High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill

Damian Collins Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

Given that 80% of the London to Paris travel market is by train not plane, does the hon. Lady agree that the channel tunnel demonstrates that if transport links are good enough, people will shift the way they travel?

[Mary Creagh]

Absolutely; people have a tendency to work it out all by themselves. Particularly in this era of the internet and smartphone apps, I am sure that people will be pretty cute about figuring out the best railway and greenest journey that they can make. I do not share the scepticism of the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) about whether people will shift. However, she also mentioned ancient woodland, and HS2 should set the gold standard in environmental mitigation and in promoting plant and animal life along the route. We will hold the Government and HS2 to account to reduce its environmental impact.

The Secretary of State mentioned climate resilience, and we saw in the devastation of the Great Western main line at Dawlish and the flooding near Maidenhead in February the direct impact of climate change on our transport networks, and on communities and businesses in the south-west and Wales.

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[Graham Stringer]

It is a relative figure from a general uplift.

We should look at the experience of countries that have high-speed lines, such as France, Spain and Germany. The most direct comparator is the line between Lyon and Paris. When the Transport Committee went there in 2011, it found, and was told by the director-general of SNCF, that both cities had benefited from it. All the economic benefit had not been sucked out of Lyon and into Paris; both ends had benefited. The same is true of the lines between Frankfurt and Cologne and between Lille and other parts of France. That does not just happen because the line is built, however; it happens if there is a strategy of the Government and the city governments to make sure there is benefit from that high-speed route. It relies on active involvement from local and city government to make sure all the benefit of that investment is captured.

[Damian Collins]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Graham Stringer]

No, as I have given way once and many Members want to speak in this debate.

There are people with genuine and serious constituency interests in this debate, but some of the interests lined up against the project are vested interests. Referring back to what the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns) said, I wrote an article recently about HS2 in which I guessed that when the railways started, in the early and mid-19th century, they would have been opposed by the stagecoach owners and bargees at that time. The editor of the journal I wrote the article for found a cartoon of the 1830s depicting horses that were unemployed queuing up. So there are vested interests against this project, as well as constituency interests.

My second point is about capacity. The point has been well made that this project is driven by capacity issues and it will have economic benefits. The question that people who want to stop this project have to answer is this: are they really saying to our country that, by the middle of this century, we are going to be relying on railways that were built in the middle of the 19th century and motorways that were built in the middle of the 20th century for our transport infrastructure? There has been very little investment in any of our transport infrastructure—motorways, roads and airport runways—over the last 30 or 40 years. That would be a disgrace to the United Kingdom and it would mean that we fell further behind our competitors.

The final point I want to make has two aspects. I sympathise with the arguments made by those Members who have constituency interests and are opposing this Bill, and I hope the Secretary of State will listen carefully, because my experience of being involved in more than one major infrastructure project is that if we pay more and earlier in compensation, we save in the long term and the projects happen more quickly. A lot of the resistance comes from people who think they are being treated unfairly. So I hope the Secretary of State will listen.

The other side of the coin has already been referred to. The Higgins report calls for the project to be speeded up and I agree with that, but I think we can do still better. Building north to south as well as south to north and speeding up the project would bring more immediate benefits. Whatever we say about the cost-benefit analysis, all the analysis shows it is not the actual quantum of money—£25 billion, £30 billion or £40 billion—that counts; it is that we will get more economic benefit back than the money we put in. So the quicker we do it, the better.

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[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

I hope that in this debate about high-speed rail the Front-Bench team will not mind my talking about high speed. Of course capacity is extraordinarily important, and we are not just talking about capacity to relieve the west coast main line. The relief that the Y network will give to the east coast main line and the midlands main line is at least as important. I speak as someone whose constituency is dissected by HS1, and we have found that the benefits appear to be much greater than the costs. I speak from that strong perspective. Part of that benefit is down to capacity, but it is also about speed.

It has been of huge advantage to our area that we can get from Ebbsfleet to St Pancras in 17 minutes. Yes, unlike people in Buckinghamshire, we have that intermediate station, but we also benefit from the classic lines which can now take people from Strood to Stratford in 25 minutes and through to St Pancras in 32 minutes. That is bringing in huge amounts of additional people. It is making it much more attractive to come to Medway—to bring in investment, as commercial and professional leaders want to base themselves in Medway. I believe that Birmingham and Manchester will have a similar experience.

If we shorten the journey time from Manchester to London from two hours and eight minutes to one hour and eight minutes, that will be a huge economic boost to Manchester. I find it extraordinary when I hear people say, “Oh, well actually it is going to damage Manchester. It’s going to suck the growth out of Manchester and it will all go to London.” If they believe that, why do they not have the courage of their convictions and argue to slow the line so that it takes four hours rather than two hours?

[Damian Collins]

Does my hon. Friend agree that east Kent has seen real economic benefits—that wages have been rising faster and unemployment has been falling faster than the national average—because of high-speed rail?

[Mark Reckless]

Yes I certainly do agree, and I think that is because of those improved journey times, including to Folkestone. The idea that there would be more jobs in Folkestone if the journey time were two hours rather than one hour, or that if we somehow had a man with a red flag in front of the train that would bring the greatest possible economic growth to the north or to Folkestone, is frankly absurd.