competing.

[John McDonnell]

I agree. I just wish we had some certainty and that certain politicians kept to their word. Who said:

“no ifs, no buts…no third runway”?

That came from the Prime Minister. He never said, “No third runway during just one Parliament.” What he said was interpreted by most of us as a permanent commitment. I agree with the right hon. Lady that we need certainty on this matter, and the one group of people who have no certainty are my constituents. I would like the Secretary of State or the Minister to explain to me what the process will be for consultation and decision making on the link with Heathrow. Will there be additional legislation? Clause 50 enables further expansion of the route to go on under a transport works order and not full legislation, so I fear that there will not be full consultation and that we will not be presented with a Bill that we can debate in this House and vote on with regard to the link to Heathrow. In that way, yet again, my constituents will be left with uncertainty. This is no way to run a railway, no way to plan a railway and certainly no way to spend £50 billion—on a project that could be going nowhere.

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[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am delighted, Madam Deputy Speaker, to catch your eye in this debate. Many Members wish to speak and so our time is constrained. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on spending so much time in the Chamber, but having done so, I hope that he will listen to some of the concerns that have been raised, because we will have spent almost £1 billion on HS2 Ltd planning this railway by the end of this Parliament, and, as far as I can see, there have been no changes whatever from when it started to now. It seems to me that this is a visionary concept, but it could be made so much better if some of the concerns that have been raised tonight were taken on board.

My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) was right to say that we live in an increasingly interconnected world. I have just come back from China where a large number of high-speed lines have been built. It was right to do so because its environmental pollution is horrendous. This is where I start to get involved in this whole concept, because 80% of my Cotswolds constituents who travel 75 miles to Heathrow go by car. If HS2, with proper connectivity to Heathrow, were better designed, 80% of them would go by rail.

Our forefathers, almost 200 years ago, bequeathed us a visionary rail system that enabled the industrial revolution to take place, and we have the opportunity to do the same thing today. We need to get the route and the details right, which is why I formed an integrated transport group, with my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (James Wharton). We have done a lot of work on this subject. We have produced a comprehensive report. If any Member has insomnia one night, they might like to read it, or at least the two-page executive summary. We make a number of points in the report that are worth repeating in the short time that I have available today.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), called in all the evidence at the last moment. HS1 was going to come in via south of London, but the route was changed and it then came in via Stratford. Had he not done that, the Olympics would never have taken place. It is a huge shame that the instructions to the Committee have taken out the HS1-HS2 link. It is still something we should consider, because passengers coming from Europe and flying into this country will want to get on an interconnected railway from this country to Europe. If there are problems with Camden, let us tunnel underneath London; let us be visionary about it, but let us ensure that we do have the HS1-HS2 link.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) made a very good point. I thought that I was going to disagree with everything he said in his speech, but he made one very good point towards the end, and I ask the Secretary of State to listen to this very carefully. If this railway had been a fast railway going at 300 kph rather than 360 kph, we could have varied the route very slightly, but with huge benefit, especially to the Chilterns. HS1 was built along the existing transport corridors—along the motorways and often along the existing rail links. If we had built a fast rail rather than a high-speed rail, we could have swept it out along the M40 and tunnelled under the shortest bit of the Chilterns. We would not have done any environmental degradation to the Chilterns at all.

[Mrs Gillan]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and for coming well behind me to defend the Chilterns. Is it not true that, in the run-up to the last election, that is the route that we believed would be adopted by any Government of whatever complexion? Imagining that they would go through the widest route of an area of outstanding natural beauty and damage it so greatly was almost beyond credibility. We were going to go through the narrowest route, and should that not have been where it went anyway?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My right hon. Friend is entirely right, and she has been basing her case on that. The advantage of doing that is that roads, rail, freight and air would have all coalesced into one Heathrow hub. The one thing that has not been said in this debate is that we need to be visionary about this, because 15 years ago, the latest technology, the internet, was just coming into its infancy. Who knows what technology will be available in the next 15 years?

Let us future-proof this railway as much as we possibly can. There will be all sorts of new technology to track people and suitcases and to make travel on an international scale hugely better than it is today. If we do not do that, we will already be losing business by the day because of the experience of passengers who have to go through Heathrow. If we do not get this right, we will lose even more business to the likes of Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle and Munich. The complete passenger experience, door-to-door, is what will matter. People will simply not come into Old Oak Common and take the underground for one station to get to HS1; they will fly from wherever they were coming from in the first place straight to continental Europe and further afield.

We need to consider HS1-HS2, the route and a Heathrow hub. We must think about how we will link to the world’s busiest airport. I have little doubt that when push comes to shove, Davies will come up with Heathrow as our major hub airport, yet we are not going to link the most expensive civil engineering project ever carried out in this country with our major airport. That is crazy.

I want to make two final points. First, I do not believe the case for business being sucked from the north to the south is true, which is why earlier I advocated starting equally from the north and the south if we can afford the cash. Finally, I must tell my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that I am one of the very few chartered surveyors in this House. I know how the law on compensation for property works and the French and Germans are far more generous than we are. If he is generous with the compensation, he will have far fewer opponents to the railway line, which will be built far quicker without so many legal battles.

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Question again proposed, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

[Mrs Gillan]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I understand that some colleagues who live some way out of London have been encouraged to make their way home because of the tube strike this evening. Is the Chair able to offer any advice to colleagues so that they might be able to stay for the votes and proceedings, particularly when this House is sitting to such a late hour?