High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill

David Mowat Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr McLoughlin]

Yes, indeed. That is one of the points that will become very apparent with the investment programmes we have over the coming years and that Network Rail will be carrying out. I can assure my hon. Friend that it is not a case of either/or; it is essential to invest in both areas.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I would like to add a thought on the capacity question. Will the Secretary of State confirm that over the past 15 years passenger numbers have increased by an average of 5% a year and that the business case for HS2 assumes an increase of 1.6% a year, which is quite a conservative estimate?

[Mr McLoughlin]

Indeed, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Basically, 15 years ago there were about 750 million passenger journeys, and the latest estimate is for 1.5 billion passenger journeys, which is a massive shift that I would have thought my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) would welcome.

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[Mr Godsiff]

I have. As my hon. Friend said earlier, there is a report that makes just that point—that such projects do not spread wealth, but quite the contrary.

[David Mowat]

The hon. Gentleman makes the point, as I understand it, that infrastructure spending does not spread wealth out. In that case, would he like to make the north really prosperous by closing the M1 and the M6?

[Mr Godsiff]

We are where we are. I do not wish to have an argument about whether the building of the M1 and M6 was folly. What is folly is the privatised section of the M6, which is uneconomic and will soon go bust. It was supported by the Conservatives—“Let’s bring private capital into our motorways”. It is part of the motorway that is never used and will soon either go bust or have to come to the Secretary of State and ask for a handout.

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[David Mowat]

The hon. Gentleman is generous in giving way a third time. I make the point again: the logic of his argument is that the north would be richer if the M1, the M6 and perhaps the existing west coast main line were all closed. That is ridiculous.

[Mr Godsiff]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but I do not understand the point that he is trying to make.

As I said, we need to look at the economic case. The National Audit Office report and other reports have said that the project is already spiralling out of control. Already, figures that we were told about a year or so ago just do not stack up and people who have a vested interest in pushing the project ahead seem to be plucking figures out of the sky to suit whatever argument they are making. At the end of the day, the British taxpayer will have to pick up the tab if it goes wrong.

At this time of austerity and cutbacks across a range of services, the idea of reducing the time that business men take to travel from Birmingham or Manchester to London by 30 minutes and one hour respectively is absolutely farcical. It seems completely to disregard the fact that business men tend to work on trains nowadays. They use computers and mobile phones. Not one single, solitary business man in Birmingham has said to me, “Unless the project goes ahead and I can travel from Birmingham to London 30 minutes quicker, my business is going to suffer and be in danger.”

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[Andrew Bridgen]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. She is absolutely right, and I shall deal with the issue of capacity later in my speech.

The cost-benefit ratios are questionable. As has already been pointed out, the assumption is that all time spent on trains is wasted time, so the figures are based on the extraordinary idea that when someone goes on a train they do not do any work. Anyone who travels on our railways will know that that is certainly not the case. It should also be noted that, compared to our European neighbours, journey times between first and second cities are considerably shorter in the UK. The journey time between Birmingham and London is already half that of high-speed rail travel in France and Spain.

[David Mowat]

My hon. Friend makes the point that others have made—that the business case does not properly reflect productive time, iPads and all the rest of it. Page 51 of the business case addresses that point explicitly, stating that if trains are overcrowded, people who are standing will not be able to work on PCs. The business case would be better if it took that into account.

[Andrew Bridgen]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point, and I shall deal with the issue of capacity later in my speech and hope to address it then.

When it comes to saving time—this point has been made several times today—I have never met a business person in my career who has said that the reason why their business is not thriving is that they cannot get to London quickly enough.

Another argument cited is that HS2 will rebalance our economy. I agree with that argument, as I believe that it will rebalance our economy, but further in favour of the London and south-east. Indeed, no serious academics support the view that HS2 will reduce the north-south divide. For weekend and leisure travel, for instance, which is the more likely scenario—that more families will travel from London to spend an evening in Birmingham or Manchester, or that families from Birmingham and Manchester will use the route to spend time and money in London? I suggest to hon. and right hon. Members that the latter is the more likely scenario, and that HS2 will simply suck more money from the regions into London and the south-east.

I therefore appeal to all Members to think very carefully about whether they are acting in the best interests of their constituents in supporting the signing of a blank cheque for this white elephant of a project, which is already forecast to cost every constituency in the country £75 million, and which, given the expected further overruns, could easily end up costing each constituency more than £100 million. Are Members prepared to support a scheme that will inevitably suck money away from transport schemes that could benefit their own constituencies? As for the issue of capacity, figures show that the west coast main line has the capacity for the 100% increase in passenger numbers that was proposed by FirstGroup when it submitted its franchise bid.

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[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I support the Bill, but before I say why I support it let me give a number of reasons for not building this railway. We should not build it just because we have less high-speed track than any other country in the world. We could be right and those countries could be wrong, so that is not a good reason. We should not build it because the business case for HS1 to move to St Pancras was predicated on access to the north. We should not build it on environmental and carbon-related grounds: I think that those are rather difficult to justify, at a time when most electricity continues to be produced from fossil fuels. We should not even build it to try to rebalance infrastructure spending, which over the last decade has been 10 times higher per head in London and the south-east than in the north-west, and more than 10 times higher than in the north-east.

We should proceed with this project if, and only if, three conditions exist: a robust business case, clear transformational benefits, and affordability in cash-flow terms, at about £2 billion a year. That £2 billion a year needs to kick in as Crossrail finishes, and I think that that is quite achievable. I cannot go into the business case in a great deal of detail, other than to say that the benefit-cost ratio remains higher than 2—about 2.5 for the full Y network—and is predicated principally on capacity arguments. The number of passengers on the west coast main line has been increasing at a rate of 5% a year for the last 15 years. This business case assumes an increase of only 1.6%, which is quite conservative.

As for transformational benefits, some Members have said today that the northern cities could do better if they just invested in broadband, while others have said that northern cities do not understand that HS2 will cause all the jobs to be sucked into London. All that I can say to that is that the northern chambers of commerce do not agree. They have estimated that in the north-west it will produce some 40,000 extra jobs and £8 billion of incremental benefits, while KMCG’s Green Gauge report estimates that there will be about 50,000 extra jobs.

I want to make a number of observations about the project. First, on the timing, 2032 is a long time ahead, and I am a little concerned that there is going to be a gap of over a decade before it goes to Birmingham and Manchester. That is a decade in which the northern cities will be put at a disadvantage—although prosperity will not, of course, stop in Manchester and Birmingham. I do not fully understand why we are not able to do more in the north earlier, in terms of the timing of the investment.

It is important that the northern cities are linked not only to London but to Brussels and Paris. I do not fully understand the issues around the linkage and all that goes with that, but to do this project and not allow that to happen would be wrong.

I also want to comment on a number of councils. We heard about Bradford no longer supporting the project, and I have heard Warrington council say it no longer supports it, because there is no station on its patch. Either this project has transformational benefits for the region and all of us in that region benefit, or it does not. My constituents in Warrington work in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and elsewhere. What matters to them is that we go some way towards fixing the north-south divide and getting prosperity much more evenly spread across the entire country.

Finally, let me say that I commend this Bill and that I hope the House supports it tonight.