High Speed 2
Frank Dobson Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) for her kind remarks about our co-operation and for thanking the various bodies concerned.
Today’s report from the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee batters great lumps out of the case for HS2. The Committee did not ask any questions that we have not been asking for the last five years. HS2 had no satisfactory answers before, and it apparently still has none.
I want to draw attention to the situation in my constituency, which is the most affected by the proposals. The proposals involve the demolition of the homes of about 500 people and would leave about 5,000 people living next to Europe’s biggest building site for the best part of 15 years.
Under the original proposals, HS2 was going to knock down Euston station and rebuild it, incorporating a further 75 metres to the west to provide space for everything, including the new high-speed line. Originally, that was going to cost £1.2 billion. Eight months later, a revised estimate of £2 billion was put forward—the figure had gone up by just £100 million a month. Apparently, £2 billion was too much, so the scheme was cut back, which would have given us a rather elegant lean-to shed for HS2 at the west side of Euston station, at a cost of £1.4 billion. That is what was in the Bill that came to the House of Commons. By the time it got here, however, we were told that that was not going to be done any more and that we would go back to the vast new scheme. The detailed proposals for that scheme were supposed to be available in October last year. Recently, in meetings with local people, however, HS2 has admitted that it has no such proposals and that it is going back to the lean-to shed version, which will now cost £2.6 billion. Who would put £50 billion on a racing stable that produces rubbish like this?
We were told that a supposed connection to the channel tunnel link would bring all sorts of benefits: people would be able to get on a train in Manchester and go to Paris. We told HS2 that that was not a workable proposition, and even the Institution of Civil Engineers said it was not, but no, HS2 persisted—and then the connection was abandoned. One explanation was that HS2 had come across “unforeseen factors”, including the need to “widen the route”. Now, anybody who starts an engineering project without realising that they will need to widen the route if they add some lines really is not fit to be put in charge of spending £50 billion.
Michael Fabricant
Is my right hon. Friend—I will call him that—aware that the completion of Birmingham New Street, including a new department store, has been delayed by a year and a half because of construction problems? Who is doing the project? The selfsame people who are supposed to be designing the new Euston HS2 terminal.
Frank Dobson
I should add, Mr Betts, that the people who have been making those preposterous estimates, coming up with ludicrous proposals that will not work, are all very well-rewarded consultants. I believe that they have already had three quarters of a billion pounds in fees, so hard-working consultants are doing rather well. As far as I can see, the only train that has actually moved is the consultancy gravy train.
I advise people that if we want to benefit the cities of the north, the answer is to invest in the cities of the north and their immediate transport requirements, rather than spending what it is now believed will be £7 billion on a full-scale development of Euston. Will Sheffield, Leeds or Manchester benefit from an investment of £7 billion in Euston? Euston certainly will not benefit, and I do not think anywhere else will.
Helen Jones
On a point of order, Mr Betts. Would it be possible at this point, as this is possibly my right hon. Friend’s last speech in the House, to record our appreciation of his service over many years, particularly to his constituents, and his devoted service to the national health service, from which we have all benefited?
Kelvin Hopkins
I am not yet a Privy Counsellor and I do not suppose that I ever will be, but the hon. Gentleman’s point about Curzon Street was absolutely right; I was coming to it myself. In my submission to the House of Lords Committee, which was titled, “Sensible alternatives to HS2”, I gave three specific alternatives that would cost a fraction of that amount but solve all the problems that HS2 might supposedly solve.
First, I suggested the electrification of the Birmingham Snow Hill line, via Banbury, to London. It currently goes to Marylebone or Paddington, but it could easily be linked—the tracks are already there, so all it needs is a bit of track work—to Crossrail going in both directions. If we had an electric train from Snow Hill in the middle of the Birmingham business district that went direct to Canary Wharf at 125 mph, someone could work on a laptop without changing trains and I bet that train would beat HS2 if otherwise that person had to get to Curzon Street and then get two tube trains at the London end. HS2 is a complete and total nonsense, but that suggestion would provide wonderful extra capacity.
That would also allow travel direct to Heathrow from the centre of Birmingham and it could be linked through from Leamington Spa on to the west coast main line, so we could have Birmingham airport linked to Heathrow airport with a direct, 125 mph, one-hour service. They could almost be hubs or satellites for each other. There could be trains from further north—from Manchester—coming down the west coast main line, joining the Banbury line and going directly from the centre of Manchester to Heathrow or Canary Wharf. It is possible for a tiny fraction of the cost of HS2.
Frank Dobson
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is the benefits that the alternatives to HS2 would bring to other parts of the country that probably explain why there is a majority against HS2 in every region of this country, according to the opinion polls, even in the north-west, where people are most enthusiastic about it? Even there, the divide is 43% to 39%.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill
Frank Dobson Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
Generally speaking, I oppose referendums, but that opposition is slight by comparison with my opposition to the ludicrous High Speed 2 scheme, which is, it has to be said, both amateurish and grotesquely expensive.
It used to be fashionable to say that things had been formulated on the back of a cigarette packet; it sounds as though it will be possible to do that on the front of a cigarette packet fairly shortly. I gather, however, that it is more fashionable now to say that things have been drawn up on the back of an envelope—and in this case, it is a pretty poor envelope.
It is clear that HS2, and all the money it involves, is unpopular in every part of England and even more unpopular in Scotland and Wales. I can say without fear of contradiction that it is certainly unpopular in my constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, where it will involve the demolition of the homes of about 500 people and expose more than 5,000 people to living next door to Europe’s biggest demolition, engineering and building site for 12 to 15 years, without any compensation at all.
The boundaries of the compensation scheme are such that people can live 5 metres—in some cases, 5 centimetres —from the boundary and not get a penny. We have been told that the situation is not like in rural areas; urban areas, apparently, are used to noise—“people are used to railways, you know, in the Euston area.” Indeed they are, but they are not used to living next to a major engineering site for a dozen or 15 years.
The five minutes that I was given to speak, under the procedures of the House, on Second Reading of the current HS2 Bill were not sufficient for me to do justice to the insanity of the proposals. The original proposals were for a total demolition and rebuilding of Euston station and its extension 75 metres to the west. They also included a link to the channel tunnel line, running across the North London line, above ground, from Primrose Hill to the back of St Pancras station. That latter proposal was rubbish from the start. No one thought it was sensible apart from officials at High Speed 2 and officials at the Department for Transport, which, even before the proposal was published, had been warned by everyone, including me, that the North London line would in effect need to be destroyed and rebuilt in order to enable high-speed trains to run along it. They had also been warned by the Institution of Civil Engineers that it was not a good idea.
Then the original estimate of the costs nearly doubled. We had warned people of this. They said it was because of new factors, one of which, apparently—it is in a parliamentary answer—was the need to widen the route. If they did not realise that would be needed from the start, they ought not to be employed in such projects.
Fairly recently, the proposal for the connection to the channel tunnel link was abandoned, so there is now no longer any rail connection to the European network, as had been promised. We were told that passengers could get off at Euston and then that they, rather than the trains, would be able to get to St Pancras: they could walk there in the rain or possibly use a travelator going along Euston road, which is, in terms of air pollution, the filthiest road in Britain. Recently, Sir David Higgins, the great new boss who has been brought in, told people that they could walk across Euston station, go to Euston Square tube station, get the tube to King’s Cross St Pancras, and then walk to the international trains. I would have thought that most people would not fancy that if they were carrying a bit of luggage. Anyway, that is the latest fancy proposal.
Let us look at the original proposals for the full-scale redevelopment of Euston and the bringing in of the high-speed trains. The original estimate was £1.2 billion. Just eight months later, the geniuses at HS2 acknowledged that that estimate—or guesstimate, or back-of-a-fag-packet stuff—had gone up to £2 billion. An escalation in price of £100 million a month is not bad, really—you have to admit that they are quite impressive at spending other people’s money. Then that was felt to be too expensive and abandoned, and they came up with the proposal known as revised option 8, which would, roughly speaking, leave Euston as it is, with a fancy lean-to shed next to it in which the glories of High Speed 2 would be displayed.
Those propositions—the link and revised option 8—were in the Bill that was considered on Second Reading in this House. One of them has been abandoned, and we are told that the Euston proposition has also been abandoned, without any debate in this House. Now HS2 wants to go back to the full-scale redevelopment of Euston, which has never been put before Parliament. If Parliament is not doing its job properly, perhaps the people will need to do their job properly in a referendum.
I have been tabling questions asking, “When are you going to come up with the revised proposals for Euston?” Last year we were told that those revised proposals would be out for consultation in October last year. The most recent answer to parliamentary questions that I have is that it is hoped they will be available in September this year. However, these people still have no idea of what the cost will be, and they cannot work out a viable scheme for the rebuilding of the station. I personally believe that they have been unable to overcome a lot of the engineering problems that would be caused by major works in the area. Parliament has not been doing its job properly; it has not had the opportunity to do so because it has been denied information by the Government. That is why we need a referendum.
To say that this is an unpopular idea is an understatement. In March last year, polling by ComRes showed that 52% of the UK population generally were against it and 30% were in favour. Last autumn it got a bit worse, from the point of view of those who are in favour of this ridiculous scheme, because, in a YouGov poll, 53% were against it and its supporters had gone down to 25%. A breakdown of the figures shows that no group anywhere in the country is, on balance, in favour. Among all men and all women, more are against than for. People in every age group are more against than for. All social classes are more against than for.
The hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) talked about the views of people in the north. I have the polling figures here. In the north-east, 62% are against and 20% are in favour. In Yorkshire and Humberside, 48% are against and 37% are in favour. The nearest thing to majority support anywhere is in the north-west, where there has been a lot of banging the drum for the wondrous likely impact on Manchester. To be fair, though, it is still quite close, with 43% against and 39% in favour, and the majority are still against.
My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) talked about the west midlands, where 50% are against and 34% are in favour.
Mr Jim Cunningham
My right hon. Friend mentioned disruption caused by this proposal. If it went ahead in Coventry, it would seriously affect some of the finer scientific measuring equipment that is used at the university of Warwick
Frank Dobson
Yes, indeed.
Apart from those who are paid supporters of the scheme, it has virtually no supporters. When I say “paid supporters”, I am including some of the civil engineering advisers and consultants who are producing reports in favour because they are paid to do so. There is a danger that they are damaging the reputation of British civil engineering consultants.
Mrs Gillan
People watching these proceedings will probably be remarking that there are not many MPs in the Chamber, but historically we do not get many people here on Friday morning for debates on private Members’ Bills. Is it not remarkable that so far there have been no interventions in support of this project on which £50 billion of taxpayers’ money, at the very minimum, is being spent? I am sure that the Front Benchers will support it, but no other voices have rushed here to do so.
Frank Dobson
That is so. I think that the right hon. Lady is probably regarded as being in the south-east, where 51% are against and 30% are in favour. In the London area, 48% are against and 34% are in favour. And so it goes on. The supporters of every political party are, on balance, against.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I was hoping that the right hon. Gentleman might give the figure for Somerset. I have a feeling the project is not enormously popular there, either.
Frank Dobson
I think that for these purposes Somerset is probably part of the south-west, where 60% are against and 25% are in favour. I should also add a late wire from the course: as of yesterday, a Daily Mirror poll showed that 80% are against and 20% are in favour.
There is something amiss if Parliament is not reflecting the views of the public, especially when they are so overwhelmingly in one direction. In the absence of Parliament reflecting those views, it seems to me that there is a case for a referendum, or possibly local referendums, on the proposals.
Dan Byles
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, although we do not have referendums on infrastructure projects across the board, this is a unique infrastructure project, and that because every party capable of forming a Government is in favour of it, it is impossible for any party to claim a mandate for it?
Frank Dobson
There are mandates and there are mandates, are there not?
One of the problems is that as each argument in favour of this ludicrous proposition fails, the proponents come up with another. The first one was speed. Oh, it was wonderful! People would be able to speed to Birmingham —or speed from Birmingham to London, but that tended not to get mentioned too much. Time would also be saved for business people. The first calculations were based on time saved when using motorways, but people are not supposed to read when they are driving, so there is a considerable gain in getting from A to B as quickly as possible, whereas on a train they can do some work. The calculations were modified, but even then they were wrong.
The next argument was that the proposal was going to add to train capacity. The proponents then had to admit that sorting out two or three particular bottlenecks on the west coast main line, which they intended to do anyway, would add considerably to the line capacity. They have never done a calculation—this would be of interest to those who use the west coast main line—of the incapacity that the massive engineering works at Euston will force on the line. These works will result in a lot of interference to access to and egress from Euston. People’s journeys from the midlands and the north-west will be interfered with one way or another for the best part of 15 years, but that is not part of the capacity argument.
Mr Jim Cunningham
Although the situation in Coventry is not exactly the same as that in Euston, there will still be major effects on the traffic flow and major disruption in Coventry. That could go on for many years, and blighting is another issue we will have to address somewhere along the line.
Frank Dobson
The other problem is that the people behind the proposition live from hand to mouth. They said, “There’ll be a way around this, because we’ll be able to divert quite a lot of the local services that come into Euston to Old Oak Common and therefore relieve the pressure on Euston during the works period.” They have now admitted, however, that they cannot divert the local services to Old Oak Common to bring about that relief, so they are still lumbered with the fact that they will louse up access to Euston station for the next dozen to 15 years.
I am sure my hon. Friend will agree that an alternative option for improving the passenger service from London to Birmingham would be substantially to improve the performance of the Chiltern line and thus relieve a lot of passenger need on the west coast main line. All over the country, minor improvements to the track, signalling and electrification could bring about big improvements for passengers. As a lad originally from just outside York, I am always conscious of the fact that the east coast main line is electrified from King’s Cross to Leeds and from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, but that the link between York and Leeds is not electrified. Consequently, anyone who wants to go to Leeds from Edinburgh, Newcastle or Durham cannot do so on an electrified train; they have to change at York or find one of the trains that are still diesel.
Philip Davies
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Is it not the case that it takes almost as long on the train to get from Leeds to Liverpool as it does to get from Leeds to London? It is, therefore, bizarre that so much money is being spent to try to make it quicker to get from Leeds to London when many people would prefer it to be quicker to get across the north of England.
Frank Dobson
Indeed. When the capacity argument fell through—the proponents threw in the towel—they turned to economic growth. However, if they look at virtually all the foreign experience, they will see that when a high-speed line is put in to a capital city, that capital city sucks in business and jobs from the other places on the line. That is significant to those who live in smaller towns near the cities where HS2 stations are proposed, because there is considerable evidence that those smaller towns will lose business to them. If a station is built in Manchester, towns in Rochdale, Oldham and other surrounding areas could lose trade, jobs and prosperity to Manchester. That might be okay for Manchester, but it would not be too good for Greater Manchester.
Rail improvements are needed in the north of England. The time it takes to travel from York to Manchester and from Leeds to Liverpool is a disgrace. High Speed 3 is now being talked about, but I think there would be a bit more support for High Speed 3 if it became High Speed 2. A lot of local services in the north of England need to be improved, as well as the interconnections between the big cities.
People talk about the economic benefits that High Speed 2 will bring to cities in the midlands and the north. The cost will be £50 billion and it is intended that five cities will benefit: Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester. As I suggested in one debate, if that £50 billion were split between those cities, giving them £10 billion each, and the people of, say, Manchester and Sheffield were asked in a referendum what they would do with their £10 billion, the chances are that they would not say that the first thing they needed to do was to club together for a high-speed railway. That would be pretty unlikely. Perhaps there should be local referendums.
Some of us are decried for being neanderthal and opposed to progress. People say, “What about the wonderful progress that was made by the great railway entrepreneurs of the 19th century?” A lot of those projects in the 19th century were characterised by bankruptcy, fraud, deception, thieving from shareholders and God knows what else. George Hudson of the Great Northern railway invented the Ponzi scheme about 100 years before Ponzi was born.
Those entrepreneurs did get the things built—that is a fair point—but if we want to rely on 19th-century examples, and if High Speed 2 is such a good idea that it could be put to a referendum and people would agree to it, surely we should be asking why the private sector is not desperate to build this new railway. Why should the taxpayer have to find the money, when historically in this country it is not the taxpayer who has done so? There seems to be no rush to come up with the dosh privately to invest in this scheme. Perhaps that is because outfits such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Institute of Directors—not organisations I usually quote, I freely admit—think that it is a total waste of time. Broadly speaking, they think it is crackers.
That brings me to the most recent report of the Public Accounts Committee, to which the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) referred. To say that it is a lukewarm endorsement of High Speed 2 is to wildly exaggerate the Committee’s enthusiasm for it. I need my glasses to give you the full benefit of the report, Madam Deputy Speaker. It says:
“The Department for Transport is responsible for a number of ambitious, expensive transport infrastructure programmes including the planned High Speed 2 programme. We are not convinced that these programmes are part of a clear strategic approach to investment in the rail network… The Department told us it will deliver the full High Speed 2 programme within its overall funding envelope of £50 billion.”
For a start, it is not £50 billion, because HS2 admits that if the scheme were to work, Euston station would not be able to cope with the extra passengers and would be overwhelmed. Crossrail 2 would then be needed, at an additional cost of £20 billion. If the scheme were to work—if all the optimistic prognostications of those who are in favour of it came to be—it would require a further £20 billion. Quite frankly, it is deceptive of the Government and High Speed 2 to talk about £50 billion. Usually, they do not even like to talk about £50 billion: they talk about £43 billion and then reluctantly admit that they need another £7 billion for the locomotives—it was perhaps going to be a train-free railway at one time—and we have to bear that point in mind.
I want to express my own views and those of the people who live in my constituency. Crossrail 1 is causing a bit of trouble here and there, but, broadly speaking, people have been willing to go along with it. Originally, the proposal for the channel tunnel link was that it should come into a huge concrete box under King’s Cross station. The sort of people who are now proposing HS2 said, “This is the only way to do it. There is no possible alternative. We are the experts. We know everything.” They ended up having to admit to a Committee of this House that was considering the Bill that their concrete box was too short for the proposed train. That was the quality of thought that went into the proposal.
When I first suggested to the planners that the best thing to do would be to use St Pancras station, which was grotesquely underused, I was treated like a total idiot: “Pathetic! How could he possibly come up with such a silly idea when our concrete box under King’s Cross is a masterstroke?” They eventually abandoned the masterstroke and we now use St Pancras station. I am pleased that if someone gets a train from St Pancras to the Gare du Nord, they really know that Britain is best, because the Gare du Nord is horrible and St Pancras is a credit to everybody except the railway planners, because they were not in favour of using it originally.
Similarly, despite the problems that have been caused in my area, there has been, broadly speaking, full support from nearly everyone there, including myself, for the massive improvements at King’s Cross station, all of which were started under the Labour Government, with the support of myself and local people.
I believe that it is necessary to say to Parliament, “Look, you are letting people down.” The proposals are a disgrace: they are amateurish and grotesquely expensive. Parliament has not been doing its job properly. I mean no criticism of the people who are serving on the legislative Devil’s island that is the Committee stage of the hybrid Bill. Those people should, at the very least, receive double salaries and free passes on the railways for ever. Our procedures let people down and do not reflect the views of people in this country.
Mrs Gillan
Would the right hon. Gentleman also like to mention in dispatches the excellent Clerk, who is doing a first-class job for that Committee and has gone a long way to ensuring that people feel that they have been or will be listened to?
Frank Dobson
Yes, I endorse that. Everyone who has had dealings with the Clerk, and with the other Clerks who have been involved from time to time, pays tribute to the help that they have been given in making their representations and getting their representations in order. However, try as they might, our procedures in relation to such matters are ridiculous.
In the absence of proper parliamentary scrutiny, one of our own Committees, the Public Accounts Committee, is saying of the Department for Transport—I will put my glasses on again:
“The Department still lacks a clear strategic plan for the rail network, and it is unclear how the Department makes decisions about which programmes to prioritise for investment… We remain concerned about the Department’s ability to deliver on time and budget… We are sceptical about whether the Department can deliver value for money for the taxpayer on High Speed 2… There is a risk that industry does not have the capacity to deliver all current and proposed programmes… The Department has a long way to go to prove that it is being more active in realising benefits from major programmes.”
Surprise surprise, all sorts of benefits were supposedly to result from the station at Ebbsfleet and the channel tunnel link, but—lo and behold—they have not been realised. That might be because they were unrealisable from the start and were basically a bit of fantasy infrastructure dreaming, but that is also what this proposal is. Parliament is letting down the people of this country and we should let them have a say with a national and local referendum.
I want economic growth and development in the great northern cities, and the towns and villages that surround them, which have contributed so much in the past to our economic strength. In future, we cannot possibly compete in the world as the cheapest on price because we will always be undercut. All we can do is compete with the best on quality and economic initiative. For example, graphene was developed at Manchester university and is the strongest material the world has ever known. I think it would be better for Manchester if we put £1 billion into developing applications of graphene, rather than putting the money into this railway. Because I am a Yorkshireman I will also mention Rotherham, which is famous for its special steels and still does great work developing them. It would probably be a good idea to put money into graphene in and around Rotherham, so that the development of the strongest material in the world is done in league with the steel industry and does not try to replace it. We should invest in those sorts of things, not throw money away on this railway.
We should allow the people of this country to have their say, but not in a general election in which everybody has—allegedly—signed up to the project. Indeed, I suspect that if there was a secret referendum in the Cabinet and shadow Cabinet, the vote would probably be 80% against HS2 and 20% in favour, because lots and lots of people recognise just how stupid this project is.
Mrs Gillan
I do apologise; I meant no disrespect. If my right hon. Friend realised how unpopular this project was, he might not make the speech he is about to make. I recall that while I was driving—I think I was listening to “Any Questions”,—one of the questions involved HS2. The audience on the radio booed, and I thought, “Well there’s a popular project for the Government to pursue, particularly in the light of its so-called limited cost.” This project has not captured imaginations up and down the country, and it is certainly not held dear by the people I talk to, including those way beyond being affected directly by the line.
The trouble is that HS2 is slipping under the radar in many ways. The organisation led by Buckinghamshire county council is an amalgam of many other organisations and, as I said earlier, it has called itself “51m”, because the equivalent cost of HS2 at the moment, if spread among our constituencies, would give each Member £51 million to spend in those constituencies. The right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras said that if we gave £10 billion to the five cities, they would not immediately club together and want to build HS2. In the same way, if constituencies up and down the country received £51 million, they would not immediately club together to build HS2.
Like the right hon. Gentleman, I wanted to find out what people thought about HS2, so I went along to the Institute of Directors. In Transport questions last March, I raised that issue because the IOD—the very business people to whom the project is supposed to appeal—surveyed more than 13,000 directors for its spring report last year to get their views on HS2. More than half those directors thought that HS2 was poor value for money, and more than 60% thought that the budget earmarked for the project would provide a better return if it were used to improve existing road and rail networks. Frankly, when our business community comes out against a project to that extent, I do not understand why the Government do not listen. I am not afraid of asking people what they think, and neither are most of my colleagues in the House. I therefore believe that the proposal for a referendum is well made and should be put, not least so that the business community can express its views.
It is all very well for the companies that are already earning highly from the project. I was amazed at some of the sums that have already gone to potential advisers and contractors on this project, all of which have been printed in Hansard in response to questions—I will not go into the details of the companies, but they are there if people want to look at them. Those companies are in favour of the project, as are Manchester and Birmingham, which see vast swathes of taxpayers’ money coming in their direction. Sir Albert Bore and Sir Richard Leese will be absolutely delighted and will put pressure on Labour Front Benchers to go along with the proposals, because taxpayers’ money will go into those Labour-controlled authorities, but what does that say to the rest of us?
Frank Dobson
Even in Birmingham there are doubts. There is a site called Washwood Heath. Everybody in Birmingham ranging from the far-left Trots to the chamber of commerce was in favour of redeveloping it with about 3,000 modern jobs in IT and bio-engineering, but—lo and behold—HS2 says, “Tough. We need it for some sidings. Total employees: 30.”
Mrs Gillan
The right hon. Gentleman is right. A constituent of mine who owns a business in the Birmingham area will be adversely affected by the project. He will have to re-site a profitable factory, which will involve losses and a great deal of interruption to the business.
It is five years since the announcement of the project. Its genesis has been well documented by other hon. Members, including in this debate. We are five years in and we do not know what the costs are. Inevitably, those costs are rising. In 2009, the costs for HS2 were identified as £16 billion. A year later, they went up to £29 billion. By 2010, they were £32 billion. As everybody knows, the costs now stand at £50 billion, particularly if we want the luxury of a few trains running up and down the lines.
What worries me is that I do not believe the costs will stop there. First, there is the unknown quantity of Euston and the implications, which could run into millions, nay billions, of pounds if the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras is to be believed—and he is to be believed.
There are unforeseen costs after that. For example, I am not convinced that the countries that make up the United Kingdom will not press for Barnett consequentials on that spend, not least because, as I know, there was a dispute with Wales on whether Barnett consequentials would be applied on the transport elements of the Olympics and the Olympics project. It was decided that the transport spend elements would be Barnettised, and therefore extra funds had to be found to pass to Wales and Scotland and so on. The first phase of HS2 is Birmingham to London. There is a powerful argument to make, and there is no reason to think that more funds will not have to be found to deliver those Barnett consequentials to the other countries that make up the United Kingdom.
Naturally, the costs have risen. As I mentioned, the costs quoted are at 2011 prices. I sit on the Select Committee on Public Administration. Last week, the Treasury permanent secretary was before us. During the course of our investigation, I asked him about the costs of HS2 and pointed out that we were dealing in 2011 prices. I have asked him for an up-to-date costing of the project, which I believe he has agreed to provide by means of a letter to the Committee. I hope that, very shortly, the House will be better informed as to the real costs—the costs as of today’s date. It is hard for people to understand the full implications of the costs of the project if we do not keep pace with current prices.
The assumptions that have been made about the benefits of the project are grossly overestimated. The benefit-cost ratio for phase 1 of HS2 has dropped to 1.4 from 2.4, as it was when the first business case was issued. For phase 2, the ratio stands at 2.3, which is down from 4. One thing is not highlighted: the business case includes an £8.3 billion cut to existing inter-city services. When HS2 was first announced, my colleague the Foreign Secretary, who was Secretary of State for Transport, said it would be necessary to “seriously review the viability” if the BCR dropped below 1.5. That has happened, but as far as I know there has been no review. The reliability of the assumptions are widely questioned, but in a project of that size that will cost the taxpayer so much, we need to be certain before we press ahead.
If we strip out from the assumptions the questionable elements—for example, the overvalued benefits of the reduction in journey times, which are questionable because people do valuable work on trains—we calculate that the more realistic BCR is 0.5. If that is the case, the project will be one of the poorest value for money projects that this country has ever seen. It compares unfavourably with many other infrastructure projects. Many road improvements have BCRs of as much as 10. The optimised alternative to HS2 originally proposed by “51m”, the group of councils that have lobbied against HS2, had a BCR of 5.
Basically, by anybody’s reckoning, the project is based on dodgy assumptions. We do not know the real costs. It is five years in, but we do not have the final route and the final plans. We do not know what the risks entail. It bears repeating that the Major Projects Authority was set up to identify the risks of such projects. As far as I was aware, it was supposed to be transparent. As I understood it, we were going to be one of the most transparent Governments ever. Those reports, which we know are classified as amber/red, have not been released. I repeat that it is not right or proper that the House can be said to have scrutinised the project properly on behalf of our constituents and the taxpayers if the Committee that considers the project Bill in detail does not have access to the clearly identified risks laid out by the Major Projects Authority. If Members of the House are not allowed to have them, members of the Committee at least should have them. If the project is to be done, it needs to be done properly. People need to see that each of those risks has been addressed by the Government, and by HS2 Ltd or whatever organisation delivers the project.
Mrs Gillan
As far as I am concerned, it is “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” We are always dictating to the banks and corporations that they must have transparency in their dealings, but we are not doing it ourselves. I find it rather disturbing, and it is certainly not fair on my constituency and the other constituencies that are going to pay the ultimate price for the delivery of this project if it goes ahead.
If one is going to put in a piece of infrastructure that disrupts an area of outstanding natural beauty—that is, an area of the country that has been nationally designated as something that is precious—it is not right that it should only be half protected. I am very grateful to my colleagues, because following my representations I was able to increase the tunnelling that protects my constituency. It was originally to come out in the middle of a football field at the back of old Amersham. I was able to persuade the then Secretary of State for Transport that we needed more tunnelling. I envisaged that that tunnelling would carry on to the end of the area of outstanding natural beauty, but it was moved to a place called Mantles Wood. There is no logic for why it should come out at Mantles Wood. If we are going to spend this money, I think it should go to the end of the AONB, so that that nationally designated area of the country is fully protected.
Frank Dobson
I think the right hon. Lady will confirm that she was present when our colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), asked Sir David Higgins about the fact that they were going to tear through two bits of ancient woodland in her constituency. He reassured her that it was all right, because they would replant it!
Mrs Gillan
The depth of ignorance knows no bounds in some instances. I am very depressed by the fact that people actually believe that one can replace ancient woodland. I have worked with the Woodland Trust. When I was first elected, Penn Wood in my constituency was one of the first major woods that the trust purchased and saved for posterity. The complexity of ancient woodland, with its soil and the way in which it is made up, cannot be replaced. We can have substitute woods put somewhere else, but they can never be replaced. Once they are gone, they are gone for ever. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention.
If one is going to spend £50 billion and disrupt the lives, businesses and homes of a number of people, money ought to be spent fully on compensation, as well as on protection of the environment. If one cannot afford to compensate people properly, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield said, it is a crying shame, because they are paying not once through their taxes but twice with the blight. It is unfair that the burden should fall disproportionately on those nearest to the ultimate route.
Another aspect that worries me, and which the Bill plays to in putting a referendum on this project before the people, is that I do not feel new technology and developments have been taken into account fully. I put a question to the Department for Transport on whether the impact of driverless cars had been taken into account when looking at the future development of the railways and other forms of transport. The written answer came back that they had not been taken into account, but that a study was going to be carried out. One cannot go ahead with a costly project over such a long period of time without looking at the impact of new technology. When I first came into the House, my secretary worked on a golf ball typewriter. I now carry with me an iPad on which I can FaceTime the world—all my e-mails come in and I can go on Twitter. The change in technology over 20 years has been absolutely phenomenal. That is the time scale of HS2. There will be all sorts of developments, not least if we can finally get good, first- class, rapid broadband into all parts of Buckinghamshire and all points north, east, south and west. There are going to be changes to business patterns, patterns of travel and style of travel. It is important that we look at horizon planning holistically before we commit to this sort of expenditure, and that we give people the chance to say what they want through a referendum, as envisaged in the Bill.
The Public Accounts Committee report was quoted extensively by the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras. He produced the summary, which is exactly the part I had underlined to read out to myself. What struck me is that the Department takes a piecemeal approach to rail investment. That is one of the most damning aspects of the report. It is important for the Department to go back to the drawing board and do some real horizon planning across the whole piece, looking at all our methods of transport, interoperability and connectivity. Otherwise, the white elephant that has been adopted as a sign by the anti-HS2 campaigners, will come to fruition. The PAC and the National Audit Office have consistently criticised the project, and that counts for a great deal. The NAO and the PAC are set up to scrutinise the type of expenditure envisaged here, and to tell it warts and all. The PAC is a cross-party Committee, so there is no political bias. Once again, it is not being listened to seriously at the highest levels of Government.
I will not go on for much longer, but I will leave the last words to my constituents. I have received literally hundreds of e-mails about the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has been mentioned in dispatches many times. E-mails have come not just from my constituents; they have come from around the country. Many people would like the Bill to come to fruition, although I know that at this time of the electoral cycle we do not have much hope of it going any further. I will leave it to my hon. Friend to decide what he wants to do with it.
Dan Byles (North Warwickshire) (Con)
It is a privilege to speak in the debate, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) for bringing the matter before the House. It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), who eloquently outlined many of the arguments and concerns. I share those concerns 100% and I do not propose to repeat the arguments, merely to endorse them, and I will not take up much of the House’s time today.
I endorse the comments made earlier about the Clerk to the Committee. Many of my constituents have come down to petition the Committee directly, as did I, and the Clerk has been extremely helpful to my constituents and to everybody who has taken part in what can be a daunting process for those who are not used to the somewhat arcane workings of this place.
My views on this project are well known and I have voted against it in this House at every opportunity. I am opposed to it on three levels: nationally, as I do not believe that there is any argument that stands up to scrutiny that shows this is the right way for the nation to spend some £50 billion; regionally, as I have deep concerns about its impact, thanks to strong evidence from around the world that smaller regional economies linked to larger regional economies suffer what is known as a negative agglomeration effect, whereby economic activity is not pushed out from the centre but is sucked in, and as Birmingham and the west midlands are the closest regional economic centre to London to be linked by high-speed rail, I am deeply concerned that potential investment that might have come to Birmingham and the west midlands will instead be pulled into London; and locally, as my constituency of North Warwickshire is almost certainly the worst affected constituency outside London—I add that caveat—as we have phase 1, phase 2, the delta junction and the Y junction as well as an enormous railhead close to Kingsbury. Although that railhead is technically a temporary structure, it will be there for a minimum of 15 years. The idea that people living next to the structure will not qualify for compensation because it is temporary, even though it will be there for 15 years, is staggering.
As I mentioned earlier, the economic analysis used for the case is woefully simplistic. It seems as though those who support the project believe it to be self-evidently good, given the woeful lack of sophistication in the economic analysis used to demonstrate that it is good. During the later stages of the argument, when the earlier bits of the case started to fall apart, the question of whether HS2 would help resolve the north-south divide started to be elevated as a key argument, even though it was not mentioned at the beginning. The north-south divide suddenly became a major selling point, and I remember the Select Committee on Transport’s ringing endorsement that
“only time will tell whether or not HS2 will…help…reduce the north-south divide.”
What a ringing endorsement of what has become a key plank in the project!
When the budget miraculously increased significantly, I noted that in order to maintain some semblance of a benefit-cost ratio that worked, the benefits had to be increased significantly almost overnight. I recall watching a Transport Minister—I will not mention which one, although I hasten to add that it was not the one who is sitting on the Front Bench now, my right hon. Friend the Minister of State—struggling on “Newsnight” to explain how they had suddenly found billions in additional benefit almost out of their back pocket in order to maintain some semblance of a benefit-cost ratio that looked right, given the costs that had been added to the budget.
Frank Dobson
Does the hon. Gentleman accept, as I am afraid I do, that the economic arguments from those in favour and those against are pretty thin and are based on guesswork about who might be using a train and why in the year 2040?
Mr Hayes
It is not out of fear that I resist this proposal; it is out of courage. I am courageous enough to believe in the power, wisdom and efficacy of this place. I am not one of those politicians who is prepared to give ground to that destructive modern insecurity—that guilt-ridden doubt about our ability to originate, to invent, to inspire and to enthral—that so many of the governing class are said to feel. I believe that politicians can make a difference, and that they can take big decisions and be ambitious for what they can achieve for the country. So it is not fear that drives my resistance to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch’s argument; it is courage, and the willingness to be bold and to have confidence in the decisions taken by this House. I emphasise the point about the decisions being taken by this House, because this kind of project can succeed only on the basis of consensus.
Frank Dobson
Lots of people pull into Euston, and they want to continue to do so without being interrupted for the next 15 years by the works on HS2. In relation to the impact on my constituency, surely the point is that although all the proposals in the Bill—which the House has apparently seriously considered—have been abandoned, the work around Euston has not. There are no proposals for the people or for this House to consider at the moment, and no such proposals are expected until September, even though they were originally promised for last October.
Mr Hayes
The people of Holborn and St Pancras, in their wisdom, have chosen the right hon. Gentleman—for whom I have a great deal of respect, as he well knows—to speak for them. Members of this House are elected to voice the concerns of their constituents. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) finished her speech by saying that she would give way to her constituents and allow them to have the final word on this matter. Other Members have argued that they speak boldly for their constituents. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) said the concerns of those who have doubts about HS2 were being disregarded because they were seen solely as concerns about the constituency. I do not disregard them on that basis; those Members are doing their duty and their job in making the case for the people they serve, and they do so in the spirit—the Burkeian spirit, dare I say—that should drive all of us who believe in representative democracy and the role of Parliament.
The intervention by the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) brings me to the matter of Euston, about which he spoke at considerable length—understandably, given his long association with that place. He will know that part of the advantage of the HS2 project is that it involves the redevelopment of Euston. He will also know that that will, in turn, involve the rebuilding of the Euston arch. There are those in Warwickshire, and in Chesham and Amersham, who might say that their local concerns are far greater than any consideration of what might happen at Euston, but I say that the emblematic significance of rebuilding the Euston arch will send a signal out across the whole nation that the Government are doing the right thing.
Frank Dobson
The Euston arch could be rebuilt tomorrow. We do not need a huge engineering project to justify it. We could simply dig the stones out of the canal and rebuild the arch where it used to stand, and we could do that tomorrow.
Mr Hayes
As the right hon. Gentleman knows, the rebuilding of the Euston arch is associated with the redevelopment of Euston station, which is at the very heart of the HS2 project. Of all the London stations, perhaps the one that demands redevelopment most of all is Euston. I know that he would not eschew the opportunity to see the benefits of that regeneration not only for rail travellers but for the whole of that part of his constituency. I know that he was not dismissing the redevelopment of Euston or the rebuilding of the Euston arch. I think that, at heart, he is something of an aesthete. Surely he knows, however, that if the project does not go ahead, Euston will not be redeveloped in the way that it could be.
Frank Dobson
I fear that the right hon. Gentleman has been very badly briefed by his officials, because he ought to know—his officials certainly ought to know this, although they probably do not, if my experience is anything to go by—that there were outline proposals for the redevelopment of Euston station that virtually everyone in the locality approved of. They would like that particular redevelopment to go ahead, because it would not involve a vast amount of redevelopment around the station. Sir David Higgins appears to believe, based on his experience with the Olympics in east London, that the area around Euston is a brownfield site, but it is not. It is full of people, and they want to be left alone.
Mr Hayes
I want to say two things about that. First, the right hon. Gentleman knows that those redevelopment plans have been given life only as a result of this project. Secondly, I concede that it is important that any redevelopment should take full account of the interests and wishes of the people in the immediate vicinity. He made a strong case for them in his speech. It is critical that the communities that will be directly affected by that development should be integrally involved in what takes place there. He has been making this argument for some time and, as a result of the overtures that he has made today, I will commit the Government to engaging with those communities, to ensuring that what is done matches the local interest, and to involving him in that process. I am more than happy to have further discussion on the detail of the development of Euston, given what he has offered this debate today. In that spirit, I say to him that its development can be a good and indeed glorious thing; it does not have to be bad news for him, his constituents or the people in that vicinity.
Mr Hayes
Let me tell hon. Members what I think about the redevelopment of Euston. This will perhaps come as news to my right hon. Friend and others, but I am absolutely determined that the development of Euston should be ambitious and bold in the way she described. I am absolutely determined that we should end with something that takes its inspiration from the arch. We do not want some vile, low-budget, modern monstrosity. We want a building that is grand and fit for the future, that is a landmark destination and that is as glorious as the new redevelopment of St Pancras or the addition to King’s Cross. We have a good recent record on what can be done at these large London stations. Let us do nothing less than that at Euston—indeed, let us try to do more. So, I will not be constrained in my ambitions in the way she says, and I could hardly be so, given that I claimed earlier to believe that politicians in this place should be bold, courageous, ambitious and inventive. I want a neoclassical building on a grand scale at Euston, and it does not take a lot of working out to realise that the inspiration—the genesis for that—should come from the redeveloped arch.
The right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras was saying that although he understands that there will be a totemic significance to that building, we also need to consider its environs. I have pledged to him that we will engage with the local community, with local representatives and with him to make sure that the views and representations of the people in the surrounding area are built in to our thinking. I do not think we can say fairer than that.
Frank Dobson
The sort of thing the Minister is now saying is what HS2 has been saying endlessly to people and then ignoring them. The people in the area—not just their MP but the people themselves—were promised that the revised proposals for Euston would be made public for consultation in October last year and are now being told that these things may be available in September this year. That shows the quality of the consultation that has been going on—it has been listen and ignore.
Mr Hayes
The right hon. Gentleman understands that those are not matters for which I was responsible, but I am here today and I can seize the responsibility for saying to him that we will make those proposals available for local consideration and consultation, and I do not think it is unreasonable to say that we should do that by September. What I do not want to get to is a further statement in September saying that they have been further delayed. He is a very distinguished and experienced local representative. The way these things work best is when draft ideas—plans—are put forward, to which people can then add, and they then develop incrementally. That cannot be done until the conversation is started in the way he describes. So I think we need to move ahead with greater alacrity than he suggests has been the case so far.
High Speed 2 (Compensation)
Frank Dobson Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mrs Gillan
The hon. Gentleman has made a very valid point, and I shall say more about it shortly.
There are problems with the current compensation proposals. They will compensate only about 2% of those who live within 1 km of HS2, or within 250 metres from a tunnel. As the hon. Gentleman has just pointed out, despite widespread evidence of blight, the vast majority of people affected by HS2 will not be compensated fairly, because the Government have consistently linked the scheme to distance from the line and have ignored the wider effects. HS2 Action Alliance has calculated that only about 172,000 people will receive any kind of compensation, although more than a million live within 1 km of HS2 and many are being adversely affected.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
In my area, around Euston, people will be living next to the biggest construction site in Europe for 10 or 15 years. They will be living within a yard of the works. However, they will be entitled to no compensation at all. As the right hon. Lady will know, uncertainty is a major source of blight. The revised proposals for Euston were supposed to be presented next month, but that has now been postponed until after the general election.
Mrs Gillan
The right hon. Gentleman and I have stood shoulder to shoulder across the House on this issue. There is no party divide on it. I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) is similarly concerned, as are many other colleagues. The point is well made.
According to estimates in data commissioned by the Government from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the average loss to a homeowner is 20% up to 500 metres from the line, 30% up to 300 metres away, and 40% up to 120 metres away. Moreover, that blight is not temporary. PwC says that it will be at its worst until at least 2023. The Government have failed to recognise that, or the fact that the scale of suffering extends well beyond the line itself.
As things stand, there is not even sufficient compensation for those living above tunnels. HS2 Ltd believes that home owners are not unduly affected by tunnels, but my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), for example, informs me that the property market in his constituency tells a very different story. There is no compensation for those affected by construction, although it will inevitably be very extensive in impact and duration. Constituents of my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington) in Wendover and Stoke Mandeville live very close to the safeguarded area and the proposed construction sites, but they do not qualify for compensation under the boundary rules. It is grossly unfair that they should be expected to endure the disturbance of construction and operation as well as putting up with a loss of value to their properties unless they can prove an exceptional need to sell. Some of my right hon. Friend’s constituents say that estate agents simply refuse to place their properties on the market and that potential purchasers have been refused any mortgage on properties because of HS2. This is emblematic of the broad injustice of the current compensation measures.
The compensation schemes announced and operating to date are also problematic. The exceptional hardship scheme and the need to sell schemes have been arduous and complicated for many of our constituents, and in my view they are often wholly unjust. The lack of consistency in the decision-making process has been incredibly frustrating for those involved, and the accuracy of valuations has been the subject of contention in many areas. There has been little transparency in this process. The latest proposals—the alternative cash offer and the home owner payment—offer poor value to the taxpayer and involve arbitrary sums that bear little relation to the actual loss suffered by the individual.
Mr Goodwill
I understand my right hon. and learned Friend’s point. Stamp duty and moving costs will be payable for those in the closest band to the railway. We will announce the outcome of the consultation to which I referred later this year.
On the long-standing campaign of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham for a longer tunnel through the Chilterns, we have considered a range of options for tunnels.
Frank Dobson
I do not wish to delay the Minister in turning his attention to the tunnel, but can he explain why the terms for urban areas are different from those for rural areas?
Mr Goodwill
We take the view that the level of disruption in rural areas, particularly the effect on property prices, is absolutely different from that in urban areas, where properties can be close to the railway but there might be many houses in between, and in many cases there is already a railway established, for example near Euston station, which no doubt people were aware of when they moved there.
Frank Dobson
My constituents might not fancy the idea of a new station, but what they really do not want is having to live next to a construction site for a decade or more. That is what they are bothered about.
Mr Goodwill
Yes, and I spent time with the right hon. Gentleman in his constituency, along with the leader of his council, looking at some of the mitigation that can be put in place.
I will talk a little about the property bond. My right hon. Friend referred to the Government’s decision against a property bond as a means of providing compensation for generalised blight caused by HS2. The main aim of the property bond concept is to ensure that eligible property owners do not suffer unreasonable losses because of any reduction in the market value of their properties caused by a proposed development. The defining feature of a property bond is the idea that eligible property owners, at an early stage in a project’s development, would be given a specific and binding promise of a well-defined, individual settlement, which the property owner would be entitled to redeem in specific circumstances. Should the property transfer ownership, so too would the bond. The outcome of a property bond scheme would reflect the way the scheme influenced property buyers, vendors and professionals throughout the lifetime of the relevant infrastructure project. Without evidence of those behaviours and decisions from actual schemes, it is very hard to assess the performance of a property bond for HS2.
The Government continue to believe that the property bond concept has merit, and that it was right to put it forward as an option in the property compensation consultation in 2013. However, taking all consultation responses and further practical and analytical findings into account, we continue to be concerned that the effects of a property bond on the behaviour and decisions of property owners, professionals and especially property buyers remain unknown and hard to assess.
In conclusion—
High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill
Frank Dobson Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Goodwill
We are here to debate the merits of two motions: one instructing the HS2 Select Committee to consider 55 minor amendments to the Bill and to hear petitions against them, should there be any; the other to allow the documents relating to this additional provision and any other in the future to be deposited in electronic format.
Before I deal with the merits of the motions, let me put them in context. The House will recall that in April it agreed, by a large majority, to give the hybrid Bill for phase 1 of High Speed 2 a Second Reading. The Bill provides the necessary powers to allow the construction and operation of phase 1 between London and the west midlands.
On Second Reading, the House agreed the principle of the Bill, which is that there should be a high-speed railway that will run between Euston and the west coast main line in Handsacre in Staffordshire, with a spur to Curzon Street in Birmingham. There will be intermediate stations at Old Oak Common and Birmingham Interchange, located near the NEC and Birmingham international airport.
Following Second Reading, the Bill, as it is a hybrid, was remitted to a specially appointed Select Committee. This Committee, under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms), is tasked with considering the petitions lodged against the Bill by those directly and specially affected by it, a task which it has already started with commendable diligence and good judgment, for which I thank it. Indeed, it is continuing its work in Committee Room 5 today.
In parallel with this, and as a key part of the process, HS2 Ltd has been engaging further with those petitioners in order better to understand their concerns and determine whether these can be addressed without the need for them to appear before the Committee. This has proved successful with a number of petitioners, including Birmingham city council and Centro. As a result of some of those discussions and further developments in the design for the railway, we have identified the need to make 55 minor amendments to the Bill as originally deposited.
The motion before the House sets out their broad location but, despite their minor nature, I think it would be useful to explain them in a little more detail. They are mainly changes to access tracks required to construct or maintain the railway and refinements to National Grid’s requirements for electricity wire diversions. For example, where a farmer has suggested that it would be better to route an access track over this field rather than that field, that change is included in this additional provision. Additional land is also included around some electricity pylons where National Grid’s requirements have been refined.
These changes, in total, will not increase the overall project budget or target price for phase 1. Indeed, they are expected to cost slightly less than our original proposals. The estimate of expense for this additional provision, which will be published if this motion passes, sets out the total cost of these works at around £965,000. However, due to the prescriptive nature of this process, it does not set out the net position, which is, as I have already said, a slight saving.
The first motion being debated today instructs the Committee to consider these amendments, and to hear petitions against them. It is important to note that the motion does not agree that these changes should be made; it just agrees that the Committee be allowed to consider them.
Subject to the approval of this motion, the additional provision and a supplementary environmental statement describing the likely significant environmental effects of the amendments will be deposited in Parliament, and in local authority offices and libraries in those locations affected by the changes. Following deposit of these documents, a public consultation on the supplementary environmental statement will commence, which will close on 14 November. This consultation is 56 days long, in line with the approach taken for the main environmental statement and in excess of the minimum requirements in Standing Orders. As with the main environmental statement consultation, the responses to the consultation will be analysed by Parliament’s independent assessor and the assessor’s report will be tabled in the House ahead of Third Reading.
There will also be a petitioning period for those directly and specially affected by these changes to submit petitions against them. This petitioning period will begin on Friday 19 September and end on 17 October for all petitioners.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
The people now petitioning have already petitioned and paid their £20. Will they be able to petition without paying a further £20?
Mr Goodwill
Yes, they certainly will. Indeed, this is a “buy one, get one free” offer from this Government and I can reassure those who are affected and wish to petition that there will be that provision for a free opportunity.
Newspaper notices will be published in national and local newspapers over the next two weeks, alerting the public to these changes and the opportunity to feed into the process by petitioning or responding to the consultation, as appropriate.
The second motion before us confirms that the permission given by the House in July last year to deposit environmental and other information in relation to this Bill in electronic format applies to additional provisions as well. Electronic deposit of the Bill and related environmental information was an innovation welcomed by the public, as well as avoiding the need and cost of printing documents, a single set of which weighed 1.5 tonnes. I believe that it is only sensible that the same approach be taken for this additional provision and any subsequent ones that might come forward, although I hasten to add this will not be such a weighty document.
As with the Bill deposit, the motion is permissive. It allows those locations where documents are to be deposited to choose whether they would like documents in electronic form only or also in hard copy. Many local authorities affected by these amendments have already indicated their preference for electronic format. A similar motion to this has already been endorsed in the other place.
I hope that the House will agree that these are two very sensible motions to demonstrate the progress that this Government are making in transforming the country’s infrastructure and economic geography. It also demonstrates that we are doing this in the right way, listening to the concerns of those affected and, where possible, making changes to reduce impacts. I commend these motions to the House.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
The debate this afternoon strikes me as rather strange, as we are being asked to give the existing Select Committee power to consider amendments that we have not seen, which is fairly unusual in the House of Commons. If we are asked to agree to some amendment, we have usually had the opportunity to read and digest them and possibly to consult other people about them. The environmental statements are apparently ready but will not be issued until tomorrow, leaving us to proceed in ignorance. They will contain all the details. When people are considering the impact on their homes, businesses, schools or leisure provision, it is the detail that counts.
Mr Goodwill
I must make it clear that the House is being asked not to approve the changes, but to allow the Committee to consider the changes and for petitions to be submitted to help them in that work.
Frank Dobson
I understand that, but if we had the detail, the House might decide that some amendments are so blindingly stupid that they should not be referred to the Select Committee in the first place. It remains the case that we are being asked to endorse these propositions without having seen them. Six groups of changes are, it is claimed, in response to the requirements of local people; four of them are in response to requirements of the public utilities; and five are for “minor changes of design” and—these are the magic words—“connected purposes”. What we are being asked to push through is not quite as specific as has been suggested.
Michael Fabricant
Following the point that the right hon. Gentleman has just made, does a blank cheque come to mind?
Frank Dobson
Pretty much, yes, although I am opposed to the daft £20 billion cheque in the first place, and have been all along.
What bothers me, besides the famous “connected purposes” let out, is that we are also told:
“That these Orders be Standing Orders of the House.”
According to HS2, the changes we are considering—or not really considering—this afternoon are minor, and we are placing this procedure within the Standing Orders of the House so that we have a sort of modern precedent for the Clerks to rely on if challenged. What concerns me is that the proposals that will eventually be made for the Euston part of my constituency cannot be considered as minor by anyone on earth.
Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)
On the right hon. Gentleman’s point about minor design changes, the same term is used in a letter written to me by the Department on 2 May. It cites three “minor changes”, which are in fact significant land acquisitions—at a National Grid sub-station; in the diversion of the Kenilworth greenway; and through provision of additional car parking at the national motorcycle museum. There is no indication in that letter of how compensation schemes would affect those lands, which are significantly outside the present qualifying area. Like him, I think that some of these minor changes seem quite significant to the landowners.
Frank Dobson
The right hon. Lady’s point simply emphasises how the detail is important. With Euston, however, it is not a matter of detail. The current proposal that the House voted through has been abandoned. In fact, it was abandoned before the House voted it through. The situation is utterly crazy. The proposition included in the Bill was basically to build a rather elegant lean-to engine shed at the west side of the existing Euston station, so most of the concern and the emphasis and the source of petitions have been from people, homes and businesses to the west of the station. The proposition now is to abandon that and demolish the whole of the existing Euston station, which will clearly take longer and extend the impact. More time will be required because of the increase in scale and the impact on businesses and people living to the east of the station will massively increase.
Mr Slaughter
I share my right hon. Friend’s pain about the shifting sands. The letter to which I referred earlier, which I received today, invites me to a meeting this Sunday at which I will have
“an opportunity to learn more about a possible new rail link that has been proposed and how it might affect you. The new line would connect the planned HS2 and Crossrail interchange station at Old Oak Common with the West Coast Main Line.”
That might be very desirable—in fact, I thought it was happening already—but it suddenly introduces a new railway line that skirts around a few streets on the edge of my constituency. The picture changes every day, the consultation becomes redundant and we move to another phase.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)
Order. The hon. Gentleman might consider making his observations in an Adjournment debate. They are not directly relevant to the two motions we are discussing today, as far as I am aware, but he has put them on the record.
Frank Dobson
Although I understand the concerns of people who are directly affected by the propositions that are not quite before us this afternoon, my principal concern is the application of the Standing Orders to what is proposed and likely to be proposed at Euston, which will be the biggest building and engineering project in Britain for many a long year. Its impact will be phenomenal and I believe that it is wholly inappropriate for the Government to try to use such a procedure to push through changes on that scale and with such an impact.
Mrs Gillan
I am increasingly worried about the process. My right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) just said that in her letter she had been informed that four sites were subject to these additional provisions and changes, but the document issued to me at 1.30 today shows only two changes for Meriden. That reinforces the fact that there is a lack of clarity about the detail and there seems to be some confusion about what changes are being referred to the Committee. With a project of this size, we cannot afford such discrepancy.
Frank Dobson
Again, I sympathise with the right hon. Lady, because nowhere has been subjected to the absolutely stupendous incompetence of HS2 more than my constituency. HS2 proposed a link with HS1. Everyone said that that was crackers, HS2 said it was wonderful and then it had to drop it. HS2 proposed the lean-to engine shed proposal. Lots of people said that that was crackers, HS2 said it was the only thing it would be possible to do and that it would be extraordinarily expensive to have a full development of the whole station—and lo and behold, that is what is now being proposed. No apology has been issued to anyone, as far as I know, for this stupendous incompetence and ridiculousness. I understand that when an environmental statement is eventually issued, the consultation period will run concurrently with the petitioning period. That seems to me to be extremely unfair.
Let me explain the difference in scale between what is being formulated now and what is in the Bill. The works at Euston in the Bill were going to cost £2 billion, but HS2 let slip at meetings that it is now thinking in terms of £7 billion. Even a fellow Yorkshireman like the Minister would admit that that is a few bob more. It is people with that grasp of reality who are behind this scheme. In addition, and in a further source of perturbation for my constituents, HS2 now says that the new Euston, when finally completed and in operation, would not be able to cope with the increased number of passengers without the building of Crossrail 2 to help take passengers to and from Euston, at an additional cost of £20 billion. Will that be included in the new environmental statement and will it be subject to petitioning?
Mr Goodwill
May I point out to the right hon. Gentleman that none of the provisions we are considering relates to Euston or the part of the line around there, as they refer merely to the parishes?
Frank Dobson
The point that I am trying to make to the Minister—and to anyone else who cares to listen—is that we are being asked to endorse the approach set out by the Government by incorporating it in Standing Orders of the House. That could be taken as a precedent that such a procedure may apply to the massive changes at Euston, not just to the important but none the less much smaller changes in the parishes and towns to which the instruction motion refers. It is therefore perfectly legitimate for me to express my concerns about the threat to my constituents. That is what I was elected to do, and it is what I propose to continue doing.
Mr Goodwill
It might be that just the parishes were listed, not the actual works, but I understand that the documentation laid before House did include that—[Interruption.] Indeed, I have been passed a bit of paper that might well reassure hon. Members. I am told that the changes relating to the motorcycle museum site are no longer being brought forward as a result of negotiations, so I must apologise to the House if the information was incorrect.
Such issues will be the subject of petitions that may be laid before the Select Committee. I believe that the petitioning period is adequate, especially given the limited scope of the changes. I underline that, at all times, we will seek to comply with all our obligations under EU and domestic legislation.
Many of the changes will be welcomed by landowners and people in the relevant areas. They have arisen partly as a result of our continuing negotiations with those affected by the building of HS2, and it is important that we ensure that people’s views are taken into account.
We need to look at the overall picture, and the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) referred to changes that may take place in his constituency. We are aware not only of the permanent changes that will arise due to the line’s construction, especially to the station itself, but of how businesses in the area might be affected due to the construction. I spent an enjoyable lunchtime eating a meal with the right hon. Gentleman in one of the area’s Bangladeshi restaurants, and I understood precisely the worries of the owners about the erection of building hoardings in the area, which might make it difficult for the restaurant’s usual clientele to access the site.
Frank Dobson
But the point—I have clearly failed to make it—is that that area is to the west of the station, but there will now be similar problems to the east of the station.
Mr Goodwill
Sir David Higgins is considering how we can best capitalise on the tremendous opportunity that Euston station presents as part of the project. Those of us who remember what the area around King’s Cross station was like a number of years ago will understand how it has been transformed. Indeed, the station itself has become a destination in its own right, and people often spend time in that area. We can capitalise on the opportunity at Euston, but I understand that people will be severely affected during the transformation process, so we need to do what we can to minimise the impact on them.
Frank Dobson
David Higgins is apparently incapable of distinguishing between the land around the stations. The redevelopment at King’s Cross took place on useless, empty, brownfield railway land; the land on both sides of Euston station is not brownfield land to be rescued by some Australian missionary, but a place where people live, go about their business and send their children to school, and somewhere people go to old folks’ luncheon clubs. They want to continue to do that; they do not want the area levelled as part of some grandiose redevelopment scheme that everyone can think is wonderful. I speak as someone who has strongly supported redevelopment at Euston and was the first person to advocate using St Pancras station as the terminus for the channel tunnel link, so I do not need to take any lessons from anyone, but the same situation does not apply at Euston—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)
Order. I remind the right hon. Gentleman that he was making an intervention, not a second speech—although it did sound a bit like one.
High Speed Rail (London - West Midlands) Bill: Select Committee
Frank Dobson Excerpts(10 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Goodwill
That will be a matter for the House authorities, but I am sure that it would be acceptable to pay the £20 in cash. I know that one of the amendments refers to electronic payments and tabling, which we will resist. The money will ultimately go to the taxpayer, as the House is a taxpayer-funded authority. We do not believe that a fee of £20 would be prohibitive for any organisation or individual seeking to petition the Committee.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
Can the Minister explain why there is a £20 fee? HS2 Ltd, which is spending hundreds of millions of pounds on consultants, does not have to make any contribution to the cost of running the House, so why should individuals? Certainly, for some of the individuals in my constituency who will see their homes demolished, £20 is a rather large part of their weekly income.
Mr Goodwill
HS2 itself has spent considerable taxpayer funds on trying to mitigate many of the environmental implications of the line, which might well head off petitioners. Indeed, I was speaking with representatives of the Ramblers Association only the other week, when we went on a 10-mile ramble in my constituency. They told me that they were hopeful that, because of the engagement with HS2, they might not have to petition, as their concerns had been answered. HS2 has been engaging with a number of potential petitioners, including local authorities, to try to allay some of their concerns and fears without the need to petition. That money has been well spent in addressing those issues.
Mr Goodwill
The hon. Lady makes a very good point. Indeed, there is already passive provision in the first phase to allow the Heathrow spur to be constructed, should it be decided to go forward in that way. From an engineering perspective, it would be very expensive and disruptive to try to join that link. Similarly, in relation to the passive provision for the HS1 link, it is ultimately for the Committee to decide whether or not a petition should be heard. The Committee may choose to hear petitions relating to a future link not being precluded, but the work of the Committee is about the railway before it and it cannot get bogged down considering the merits of links that may or may not happen.
Frank Dobson
Much as I welcome the dropping of the preposterous HS2-HS1 link, as do all the people whose lives would have been ruined by it, in view of the fact that until about three weeks ago HS2 was saying that there was no possibility of dropping the link, no one in the area believes a word that HS2 says. I warn the Minister of that. The motion says that the Committee shall not hear a petition if it relates to the link. That is fine, because the link has been dropped. Supposing that, after the Committee stage had concluded, the House as a whole decided to reinstate the link; would people then be allowed to petition? If not, they would think they were being swindled by officialdom, as would indeed be the case.
Mr Goodwill
I hope that, following the decision to scrap the link, I have a few more friends in Camden than before. If the Committee were to decide to make changes to the Bill that affected potential petitioners who were not affected before, there would be another opportunity for them to petition, and a similar period would be allowed for that to happen.
Let me underline that for a whole variety of reasons that I will not go into but the right hon. Gentleman will understand, we do not believe that the HS1-HS2 link represents value for money or that it is practical. There are all sorts of logistical problems. From a security perspective, the journey would have to be designated as international because we could not have a situation where some people on the train had gone through passport control and some had not. There might be rather frugally minded Yorkshiremen such as me who decided that, rather than buy a through-train ticket to Paris, they would buy two tickets and make the short stroll between Euston and St Pancras, or get the underground, or even use some other means such as a travelator, which could transport people quickly and easily between those two locations.
Mrs Gillan
I am grateful for that intervention. I am using this debate as a vehicle to raise these questions. They might not all be directed at the Front Bench, but I am raising them in this forum because I see no other opportunity for Members to raise them. I take on board what the Minister has said.
Frank Dobson
Does the right hon. Lady recognise that some of the organisations that are said to have advised the Department or HS2 are not necessarily on quite the same lines as the Department or HS2? For instance, we were told that the Institution of Civil Engineers had provided advice on the HS1-HS2 link. It had indeed, but it turns out that it advised against the link. That bit was not mentioned.
Mrs Gillan
One has to be very careful in this game and read the fine print. Even when one reads the fine print, one can be surprised about what one discovers.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate as the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras. I think some people think that the St Pancras part of the constituency name refers to the station, but it refers to the parish of St Pancras, which has two St Pancras churches. We also have three major main line stations: St Pancras, King’s Cross and Euston. The history of what has been proposed for those stations over the years has to be borne in mind by anyone considering the current proposals. Ministers need to understand the background.
I have never questioned the integrity of the Ministers and I tell people that I do not question their integrity, but everyone questions the integrity of the officials that they have had to deal with over the years. The background is that the first proposal for a channel tunnel link to London was for it to terminate at a concrete box under King’s Cross station. We were told that there was no possible alternative to it; that it was “perfection”. Eventually, that daft idea was abandoned. An idea was then taken up—I was the first person to put it forward—for St Pancras station to be used as the channel tunnel link terminus. When I first suggested it, sneering remarks from all sorts of railway aficionados were the result. In the end, it went ahead and it has worked very well, as I think everyone accepts. Although it involved problems for local people, they went along with it because they could see the merits of it, both from their point of view and from everyone else’s.
Similarly, the recent improvements at King’s Cross were welcomed by virtually everyone, including the council, me and local organisations. That is not the case with Euston. We still need clarification to satisfy people in my constituency. When the proposal for the channel tunnel link was first put forward, I said to officials that it would need a great deal of engineering work to make it work and that that would be very troublesome for the people adjacent to the part of the line above ground. They said, “No, no, it won’t need major engineering works.” When I said that at a public meeting, one of the consultants—not an official—came along and said, “Oh no, no; we can assure everyone it won’t need major works.” Lo and behold, it was eventually accepted that major engineering works would be needed, because some new factors had arisen, including the need to widen the route. Somebody who thinks they can put a line across Camden town for an additional service without widening the route ought not to be allowed to advise the Government or anyone else.
Time and again, people said the proposition was ridiculous and they were sneered at and snarled at, as I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), who speaks from the Front Bench, would confirm. I very much welcome the position taken by her and our hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), as do people in my constituency, that we do not accept that the link is a good idea. It is a bad idea and it should, without a shadow of a doubt, be wiped out altogether. That is why I could not possibly support amendment (e), in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart), which would raise the possibility of the damn thing being revivified. I could not bear the thought of that.
The other point I would like to make, before I come to all the amendments, is that the procedure that we are talking about is archaic, difficult for human beings to cope with and ridiculous. We might compare it with a public inquiry into a similarly large proposition, where people have the opportunity to make representations without having to engage with an A4 page of all sorts of archaic rubbish and ridiculous language before actually getting round to putting their point, and without time limitations on submitting their petitions, which are then vetted to see whether they are valid. For what might be described as normal human beings—or, for that matter, small businesses, which do not have a great secretariat or legal advisers and suchlike—the time limits proposed are already too short and ought to be extended. In relation to businesses, I have a query for the Minister that I hope he can clear up. As I understand it, the restaurants in Drummond street will, because they are businesses, have the short deadline for submitting their petitions. Is that right?
Mr Goodwill
The small businesses along the route—shops or, indeed, farms—can petition either as businesses, in which case they will have the short deadline, or as individuals, in which case the longer deadline will apply. I hope that clarifies matters.
Frank Dobson
The next question is this: does the business restriction apply to the association of businesses in Drummond street? The Minister might not know the answer to that—I would not necessarily expect him to know that.
Mr Goodwill
I stand to be corrected by wiser authorities than me, but an association would be in the same category as businesses, some of the non-governmental organisations and larger local authorities. However, members of an association could collectively petition as individuals and then delegate one of their representatives or parliamentary counsel to speak on their behalf.
Frank Dobson
I am grateful for that clarification, but I am sorry about the direction of it.
Dan Byles (North Warwickshire) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that some very small businesses would have greatly benefited from being treated as individuals? Why someone running a very small business, going about their normal, day-to-day activity, should be considered a greater expert in the petitioning process than an individual is quite beyond me.
Frank Dobson
I entirely share the hon. Gentleman’s views about that. I am glad that Camden council is organising workshops for individuals and small businesses and making its best efforts to ensure that their petitions are in order and, in some cases, that the £20 is handed over and logged, and then passed to me, so that I can personally hand it in, in the hope that their petitions will be valid.
That leads me on to the £20 fee. It is said, generally speaking, that it is not a deterrent. Well, if it is not a deterrent, why do we have it? People do not have to pay a £20 fee to give evidence at a public inquiry. The fee will raise quite a trivial sum. Even if thousands of people submit petitions, at £20 each, the fee will not raise any worthwhile amount of money for the House of Commons. If the fee is not a deterrent, why do we have it? I think it will be a deterrent for the worst-off. As the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) said, it is a fifth of a single pensioner’s pension, which is a lot of money for a pensioner—or some pensioners, anyway—to find. Whatever the outcome in this case, the whole hybrid Bill approach needs to be looked at. We talk about modernising, and by God there is some modernising needed for this hybrid procedure.
That takes me back to the instruction that the Committee
“shall not hear any Petition to the extent that it relates to whether or not there should be a spur from Old Oak Common to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.”
No one trusts the processes involved, so there is something that is still not clear to me. I am sure the Minister is trying to get the truth out, but to return to the proposition that I was trying to explain earlier, let us suppose that the Committee complies with that instruction—as it must—and cannot reintroduce the proposal for a spur from HS2 to HS1, but the matter returns to the House after the Committee has looked at it and made all its recommendations. As I understand it, the House could then reinstate the link, if it wanted to. If it did, would there be any procedure to enable petitions from those affected? If not, in effect we are banning people’s petitions from being examined now, while they might not be able to petition later if there were a further proposition.
Mr Goodwill
To clarify, if any changes that result from the Committee responding to petitions affect people who were not affected previously, a new petitioning period would be triggered. People who were then affected could petition, so they should not be frightened that something could be slid under the door without their having the opportunity to petition.
Frank Dobson
I understand that; my question is this. Let us suppose the matter comes back to the House and the House as a whole wishes to change things in some way that affects people. Will those affected then have the opportunity to petition against those changes?
Mr Goodwill
I will correct this if it is not right, but my understanding is that if that happened—there are no plans anywhere at all to do that; I must make it clear that we have scrapped the link—that would initiate the whole process again. It would be a new process and a new Bill, and there would be a new hybrid Bill Committee, but that is not the situation. I therefore hope that the right hon. Gentleman can allay the fears of his constituents, in that we have indeed abandoned the HS2-HS1 link as part of this project and the petitioning process could not resurrect it, because it is not within the scope of the Bill before us.
Frank Dobson
I thank the Minister for that; I am 99% reassured.
As the Minister knows, the Bill’s proposals for Euston have been abandoned—or are to be abandoned—and are to be replaced. The engineering and other studies have only just commenced. My next question to the Minister is whether he can confirm that when the new proposals for Euston are formulated, they will be subject to the usual procedures requiring HS2 to produce a new environmental statement, that there will be opportunities for people to respond to it and that people will then be able to submit new petitions against the new proposals that the Government wish to include in the Bill. Am I right about that?
Mr Goodwill
I shall comment on that when I sum up at the end, so that I do not misinform the right hon. Gentleman. I rather suspect, however, that I will be able to reassure him that that is the case.
Frank Dobson
I welcome that reassurance.
I am particularly concerned, too, about the statutory and non-statutory provisions for compensation. Outside London, some people whose homes will not be demolished but whose property and general lifestyle will be adversely affected by a railway perhaps 50 yards away will be compensated, which I think is right. The situation in my constituency, however, is that people whose homes are 5 yards away from the line or 5 yards away from 10 years of engineering works will get no compensation. I hope that the Minister, the Department and HS2 Ltd are aware that the immediately preceding Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Keir Starmer, has given us an opinion that the procedure followed in respect of my constituency is actually in breach of the law. I therefore hope that at least the House will have an opportunity to review it, even if the Committee cannot. I view it as strange that we are talking about a Committee supposedly looking at mitigation and compensation that is apparently not allowed to look at compensation. That needs to be revised.
My last but one point is that I very much support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee. I hope that the Government, as well as our Front-Bench team, will go along at least with the spirit of it.
My final point is about the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston. I believe that if we are to have a High Speed 2, it is ludicrous for it not to be connected to High Speed 1. That does not mean that it makes any sense whatever to have the HS2-HS1 link that was originally proposed, which was crackers in practically every aspect and certainly does not go to the right place. I agree with those who believe that there needs to be a connection—and the best place to receive that connection, if that is the right word for it, is Stratford.
Frank Dobson
I hear my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). It has just occurred to me that if HS2 did that and it went to Stratford, the most famous Englishman of all time might have ended up in a different Stratford from the one in which he was born and brought up. I think that would be a welcome move. I would ask anyone who thinks that we are going to see successful use of a travelator between Euston and St Pancras quite where this “covered way” is to be constructed. The proposal has been suggested about 25 times in the past and it has always been rejected as absolutely loopy.
Going back to the original proposition for the channel tunnel to come into King’s Cross, I remember moving an amendment to the effect that provision should be made to go from King’s Cross to the west midlands, but it was duly voted down. I have always been in favour of having proper connections. When the preposterous idea of placing a travelator along Euston road was proposed, it was received with mockery and derision then and it is still being received with mockery and derision now. The only way to avoid using Euston road would be to demolish even more houses in my constituency or to drill a hole through the British Library or through the Francis Crick Institute that is currently being constructed. I find it most extraordinary that some people think that a satisfactory link can be constructed.
I have noticed that the great hero of the hour is Sir David Higgins, so we are told that because he suggested the proposal, it must be a good idea. He suggested that the delay would be no more than that we experience when we have to go from one terminal building at Heathrow to another one. They are not quite the same. Not much rain falls on people when they travel from terminal 4 to terminal 1 at Heathrow, but Euston road really can get pretty wet. I thus very much support the spirit of the amendment proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston, but I could not bear to support it in full because it still includes the possibility of facilitating
“the provision at a later date of the spur”,
which has rightly been abandoned.
On all these issues, I urge the new Minister to bear in mind that every time local people—and me in trying to represent them—criticised the link and every time we criticised the design for Euston, we were treated, frankly, with contempt. Now the contemptibles have turned out to be right, yet the people who treated us with contempt are being asked to come up with alternatives to meet the requirements that everyone thinks are needed. The Minister needs to keep an eye on them: if they are the same people, the chances of them getting it right now are no better than the chances of them getting it right before.
My final point is this. The original proposal for Euston was to cost £1.2 billion. Eight months later, before anybody had done a trial bore or anything, the project came up with a revised costing of £2 billion. That is why the Minister needs to be very careful in entrusting the future of this project to people who can get a costing for a station £0.8 billion wrong and have to correct themselves within eight months. I offer friendly advice to a fellow Yorkshireman: “Have a good look at ’em, mate; have a good look at ’em.”
Sir John Randall
I am grateful for that intervention from another venerable greybeard. Something of a theme seems to be emerging. Yes, it is true that those Members were missing in action, but I am afraid that the figures on which we always work relate to those who actually go through the Division Lobbies.
Frank Dobson
Does the right hon. Gentleman share my view that we can take some comfort from the thought that each of the 50 of us who voted for the amendment was voting against £1 billion?
Sir John Randall
Personally, I would rather vote for £1 billion each, but that would probably be inappropriate.
Let me reiterate my thanks to the members of the new Select Committee, because they will be faced with a very onerous task. I am not sure whether it will be possible for the message that I tried to convey about the Heathrow spur during the five minutes that were allotted to me yesterday to be raised before the Committee, but I think that very few people, if any, still think it worth continuing with the spur, and raising that issue would help those of us who are petitioning for an extension of the tunnel beyond Ickenham.
I have a great deal of sympathy for the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee. Now that I have been released from the Whips Office, the House is perhaps beginning to recognise that one of my great interests is wildlife and conservation, and everything to do with the environment, and I hope we will do all that we can to ensure that the Committee considers the question of mitigation in that context. I mentioned corn buntings yesterday, but if I had had more time I could have mentioned a great many more species, and enlightened the House a great deal more about wildlife in the Chilterns.
This will be a long process, and there will be decisions for us to make. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham has raised some interesting points, and we have discussed them. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister has listened to what has been said, and will pass it on. I hope that the Committee will do its work so well that by the time we reach Third Reading, I shall find myself able to agree with the Bill, which would be far preferable to the position in which I find myself today.
I must say that I feel sorry for the members of the Committee. I have never had the good fortune, or possibly misfortune, to be a councillor, but I understand that members of planning committees never win friends, because whatever decision they make, they are bound to please one lot and annoy another. I am afraid that the Committee will be rather like a referee at a football match, or in any other sport: whatever decision it makes, someone will be upset by it. I therefore feel that we, as fellow Members of Parliament, should give it the fullest possible support.
Joan Walley
Once again the right hon. Lady is absolutely right and I value the work she does on the Environmental Audit Committee. When the Government have the report of the Select Committee that has been appointed today, they will bring forward environmental proposals on Third Reading. There is ample time for the Government to take account of how we can have something in place that makes up for the lack of strategic environmental assessment—we have not had that—and which could still look at the detail of the environmental impact assessments that we need. In the evidence that we received from many NGOs—from the wildlife trusts, the WWF and a host of other organisations—they all said how much they wanted to work in collaboration to find ways of having the mitigation that is needed, and also to look at implementing offsetting in ways that could be truly transformational. There are all kinds of implications for the detail of the engineering works on the route as well. If there is no way for all that to be brought together and taken on board, I think Parliament will be accused of having total disregard for the environmental aspects that should have been included and still need to be.
Finally, I want to refer to the Supreme Court. It made it clear that it is for Parliament, not the Government, to decide the parliamentary procedure for the hybrid Bill, and therefore for Parliament to decide what is reasonable and practicable when it comes to environmental protection, mitigation and compensation measures. It is entirely appropriate that the Select Committee should have the instruction to ensure that it is able properly to consider environmental issues and not leave what is “reasonable and practicable” to HS2 to decide, which in my book would be likely to mean a much lower level of environmental protection being applied than is required.
The cost of such environmental protections is a necessary cost if such a scheme is to go ahead. We heard about the huge ambition of HS2. That ambition needs to be equalled by environmental ambition. We should be doing everything to avoid impacts first, before we mitigate or compensate for them.
Frank Dobson
People sometimes think that the environmental factors apply just to rural areas, but the environmental impact in my constituency will be dramatic; I am thinking of the effect on air pollution, noise, general filth of one sort or another, and disruption. I very much agree with the line my hon. Friend was taking in her last few words, because, for example, not only will people have to live next to the main site of the Euston development, but no fewer than 14 subsidiary depots are proposed, all of which will be damaging the environment.
Joan Walley
I am most grateful for that intervention, as my right hon. Friend makes exactly the right point. The environmental aspects are not just about nature, biodiversity, natural capital or ecosystems; they are also about noise and air quality. This week we are already seeing the huge concerns that exist about air quality; in yesterday’s debate we heard the extent to which many Members are worried about the long-standing impact on it. How that is mitigated needs to be factored into the specifications of the work that is done, and the Select Committee appointed by this House will have an important role to play in that.
Frank Dobson
My hon. Friend rightly referred to the fact that Crossrail is usually cited as an example of how things should be done, and I agree with that view. Crossrail runs across my constituency and its Tottenham Court Road station is in it. The original proposal was that the nearest depot to facilitate the building of Crossrail should take over the Phoenix garden behind St Giles’s church for about a decade, but I was able to persuade Crossrail that it would be better to knock down a couple of buildings in Oxford street instead. That is in marked contrast to the approach of HS2 Ltd, which proposes to take over and occupy for a decade every open space and play area within about 100 yards of Euston station.
Joan Walley
That is a point well made, and unless the current arrangements are changed HS2 Ltd will be able to give judgment on its own plans. It will be given carte blanche to do exactly what it wants if there are no means of scrutinising its proposals. I would hate to see all the areas of land that people value and want to see as part of their communities coerced into becoming depots or some such thing. Yesterday, on Second Reading, hon. Members raised transport issues and asked why the tunnelling spoil could not be transported away other than by road. All these aspects need to be looked at from the environmental perspective, not just on the basis of the bottom line of what the cost and engineering will mean. That is the equivalent of giving HS2 Ltd carte blanche to set out its own policy.
For all those reasons, I shall be interested to hear the response to the concerns that we have expressed in the amendment about these environmental issues. Constituents and the country at large expect this Parliament to provide the highest level of scrutiny of this massive, £50 billion investment programme, and we need to be seen to be doing that. For that to happen, we require the instructions to the Select Committee to be unambiguous about its environmental responsibilities and those matters for which it has a responsibility to report back to the House.
Mr Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)
I do not wish to detain the House for long. I was interested to hear the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) say that it is strange that this House has not modernised its procedures for hybrid Bills. I have never considered myself an arch-moderniser, but I could not agree with him more. The whole process of dealing with major infrastructure projects in this country—including both the parliamentary processes in this House and the processes outside it—is outdated, antiquated and unacceptable in this day and age. The fact that it took 10 years to build terminal 5 at Heathrow and so much time to build some of the other major projects that this country has enjoyed in the past 20 years is ludicrous and we should deal with that.
I declare an interest, because I had the dubious honour of being a member of the second-longest running hybrid Bill Committee, which, again, had an association with the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras, as the Government of the day had the idea that the London terminal for High Speed 1 was going to be at King's Cross. Man and boy, I went through that process and I was fascinated to hear my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) say that the members of these Committees are not pressed men. Things have changed, I suspect, in the processes of the House. The Committee had a fantastic cast. There were only four of us: Bob Clay, the former Member for one of the Sunderland seats; someone who has now reinvented himself in this House as the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway); Mr Neil Hamilton; and myself. I knew what they had done wrong, but I was not sure what I had done.
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
I rise to speak in support of amendment (e) to motion 4 on the Order Paper, which is tabled in my name and that of five other right hon. and hon. Members from the west midlands representing the three main political parties. It is quite useful to have learned that to be on the Committee that will consider the Bill requires not only persistence, but also continence—in every sense of the word.
In speaking to the amendment, I am trying to prove a theory, namely that the greater and more significant the issue under debate, the fewer words will be used to discuss it. Debates about £20 fees and the Committee’s quorum may take up more inches in Hansard than this amendment. The amendment is quite simple and tries to suggest that when planning massive investment that will last for decades, it is foolish to constrain the project unnecessarily. Some 12 years ago, I was in Birmingham to discuss the revamping of New Street station and a question was asked about high-speed rail. Everybody around the table said, “You’re never going to get high-speed rail so you might as well forget about it.” We decided, however, that we ought to keep the corridor, so that high-speed rail could happen should it ever be cleared. The amendment asks that although the Committee will not be permitted to hear any petition to the extent that it relates to the
“the spur from Old Oak Common to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link referred to in the Bill”,
it should not be
“prevented by this instruction from hearing any Petition”—
and this is important—
“relating to the need for the Bill to:
(a) include an alternative to the spur;
(b) facilitate the provision at a later date of the spur; or
(c) facilitate the provision at a later date of an alternative to the spur”.
I was not born in this country. I was born in a city called Munich, which, when it was awarded the Olympic games, was synonymous with traffic jams. London transport engineers moved to Munich and managed to design an integrated transport system that is still serving its purpose 50 years later. The main thing was that Munich had planning laws that allowed for big decisions to be made. We should not have a high-speed rail line that has speed and ease of access, both national and international, as its whole purpose and that then asks passengers to get out of one train halfway through the journey, move across London and then go somewhere else. That may be how it is done in Paris, but it is still not a good idea. I want Ministers to consider the matter, because it is not just the Mayor of London who thinks that it is a bad idea. Birmingham city council’s view is that it is important not only for the region, but also for its provisions and planning for Curzon Street station and the international link.
Accepting the amendment or elaborating on what the Minister means by passive provisions would not close the door on something that it is so essential to the success of high-speed rail. I urge the Minister to ask himself why we are spending massive amounts of money so far into the future. We want to increase not only capacity, but also interconnectivity, both within the United Kingdom and with the rest of Europe. The Minister should consider the amendment with great care. If he can come back with some proposal that proves that the door has not been closed on what is an enormously important debate, I will be happy not to press the amendment to a Division, but he must be quite specific about what he means by passive provisions and how the link will be considered. That does not mean a specific link; it means linking HS1 and HS2 in a meaningful manner. If we do not do that, the whole purpose will be defeated.
Frank Dobson
As I hope I have already explained to my hon. Friend, I would happily accept paragraphs (a) and (c) in the amendment, but were the proposal to
“facilitate the provision at a later date of the spur”
accepted, we would create a situation in which people would be able to petition in favour of the abandoned spur, but the people affected by it would not be able to petition against it.
Ms Stuart
I fully accept that that is an argument. The main thing, however, is that I do not want the decision not to consider a link simply to be in the hands of the Secretary of State and Sir David Higgins; I want the decision to be made in a democratic way. I therefore want the doors to be kept open for the Committee to consider petitions to provide such a link. That is really the only point that I wanted to make today.
Mrs Spelman
I agree, and I hope that when the Minister responds to the debate he will mention the impact of construction works.
Frank Dobson
Does the right hon. Lady agree that one of HS2 Ltd’s favourite words is “temporary”? It only meets the ultimate dictionary definition of “not permanent.” The temporary use of a depot next to a school, for example, would last longer than the average time a child is at the school. If it is next to a quiet, little garden where old people like to sit, most of them will not be alive at the end of the temporary period.
Mrs Spelman
The right hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. In fact, the blight applies from the moment people are made aware that construction sites will be located next to their properties. Since March 2010, people have been waiting for over four years and are unable to sell, so we know that construction works have exactly the same impact on the need to get on with their lives.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
It is an absolute pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman); I agree with much of what she says. I hope that she has more purchase with her own Front Benchers than I might, and that they have listened very carefully to her speech and to those of others who have talked about the HS1-HS2 link. I rise in support of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart).
I want to reflect on the link between the existing route for High Speed 1 from St Pancras to the channel tunnel and the proposed High Speed 2 link. I am a supporter of HS2, but the proposed link, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) rightly stated, would not have provided an adequate service. I was therefore happy to support its deletion from the Bill yesterday. It was to be a single track shared between international, freight and domestic passenger services, with limited potential to maximise the growth and regeneration benefits that high-speed rail could bring to the UK. It was not adequate to address anticipated demand. It would have allowed for just a small number of international services and created a conflict between those, freight and London orbital services, with limited potential for further inter-regional and intra-regional ones.
Recognising the shortcomings of that link route and removing it and its safeguarding from the Bill does not, of course, remove the strong arguments in favour of a good-quality link between the UK’s two high-speed lines and between the UK and the European high-speed rail network. Indeed, as I said yesterday, Richard Threlfall, head of infrastructure at KPMG, is quoted in the engineering press as saying that it is a “great tragedy” to scrap the link and “complete nonsense” not to have the two lines connected. I absolutely concur with his judgment. Clearly, at some time in the future we are going to need a much-enhanced capacity such as a dedicated twin-track line capable of working as a dual-purpose line for international and domestic services. We therefore need to look at the physical alternatives to the proposed and now rejected link, including the possibility of tunnelling to provide a connection with the west coast main line and HS2. We need to start that discussion and evaluation now.
I really urge the Minister to reconsider his position, because such a link also opens up the possibility of inter-regional and intra-regional services, as well as international links. We know there is demand for direct rail services from the midlands, the north-west and Yorkshire to east London, Essex and Kent without having to go through central London.
I reiterate the tribute I paid yesterday to colleagues across the political spectrum from Kent and Essex county councils who have collaborated with my own borough of Newham to demonstrate that demand through research published in the 2013 report, “Travel market demand and the HS1-HS2 link”. It concluded that potential increases in domestic demand enabled by an HS2-HS1 link of adequate capacity would bring significant benefits and, therefore, strengthen the business case for HS2 overall. Consultants commissioned by Greengauge 21 research highlighted an historic lack of long-distance, cross-London connectivity, only some of which will be addressed by the additions from Thameslink and Crossrail. The net effect is that many journeys end up being made by car, making use of the busy M25 simply to avoid the difficulty of cross-London transfers. I have to admit that I am guilty of making such journeys.
The report discerned in particular seven inter-regional domestic service markets that would benefit from a transfer to rail from other modes—especially car journeys on the M25—if there were an HS2-HS1 link. It concluded:
“The increase in rail share is between 7% and 23%, which is a remarkably high transfer”,
such that a
“new geography would get direct benefit from HS2 services: Essex, East/South East London, Kent, parts of Suffolk and East Sussex”.
Five of the seven inter-regional services include a focus on Stratford and enable connections to the west midlands and the north-west, the west of England and south Wales, the east midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside, and north-west London and Milton Keynes. The report aggregates that increase in domestic inter-regional demand as equating to 45% of demand emanating from central London, or 25% of the whole demand from Greater London. Along with increases in international demand from the link, those benefits will justify investment in the HS2-HS1 link and add significantly to the core business case for HS2. It will be seen that Stratford would play a key role in such substantial service development.
It strikes me as a great pity that there has not yet been any work to give a financial value to the opportunities to run those inter-regional services, even though the demand is clearly there. The Government must surely take note of that: the interconnectivity cannot be denied and the common sense of the link is obvious. The time to act is now and I seek an assurance today from the Government that they will commission a further examination of the demand, assess the economic benefit and put that into the mix when reviewing the potential for a future link between HS1 and HS2.
Although I am conscious of and totally support the need to contain the costs of HS2, I am also conscious of the old maxim, “penny wise, pound foolish”. We must take care not to take decisions now—indeed, we should avoid them—that would create obstacles down the line to securing maximum growth in the economy, particularly in regions to the north of London and in the midlands, as well as in east London.
The current approach also fails to recognise the environmental advantages, including reducing car travel on crucial networks such as the M25 and relieving pressure on central London interchanges and termini. We know that connectivity and capacity are far and away the most important issues for travellers—more important even than speed. Stratford International has both in spades, and I make no apology for reminding the House of that fact yet again.
We are discussing investment for a high-speed railway network designed to last until the next century. We must be strategic in our approach, squeeze value from every pound of spending and not overlook the opportunity to strengthen the business case for the entire network. Dragging our suitcases along streets in London, however desirable those streets may be, is not a 21st-century solution to the issue of connectivity.
Frank Dobson
Does my hon. Friend accept that the proposed walk is along Euston road, which has the worst air pollution in London, and for which the Government are being prosecuted under European air quality legislation?
Lyn Brown
I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for supporting my case in his speech and in that intervention. Frankly, the Stratford option would help us enormously with the difficulties in his own area, which he has raised.
Above all, we need to consider how we can, in the not-too-distant future, secure an improved, fully integrated, robust link between HS1 and HS2. The link should be available for international and domestic services routed through Stratford at the heart of the growing east London economy, and benefiting economies in the midlands, in the north and indeed across the whole country.
Mr Goodwill
I am sure that were the Committee to make a request for either this type of report or commercially confidential material it will be considered at that time, but at this stage the Committee has not been formed and no such request has been made.
The right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), as we heard from his contribution, is a man ahead of his time. His predictions have come to pass—at least the ones that he referred to; he may have made other predictions that have not. I would be keen to have dinner with him at one of the restaurants at Euston and see the problem first hand. Maybe I should go incognito; I suspect he is so well known he could not go incognito. As a fellow Yorkshireman, I suspect that there may be a problem at the end of the meal when we have to decide who is going to pay.
Frank Dobson
I am very happy to take up that invitation. As a fellow Yorkshireman, I suggest we go at lunchtime when there is a brilliant buffet that costs a lot less than eating in the evening.
Mr Goodwill
How could I refuse such an invitation?
The right hon. Gentleman asked whether we could confirm that any new Euston proposals would require a new environmental statement, consultation and petitioning period. The answer is yes. A consultation would be required by Standing Order 224A. The change would then be subject to a new petitioning period.
The right hon. Gentleman also talked about petitioning by business associations. I think I can go further than I did in my intervention. A business is defined in the terms of this measure as an organisation that exists to make money for its owners. A business association would not seem to meet this definition and so would have the longer deadline. I suspect that if he found a different lawyer he would probably get a different result, but that is the position of this Government at this Dispatch Box and I hope those associations will be reassured by that.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) talked about the green belt. The Bill includes powers for local authorities to approve plans and specifications for the railway, which should ensure that any structures in the green belt are designed sympathetically.
This debate has been an important stage in the progress of this Bill for phase 1. I hope I have explained why many of the amendments are superfluous to the effective operation of the Committee.
High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill
Frank Dobson Excerpts(10 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr McLoughlin
I want to talk about the compensation package a little later and indeed about the fact that I announced a new compensation package before the House rose for Easter, but that matter is out for consultation.
Before I took those interventions, I was talking about the improvements in the great western main line. We will also see improvement in east-west links, with faster electric trains between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle and a reopened railway between Oxford and Bedford. In London, we will see the Crossrail and Thameslink upgrades, which between them will cost £21 billion—about the same amount that is being spent on the first phase of High Speed 2. It is the scale of spending on London that has brought about amazing transformations at places such as St Pancras and King’s Cross stations. In the 20 years that I have been using those stations, they have become places that people wish to visit, destinations in their own right and places of which we can be proud. However, that necessary investment in London should not come at the expense of the rest of the country. Demand for travel is growing everywhere.
Twice as many people travel by train every day as they did 20 years ago. More people drive and fly, too, and that is because our horizons broaden in a better-connected world. Digital links do not replace travel; they fuel it. Smartphones and broadband are not an alternative to things such as HS2; they are part of the same growing links between people and businesses, and that pressure is felt acutely on our north-south rail corridors.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
I very much welcome the Secretary of State’s praise for the two brilliant stations in my constituency, one of which was started and finished under the Labour Government and the other of which was started under the Labour Government. Will he confirm that according to the documents of HS2 and his Department, Euston will be able to provide extra capacity only if there is investment in Crossrail 2, at a cost of an extra £15 billion to £20 billion?
Mr McLoughlin
The documents about Crossrail 2 have been put out by the Mayor of London. We shall see the completion of Crossrail 1 in 2018, which will make a massive difference to London overall. I know that the right hon. Gentleman feels very strongly about this matter and is proud of the stations in his constituency, but the truth is that when I first came to this House, we regarded Euston as the best station of the three. It is now way behind the other two stations. HS2 gives us a once in a lifetime opportunity to make a transformational change to Euston station, which will bring it into line with the other two stations.
Mr McLoughlin
I am slightly concerned about the amount of time I am taking, but I will give way to the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson).
Frank Dobson
King’s Cross and St Pancras are both in my constituency. They had the support of the local council, the support of the local MP and the overwhelming support of local people, even those directly affected. That is not the case with the proposals for Euston.
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.
Mary Creagh
That was an excellent point, well made. My right hon. Friend has triggered my memory. There has been £6 billion for Reading, £6 billion for Thameslink and £18 billion for Crossrail—pretty soon there will be enough for a high-speed rail network. I have read about the debates over the disruption that Crossrail has caused. Tottenham Court Road station was closed for two years, yet the centre of our global capital was prepared to put up with that because it realised the benefits that it would bring through reduced journey times. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) has the freight flyover at Reading station, as well as a couple of new platforms and re-signalling work. He will no doubt enjoy the faster journey times to London. I would like the same for my constituents and the constituents of the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith).
I wonder when the Government will be able to report on the vocational training elements of phase 1, which were provided for by Labour’s amendment to the paving Bill. We want to see the annual report and to see what is happening. We welcome the new further education college that will train the next generation of young women and men to become rail engineers. Members on both sides of the House have been bidding to host the college. I look forward to hearing where and when it will open.
Sir David Higgins’s report called on the Government to be more ambitious in the development of Euston station. The iconic new developments at King’s Cross and St Pancras show how stations can transform and regenerate their local areas. I hope that that will also happen at Reading. Euston is potentially central London’s biggest regeneration site. Its redevelopment must provide new social housing to tackle the acute housing crisis in Camden, as well as retail and office space. It would be a disaster if it followed the housing developments in the city centre that are sold off-plan to foreign investors, creating ghost towns, rather than going to local people.
I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) and Councillor Sarah Hayward, the leader of Camden council, will continue to battle to get the best deal for their community. It has been inspirational to talk to my right hon. Friend about the life sciences hub that he wants to see around the Francis Crick Institute, which is due to open near Euston in 2015. To have the tech hub at Old Street and a life sciences hub at Euston would be an enormous boost for young people and jobs in his constituency.
Frank Dobson
I welcome what my hon. Friend has said. Will she bear it in mind that the investment in the Francis Crick Institute, which is a biomedical research centre, is just over £300 million? I believe that it represents a bigger contribution to the future of this country than spending £50 billion on a railway.
Mary Creagh
Perhaps I will break the consensus now. My right hon. Friend’s constituents will benefit from the investment in Crossrail and Thameslink, which will improve London’s transportation system. I gently say to him that his might be a slightly London-centric view. I hope that HS2 will be of benefit to every nation, region and sector of our country’s economy.
We welcome the removal of the HS1-HS2 link from the Bill, which would have caused huge disruption to Camden. Removing it will save £700 million from the budget. We also welcome David Higgins’s proposals for a coherent transport plan for the north, which has been historically underfunded, and for proper east-west rail links between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Hull. Our cities must plan and are planning how to maximise the regeneration and growth opportunities around the stations.
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.
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.
High-speed Rail
Frank Dobson Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr McLoughlin
I hope very soon to be able to make announcements about the Government’s proposals for compensation. I would just say to my right hon. Friend that on the one hand I am attacked for listening to people, and then on the other hand I am attacked for not listening to people. I suppose that is just one of the problems of dealing with big infrastructure projects—wherever we take them, there will always be people who are directly affected, and they will not be convinced of the necessity of them. However, I am convinced of the necessity of high-speed rail for our cities in the north.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s decision to abandon the ridiculous proposal for the High Speed 2-High Speed 1 link across Camden Town, and I also welcome Opposition Front Benchers’ support on that matter. However, I cannot say the same about the proposal to go ahead with an even bigger redevelopment of Euston than was proposed before. It will mean that the homes of more than 500 people will be destroyed, and that the lives of about 5,000 people will be subjected for a decade to the noise, filth and disruption of the biggest engineering project in Europe. I hope that, even at this stage, at a time when looking back, looking forward and coming to different decisions is apparently still on the cards, the Government will at least consider having the initial London terminus at Old Oak Common.
Mr McLoughlin
The right hon. Gentleman has been consistent on the HS1-HS2 link. I do not need to tell him about the difference that has been made to the area around King’s Cross and St Pancras in his constituency—it is plainly there for all to see. Those of us who use St Pancras station faced a lot of inconvenience at the time when that development was going on, but given what we see today, it was worth it.
High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill
Frank Dobson Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mrs Ellman
I do agree. I think that that is an excellent example of what could be done. However, I want to be sure that such examples are being followed up nationally.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
Let us assume that the Government’s £50 billion estimate is correct. That investment is expected to bring the greatest benefits to Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester: five cities. Does my hon. Friend think that if the £50 billion were broken up into nuggets of £10 billion, and if each city were offered that amount to promote its local economy, the five of them would decide to club together to pay for a high-speed rail link? [Laughter.]
Mrs Ellman
The whole point of major infrastructure is that it makes a major difference in connectivity across the country, which benefits all parts of the country. If that benefit is fragmented, it will not accrue.
I certainly support economic development in the regions, and I deplore the abolition of the regional development agencies, but I hope that the local enterprise partnerships—alone, working together, or working in transport cores—will ensure that economic benefit comes to their areas, and that the Government provide the support that will enable that effort to be private sector-led and succeed.
Stephen Timms
I think that investment in this project will contribute to national wealth. My concern, however, is that it should be adequately designed and planned. To have a single track connecting High Speed 2 and High Speed 1, with a capacity of three trains an hour, is a mistake.
Stephen Timms
I will make one more point before I give way to my right hon. Friend because it relates to the concerns that he has raised.
If there were a proper link between High Speed 1 and High Speed 2, some of the trains coming towards London on High Speed 2 would not have to terminate at Euston. Some could run on to High Speed 1, some could terminate at Stratford International station, in which I have a particular interest, and some could run further along High Speed 1. As a result, significantly fewer platforms would be required at Euston than are proposed and there would be a reduction in the big problems in my right hon. Friend’s constituency, to which he has rightly drawn attention.
Frank Dobson
I am sure my right hon. Friend is right that the proposal to have a tunnel from Old Oak Common to Primrose Hill and to run the rest of the connection above ground across Camden Town will not provide an adequate service. It will certainly wreak destruction in Camden Town, which the people behind the project denied until recently. As an indication of their general incompetence, when the cost of that proposal went up from £170 million to £300 million, they said that it was because of unforeseen circumstances, including the need to widen the line.
Stephen Timms
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I am aware that the proposal for that interconnection is now rather more costly that it was initially. However, as far as I can see, the problem has not been solved. There is still a limit of three trains per hour, which is clearly insufficient. I warmly welcome amendment 17.
Frank Dobson
It may interest the hon. Gentleman to know that about 220 households in my constituency will need to be re-housed at the expense of HS2. The authorities were rather shocked to discover that a one-bedroom flat in a block recently built in the locality is currently going for £482,000. Most of the people who need to be re-housed need a family-sized flat.
Stephen Barclay
The right hon. Gentleman brings great expertise to these issues. That takes me back to the reference to a blank cheque: my concern is that the House is being asked to exercise blind faith, which will have a hugely distorting effect on transport schemes elsewhere in the country—as pressure grows, for example, for Crossrail 2 to connect not at Tottenham Court Road, but at Euston. Other schemes in the system, such as the one in my area of Cambridgeshire, will be asset-stripped of what they rightly deserve.
Let me leave the House with the image that we look like someone coming down the platform with five business cases, while the train has already left the station and we are waiting for the announcement of whether we will hit our destination, which will be given next year not by the Government, but by the shadow Chancellor. I do not think that is the right way to proceed. We need to be far more careful with controlling the costs.
Mr Straw
I will in a moment, but I am conscious that others want to get in before the knife.
I come to the issue of the costs. No one is in favour of providing blank cheques for schemes, but I have seen no evidence that a blank cheque is being provided for this scheme. What we are talking about is £42 billion until 2033, which works out at just over £2 billion a year. That is a lot of money but, in the grand scheme of things, including infrastructure investment, it is not huge, particularly when compared with the massive amount of money that has rightly been put in by successive Governments to improve infrastructure in London and the south-east. I would be happy to support that, but it is time that the investment went elsewhere.
Frank Dobson
Does my right hon. Friend feel that some people might be a bit suspicious that a contingency sum of £14 billion closely resembles a blank cheque?
Mr Straw
I have certainly never wished to speak for my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Mandelson. All I can report as a matter of fact is that my right hon. and noble Friend was in the same Cabinet Room in 2009 when the project was endorsed. If he has had some reverse damascene conversion, it is for him to explain that, not me.
Let me turn to the issue of costs. I was chairman of the Cabinet Committee on the Olympics for its first four years. The first bid was put in at about £2.5 billion and the ultimate cost came out at £9 billion. Let me explain why there is no direct comparison. The bid was not based on the contingency but on a prayer that we would win it. Not a huge amount of effort was put into costing it because, frankly, very few people ever thought we would win. It was only after we had won on 6 July 2005 that the serious work began and led, quite properly, by the Treasury, we considered the contingencies.
I say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) that a contingency of such a size is sensible, because there needs to be an optimism bias. That was what was put into the budget for the Olympics by the man who is now Sir David Higgins, who turned that project around. Contrary to what was said by the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), the Olympics as an infrastructure project came in not only on time, because it had to, but on budget. Those who are worried about a blank cheque—any Chancellor or shadow Chancellor needs to be—should be reassured that Sir David Higgins is now in charge. I have every confidence in him, not only from his time running this operation and the Olympics, but from his time at Network Rail. He got costs down and took a close interest in the detail of the projects.
Frank Dobson
Can my right hon. Friend confirm that Sir David Higgins spent all the contingency sum on the Olympics?
Mr Straw
Not quite, I think. There were reasons for that, however, and for the contingencies. These are very large projects. There were also contingencies for Crossrail, for Thameslink and for the expansion of Euston in 1968 and I do not recall Members who would have benefited directly from those projects raising issues about contingencies at the time.
Mr McLoughlin
My hon. Friend has taken part in the Third Reading of many Bills—they have always been hour-long debates. In fact, it is only recently that we have had debates on Third Reading. Back in the days when the right hon. Member for Blackburn was Leader of the House, we sometimes did not have debates on Third Reading because we simply did not have the time. The Government are trying to help everybody we can—[Interruption.] I do not want to get any more partisan now that I have the right hon. Gentleman on side.
The Bill is about helping communities and businesses, and helping the cities of the north and the midlands to compete on equal terms with London. Nobody begrudges the money we are spending on Crossrail or Thameslink. They are huge investments in our capital city, but it is time we looked at what is happening in the rest of the country.
Three important words—room for growth—sum up why the project is so important. They are at the core of the strategic case we published on Tuesday. The responses to the report show the crucial message of growth. The British Chambers of Commerce states:
“This report bolsters the economic case for HS2…HS2 is the only scheme that can transform capacity on Britain’s overstretched railways.”
The CBI has thrown its considerable weight behind the project. It did so because the new line is part of the answer to the infrastructure deficit that faces our country. The leaders of our great cities back HS2. Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester city council, has said:
“It’s straightforward and simple. We need more capacity and the only way is through this new network.”
Since 2008, the country has learned some tough lessons, but we must make ourselves more resilient and competitive as an economy. That will not happen if we do not take the long-term decisions on investment and stick to them. Our society is changing, our population is growing, people are travelling more, and demand for inter-city rail travel has doubled in the past 15 years and will continue to increase.
As I have said all along, I welcome suggestions for creating more capacity, but the so-called alternative suggestions from the critics simply do not add up. We have looked at the case for building new motorways and dramatically expanding domestic aviation. Neither does the job. Some people believe we can carry on squeezing more room out of our current railways, patching up our problems. The work we published this week shows that, if we tried to create the capacity we needed by upgrading the three current main north-south lines, we would face 14 years of weekend closures. That is not an alternative to the new line, it is disruption on a nightmare scale.
We are already investing record sums in the existing railway. Network Rail will spend £38.3 billion in its next five-year control period, and the Government have a £73 billion budget for wider transport investment over the next Parliament. Despite all that, we will still need new rail capacity. If one accepts that—and that we need room to grow—there is no choice about how to provide it. As the strategic case makes clear, a new high-speed north-south line is not just the right way, it is the only way.
The new north-south line will be the backbone of Britain. It will have 18 trains an hour, each carrying up to 1,100 passengers, transforming the available space on inter-city lines. As long-distance services transfer to the new line, capacity will be released on the existing network. Of course, not every city across Britain will benefit in the same way, but Network Rail estimates that more than 100 cities and towns could benefit from released capacity. It would mean significantly more commuter services, better connectivity and more routes for rail freight, taking lorries off our most congested roads.
We know that HS2 is the best answer to our transport problems, but as with any large infrastructure scheme, we also know we will face opposition. I respect the fact that some people are concerned about the impact on the places they live, and I respect those with serious proposals for improvements. Already, the environmental impact of the new line has been vastly reduced thanks to such improvements. But I also respect what Sir John Armitt said in his recent report on infrastructure—that big schemes need “broad political consensus” as well as “resolution” from political leaders.
HS2 must be a national project with support across the parties, or in the end it will be nothing. Labour leaders in our great cities across the north and the midlands know that HS2 is right. To those who say that there is no blank cheque, I say that there never has been and there never will be. I know that hon. Members want costs controlled. Here are the facts. The target price for the first phase is £17.16 billion. That is the price for construction agreed with HS2 Ltd. For the whole Y-route, the agreed budget is £42.6 billion, including a contingency of £14.4 billion, which we are determined to bear down on. Sir David Higgins—the man who built the Olympics on time and on budget—will make sure that happens. As the new chairman of HS2, he will bring his penetrating eye and expertise to the task to get the best value for our country.
As the strategic case published this week shows, our updated benefit-cost ratio has fallen slightly from 2.5 to 2.3. We have been open about that, but it means that the business case for the new north-south line is still strong, with more than £2 returned for every £1 invested—about the same as Crossrail and Thameslink, and nobody seems to doubt those projects. In fact, the ratio for HS2 could increase to 4.5 if rail demand continues to rise until 2049.
It is still important to recognise that the benefit-cost ratio cannot take account of unpredictable factors. That was true of the Jubilee line extension in London, for instance, which did not include the 100,000 jobs it now supports at Canary Wharf. It was true for High Speed 1, which did not include benefits from redevelopment at King’s Cross and St Pancras. When I first became a Member of Parliament, King’s Cross and St Pancras were places where people did not want to spend any time if they could possibly get away with it. They would try to turn up just before their train was due to leave. Those stations are now destinations in their own right. People go there and look with amazement at what has happened to the UK’s railway system.
Frank Dobson
I represent not just St Pancras, but Euston and King’s Cross. Does the Secretary of State accept that virtually all the people in my constituency who are now opposed to HS2 were strongly in favour—indeed, the first advocates—of the transformation of St Pancras and the improvements at King’s Cross?
Mr McLoughlin
Of course I do. I am more than happy to meet the right hon. Gentleman to discuss the particular issue of Euston station, because the redevelopment will bring specific problems. But we must also ensure that we get the very best deal for his constituents in the redevelopment of Euston station. I am meeting the leader of Camden council next week, although I do not know if the right hon. Gentleman will be there. I do not discount the concerns of local residents about the work on major infrastructure projects, and we have to take them into account.
Frank Dobson
I am going to be the original parochial MP. For many people in my constituency, this issue is not a question of “not in my back yard”, but one of “not through my front room”. A total of 220 homes will be destroyed and a further 1,000 homes will be blighted for the 10 years while the works go on at Euston. A large number of small businesses will be bankrupted because of what is going on there.
When it comes to getting compensation, both the qualifications and the quantum for compensation in Greater London, and most particularly at Euston and in Camden Town, are much worse and far inferior to what will apply in rural areas. I hope that some people in the House of Lords will see fit to help Ministers keep the promises they made about being fair to everybody in terms of compensation. There can be no justification for saying that the noise is less in Euston than in Great Missenden. Noise is noise, dirt is dirt, filth is filth. The main difference is that in Euston all that will go on for 10 years, whereas on most other parts of the line it will go on for only a short period.
HS2 Ltd, and the HS2 apologists, say “Oh, it will not be as bad as Frank Dobson says.” Well, if the trouble will not be as bad as Frank Dobson says, why cannot those at HS2 come up with full, decent compensation? The main reason is that they know that it is going to be terrible and that proper compensation would cost a lot of money, but why should people living in my area experience dreadful blight for a decade or more while a national project goes through? Why should they be sacrificed on the altar of that national project?
It has been suggested that buildings in the area will act as buffers against noise. The people who live in Mornington terrace, the people who live in Ampthill square, the people who live in Park Village East, the people who live in Eversholt street, the people who live in the Regent’s Park estate, the people who overlook the railway now and the people who will overlook the railway when the “buffer” blocks of flats have been demolished—all those people face 10 years of noise and filth and disruption, and we are proposing that they should not receive the same level of compensation as people living in Great Missenden. That cannot be fair, and it cannot be decent.
I think that nearly everyone in the House wants to support and help small businesses. Drummond street, in my constituency, is full of small businesses with very hard-working owners and staff, providing restaurants and cafés and shops. It is on the west side of Euston station. The shopkeepers and restaurateurs have conducted surveys, and have found that between 40% and 70% of their trade is passing trade—people who are going to or from Euston to catch a train, the tube or a bus.
It is currently proposed that about a third of Drummond street will be demolished—which does not include any of the shops—that a huge fence will be built around the construction site for 10 years, and that there will no longer be any access to the west side of Euston station from Drummond street. Anyone trying to get from the shops and restaurants into the station will have a quarter-of-a-mile wander around the boundaries of the site. That means bankruptcy for the small businesses there which will lose their trade. Those businesses are already being damaged and blighted. The kitchens of one of the restaurants are getting a bit past it, and the restaurant is thinking of replacing them, but there is no point in investing in that replacement. Let me say this to both Front Benches: do they seriously think it right to go ahead with this project and damage those little, ordinary citizens?
I raised this matter in the Committee, which took evidence from witnesses. When the problems in Drummond street were brought to the distinguished attention of the man who is the director general of the HS2 project at the Department for Transport, he gave his considered opinion of the Drummond street traders, saying
“Their business will develop. We hope that businesses in Drummond street will benefit from the construction workers on the HS2 site.” ––[Official Report, High Speed Rail (Preparation) Public Bill Committee, 11 July 2013; c. 154, Q292.]
Does he seriously think that some construction worker, knackered and stopping for his snack break, will walk a mile to and from Drummond street to get food? No is the answer to that, but what is worse, had this great person inquired of the traders in Drummond street, they would have confirmed to him that a major construction site nearby had supplied them with no single remembered user during their lunch breaks. This, I have to say, is someone who works for the outfit which has been promoting HS2 until now.
As I have said to the Secretary of State and his predecessors, if I was in favour of this hare-brained scheme, I would get rid of a lot of the people involved, because in my constituency alone their original estimate of the costs has proved to be £1 billion less than their revised costs. That is £800 million extra at Euston and £125 million for running the works across Camden town, where, apparently, the cost went up from £170-odd million to £300 million because they had not realised they would need to widen the track. If that reflects the quality of thought and advice, I say to those people who are in favour of this scheme, “Watch it, because it’s a mess, and even the great man who, at the Olympics, did manage to spend the contingency fund is going to have difficulty sorting it out.”
I therefore have to say that I believe it will be necessary for the House of Lords to try to look after and properly compensate the people I try to represent. At the last general election I made two promises. I promised I would try to stop HS2 happening and, failing that—this was a twin-track approach, if people will excuse the expression—I said I would try to make sure all their interests were looked after. I have great belief in the integrity of the current Secretary of State, and if he is going to discharge his promise to look after people properly and treat them fairly, he will have to deal properly with the people I have been trying to represent.
High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill
Frank Dobson Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
I suspect that even the Scottish National party does not expect the line to reach the constituency of the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) any time soon, but I hope it will reach my constituency.
Mark Lazarowicz
I would like to believe that it will not be next century and that my constituents will be able to benefit from the line as well. Clearly, they will benefit from faster services in so far as they can use the line further south, but we need to see work being done now and commitments made now to ensure that the further additions from HS2 do not start happening only in 2033.
Maria Eagle
I have a great deal of sympathy for the hon. Gentleman’s point. It makes no sense to me at all that passengers from the south-east should have to change trains in north London to reach towns and cities in the midlands, the north and up to Scotland. We do not see this connection as an optional extra that can be delivered in a patch-and-mend way; it needs to be re-thought.
Frank Dobson
Is my hon. Friend aware that HS2 is saying that it wants to use the north London line for the link because
“it is assessed to have less construction risk than a tunnel”?
Is she aware that the man from Bechtel who masterminded the successful channel tunnel link and the refurbishment of St Pancras decided to do a double-bore tunnel from Barking to St Pancras because is was “less risky” to have such a tunnel than to use the north London line. Who would my hon. Friend trust on that?
Maria Eagle
I would undoubtedly trust my right hon. Friend—there is absolutely no doubt about that. The points made by both the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) and my right hon. Friend illustrate the concern and controversy that remain about this issue. I believe that a solution should be devised that can minimise the impact on communities in Camden while ensuring that we do not miss a perfect opportunity to redevelop Euston in the right way for the long term. I believe that the Government should keep looking at that.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
HS2 will unleash havoc on Euston, Primrose Hill and Camden Town in my constituency. It will demolish the homes of about 500 people and blight the homes of at least another 1,000. One local park will disappear for ever; another will be a building site for 10 years or more. The project will prevent the much-needed reconstruction of Euston station, which was intended to provide around 1,000 new flats for local people. It has already delayed plans to rebuild a local convent school. The link to HS1 will subject Primrose Hill and Camden Town to large-scale engineering works, mainly above ground level. Local shops and restaurants will be put out of business; quiet back streets are to become official routes for construction traffic. Yet the compensation and mitigation regime intended for our area is inferior to what has been promised outside London. That cannot be right.
When HS2 was given the go-ahead, we were told, first, that phase 1 would cost £17 billion; secondly, that it would be completed by 2026; and thirdly, that no one would suffer a significant loss. HS2 is backtracking on all three. For a start, as has been pointed out, £17 billion will not provide a working railway, because it does not include the cost of the trains, estimated to be £2 billion—it will be a train-free zone. Nor does it include the cost of the works at Euston needed to allow the already overcrowded tube and local roads to cope with additional passengers and traffic—that is probably another £2 billion. VAT at 20% will come to about £3 billion. The original estimate for HS2 also included £1.4 billion for a spur to Heathrow. The spur has been dropped, but it is not at all clear where the £1.4 billion has gone.
Mrs Gillan
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that because we do not have the full environmental statement—we have only a draft—we do not know the full cost of any environmental mitigation that may be needed along the route?
Frank Dobson
The right hon. Lady is absolutely right. Recently, HS2 Ltd has been forced to confess that it underestimated the cost of the works at Euston by no less than 40%. We have been asked to write a blank cheque for people who underestimate costs by 40%. On top of that, HS2 Ltd admits that it has to rebuild or strengthen cuttings, embankments and bridges on the north London line and the main line. Originally, it denied that that would be necessary, so it did not provide for it in the initial costings. I remind Members that those costs have soared while HS2 is still at a desk-study stage. God knows what will happen when people get round to practical work on the site.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Is my right hon. Friend aware that last week, the New Economics Foundation produced the third independent evaluation of the project, saying that there was real doubt about its viability and what it would do for northern cities?
Frank Dobson
I cannot possibly disagree with my hon. Friend. In theory, a million years ago, I got a degree in economics, and I have reached the stage where I can usually work out when someone is talking drivel. When I heard the Government’s cost estimates, I think I understood they were talking drivel.
Does anyone in the House really believe that the line will be completed by 2026? I was going to offer a bet against completion by then, but I suspect that the final completion date is so far in the future that I am unlikely to be around to collect my winnings, which brings me to compensation and mitigation.
At present, HS2 Ltd intends that people and businesses in our area should receive lower compensation, lower standards of protection and inferior mitigation measures. There is no excuse for that treatment of a settled residential and business community. Local council tenants, right-to-buy leaseholders, private tenants, leaseholders and owner-occupiers should be no worse off as a result of the project, which is being carried out, apparently, in the national interest. They must be found new homes that meet their needs, and without any detriment to the terms and conditions of their tenure.
The same approach should apply to businesses. Restaurants and small shops in Drummond street depend on passing trade to Euston station for up to 70% of their business, but HS2 Ltd proposes that for 10 years, they should be cut off from the station by a barrier that will be higher than the Berlin wall. What is worse, it is proposed that they would not receive any compensation at all. May I tell Government Members, who always say that they are speaking up on behalf of small businesses, that if they do not do something to prevent that wickedness, they will let down some small businesses? The same non-compensation rules will apply in Camden Town.
The Government must reconsider the project. Is it really the best use of a scarce £17 billion if we want to improve our creaking transport system? Even if it is, would not the London terminus be better sited at Old Oak Common which, unlike Euston, is on the Heathrow Express route and will be on Crossrail? It would be welcome there, and studies show that if people got off Crossrail at Old Oak Common, only 4% of London underground stations would take longer to reach than if they went to Euston. The stations that would take longer to reach are Euston Square, Regent’s Park, Mornington Crescent and King’s Cross St Pancras, so there is no disadvantage. If this goes ahead, most sensible travellers will get off at Old Oak Common anyway, whatever anybody says.
Finally, if it is decided to go ahead, I hope there will be agreement across the Chamber that there should be a special made-to-measure compensation and mitigation scheme for the whole length of HS2 and all the residents and businesses affected by it. It should be as generous as the Secretary of State promised, and I do not doubt the integrity of the Secretary of State.
I also have to say this: in all the years that I have dealt with public and private bodies, I have never come across an outfit as stupid, incompetent and incapable of even delivering letters as the people at present running HS2, and if I were in favour of the project, I would get someone else to do it.
Graham Stringer
I will not be drawn into a discussion about hub airports.
On the benefits and disbenefits, it is up to the people who run our towns and cities to ensure that people go in their direction and invest in their area. There is no doubt that such people want the high-speed line. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) said earlier that she wants the high-speed route to go to Liverpool. I do not blame her, given the potential benefit.
I am sure that some of the arguments made against HS2 were made when railways began. The vested interests of stagecoach owners and bargees almost certainly led to their using similar arguments about how railways would not catch on. I know of no economic analysis that captures the likely benefits, but what we do know, from looking around the world, is that countries that invest in their transport infrastructure almost always do better economically. We should therefore invest.
Frank Dobson
As the proud MP who has King’s Cross, St Pancras and Euston stations in his constituency, I am rather in favour of the railways. For that matter, I am a member of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. However, I think my hon. Friend is falling into the sort of syllogism that something must be done, this is something, and therefore this must be done. There are better ways of spending this money on improving the railway system.
Graham Stringer
I hope I am not falling into that trap. I think that a high-speed system that will eventually join Edinburgh and Glasgow, through Manchester and Leeds, to Birmingham and London will be of enormous benefit to the country. I do not believe it is a perfect system and I do not believe it is being constructed in the best way, but it has all-party support and it can be improved. I personally believe that we should be building north to south, as well as south to north. I believe, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State said, that we should be building a link directly through to High Speed 1. However, I do not believe that any of those problems are sufficient to stop us investing in infrastructure that will help the whole of the country.
Mr Betts
I can understand that. I think that the right hon. Lady is making a wider point about the need to look at the whole compensation scheme, and I shall come to that in a second.
Property owners in my constituency have not yet had any experience of the exceptional hardship scheme, but I wonder whether it could be widened to include those who want to move and make the same choices for their families as anyone else could make, but who are unable to do so while the potential blight from the high-speed line is hanging over them.
Frank Dobson
In my constituency, someone who used to be an owner-occupier got a job elsewhere and let their place. They have been told that they do not qualify for compensation because it is intended only for owner-occupiers.
Mr Betts
I understand that point. I have a constituent who bought a small property as an investment with a view to putting down a deposit on another family home into which they were planning to move in a year’s time. They, too, have been caught by that provision.
I made the point earlier to the Secretary of State and to my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) that if we are asking people to make sacrifices for the benefit of the country, they deserve compensation of more than 100% of the value of their homes. They would get 100% if they chose to sell, but they are not choosing to sell; they are having to move, and we need to be more generous. My hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood made the very reasonable point that if we were more generous, it would almost certainly speed up the process, so let us have a look at that.
In particular, let us have a look at the circumstances of my constituents who live on Greasbro road, which is a very low-value area. It is next to an ex-steelworks and to the motorway, and many people would not choose to live there, but it is a friendly road where people know their neighbours and family members who live nearby. They are worried about moving, and they know that they will probably not be able to buy another house in the local area with the compensation they will get. They ask why they should be penalised and forced to move away from the community that they know. Something more than the market value of their homes would help those people. It would not have to be a percentage increase on the market value; a lump sum in excess of the market value would particularly help people in low-value properties who do not want to reach retirement age in 10 years’ time and find that they have to take out an extra mortgage that they cannot afford.
I support the high-speed rail scheme wholeheartedly, and I support it coming to Sheffield, but let us see whether we can help those people who will be affected and make the benefits to the community more generally accessible.
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
I am pleased to speak in favour of Second Reading and against the amendment. I have been struck today by the large degree of cross-party support that High Speed 2 commands. Obviously, we have heard objections from Members on both sides of the House, largely from people representing constituencies that will be affected by the route. That is perfectly understandable; that is what happens in the House of Commons. Different interests come together—often there is conflict, and often there is compromise. It is perfectly legitimate for people whose constituents, and their livelihoods, are affected by the direct building of the route to state their objections, but it is also perfectly reasonable for people to speak in this House on behalf of the national interest and it is clear to me that High Speed 2 is very much in the national interest.
Frank Dobson
I am reminded that within a week of first becoming a Member of this House, there was a vote on an issue that had those on both Front Benches on the same side. An old Tory knight of the shires said to me, “Whenever the two Front Benches are in agreement, some poor devil is being done down.”
Kwasi Kwarteng
I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman’s witty intervention, but I do not think it has anything to do with the debate. It was an enjoyable interlude.
We have not had any real perception, understanding or analysis in the debate of what high-speed rail has meant for our partner countries in Europe. I am a member of the Select Committee on Transport and we went to France and to Germany. Nobody in those countries is suggesting that they should close down their high-speed routes. Indeed, everyone we met, from local residents to other stakeholders, Government people and business people, was determined to expand the network.
I am not suggesting for a minute that because such things are supported in France and Germany we should follow that path, but I am saying that we should investigate, as we have, the reasons behind their approach. We need some very good reasons why Britain is so peculiar and different that high-speed rail will not benefit us. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State observed, Italy has 960 miles of high-speed rail. We have only a small amount—only 60 miles, I believe—
Railways
Frank Dobson Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate.
I will first pick up on the fascinating comments made by the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood). I wonder whether we are witnessing the embryonic development of a Labour policy of whole-scale renationalisation of train operators. I have only five minutes, so I cannot pursue that much further. I imagine that the proposal finds a lot of favour with the hon. Lady’s Back-Bench colleagues and, indeed, trade union sponsors, but that is a matter for another day.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government’s position is ideologically bizarre, in that they seem to oppose public ownership of the railways by British people or the British Government, but have no objection at all to public ownership of British railways by foreign Governments?
Iain Stewart
If the right hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I will come on to some of the proposals in the EU package that I think will help British operators to expand into Europe, if they so wish.
I broadly welcome the package of measures. It takes Europe in a direction that we have already taken, so its broad thrust will not have a dramatic effect on rail operators in this country.
I want to pick up on a few specific concerns. There is an issue about how the rest of Europe will respond and I am concerned about how effective the European Union will be in implementing the package in other countries. The Transport Committee’s evidence sessions made it clear that it will be very difficult to apply the package to all EU member states, because of the different sizes and structures of their respective railway systems. Past experience shows that the proposals are so opaque in practice that national Governments can implement them as they wish so as to protect their own national operators. I asked Brian Simpson, the Labour MEP who chairs the European Parliament’s Transport and Tourism Committee, whether there was lobbying from France and Germany to protect their national interests. He replied: “You bet there was.” I am, therefore, concerned about how the proposals will be implemented in Europe.
The Committee has recommended—I think this would help—that the maximum limit for the bundling together of rail network services should be one fifth instead of one third. On the evolution of services in Germany, while urban and regional services are diversifying, allowing different operators to enter the market, the entire inter-city network, with only two exceptions, is operated by Deutsche Bahn. Therefore, a contract covering one third of the national network would allow Deutsche Bahn a near monopoly of the inter-city services, which goes against the principle of the directive. I hope that in his discussions with colleagues in Europe, the Minister will pursue an upper limit of one fifth of the market, rather than one third.
The Minister has already referred to one of my domestic concerns, namely that the package should not prohibit the alliance between Network Rail and some of the train operating companies, particularly South West Trains. I believe that that is an effective way forward for the railways and I hope that the Minister will be able to get some clarification on it and protection for those British interests.
I am also concerned about international services. For obvious reasons, the impact on British railways has not been significant thus far, but High Speed 2 and its connection to High Speed 1 and the tunnel will lead to many more international services from this country. I do not want our interests to be inhibited by problems relating to track access or safety, which is what happened when Eurostar tried to buy Siemens trains for the tunnel. The existing regulations are not as effective as they could be. I hope we can get much greater clarity and certainty on both those areas, in order to allow the development of effective cross-border services from this country. The Minister has said that he is looking at whether the issue can be dealt with through a European-wide arrangement or through greater collaboration between national agencies. I do not have a particular preference, but the overall objective should be to give operators greater certainty so that they can plan services.
I am running out of time, so I will conclude by saying that I broadly support the thrust of the package, but hope that the Government will be successful in getting the assurances and clarifications needed to protect our interests.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
When we have such debates, it is important that we consult the people who run the railway system. I therefore refer hon. Members to the evidence provided to the Select Committee on Transport by the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. When privatisation came about, RMT submitted evidence to the House and made it clear publicly that privatisation would result in a risk to safety. Eventually, Southall, Paddington and Potters Bar happened. I attended the funeral of the driver who died at Southall—he was an ASLEF member and my constituent. I remember the warnings that were given. As a result of privatisation, people such as that driver sacrificed their lives.
This time, RMT is saying clearly that the proposals, if they go ahead, will compromise safety. RMT is saying that the system is fragmented and complicated with numerous interfaces, and that the measure will simply introduce another tier of bureaucracy for it to deal with. Its view is that safety should be dealt with at national level and local level, where there is local knowledge. Yes, interfaces in Europe should be dealt with internationally by agreements within Europe, but safety should rest as a national competence. In that way, we can achieve safety on the basis of the knowledge of those who operate the system.
The second point made by RMT is on infrastructure. It clearly says that there is a move—the measure is a further step—towards a single European infrastructure manager. The House has debated High Speed 2. Many hon. Members on both sides of the House believe that key decisions on infrastructure should be retained at national level. Of course, we need integrated decision making when we go across national boundaries, but basic infrastructure decisions should be based on local knowledge and the representation of local interests, and particularly local constituency interests. The measure will take us beyond that.
RMT’s third point is that rail is effectively a money laundering exercise. This is not petty nationalism, but we see an incremental nationalisation of our railway system by Deutsche Bahn and others. The taxpayer subsidy poured into the system is laundered into investment in those companies’ own countries. Why do I say that? Let me quote the German Transport Ministry. It said:
“We’re skimming profit from the entire Deutsche Bahn and ensuring that it is anchored in our budget—that way we can make sure it is invested in the rail network here”.
The laundering of the British pound into German euros is a deep irony, and it is happening as a result of the UK Government’s proposals to support elements in the package.