High Speed 2 Compensation

Gavin Williamson Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) on securing the debate. We have already heard from the first two speakers how people’s lives have been impacted by this scheme. Many of us, right across Staffordshire, were delighted when we heard the news back in October that the Prime Minister had taken the right decision in cancelling phase 2 of HS2. Many of us had been campaigning for that and we were so delighted to hear the news.

HS2 had already spent £208 million on the purchase of land for phase 2a alone, and that was even before the major construction work was to start. There was a hope and a belief that the land that had been purchased would be returned to the owners and it would all be resolved incredibly quickly. I am afraid to say, however, that even though the announcement was made in October, there remains an enormous amount of uncertainty, an enormous amount of concern and a total lack of clarity for many people who are impacted by the scheme.

As the new year begins, we need clarity on when land will be returned. We need to have an understanding of when the selling of land by HS2 is to start. We need to have an understanding about those people who have had their homes taken from them. When will they be in a position to buy back their homes? When will they be in a position to know what the rules are and what their future may hold?

I appreciate that the Minister has, just today, lifted the safeguarding on phase 2a. I think all of us very much welcome that, but it still leaves many questions that need urgent clarity. I understand that the Department for Transport has said that the return of land will

“take time because the Department for Transport needs to make sure the programme provides value for money for taxpayers and does not disrupt local property markets”.

It also says:

“there remains a significant amount of work to do”.

I am sure there is a significant amount of work to do, but there has been a considerable period of time to do that work, and people’s lives are on hold and their nerves have been frayed. Many people just do not know what their future holds. They cannot move on until the Minister and HS2 give them the certainty and the clarity that is required.

I want to touch on a couple of examples that have been sent to me. There is, sadly, a lot of fear among many Staffordshire residents about how HS2 acts. It acts sometimes in quite an imperious manner, without necessarily the care, consideration or consistency that one would hope for from a Government-owned organisation.

One example relates to a farming business. Temporary possession started in 2022, with HS2 taking around 3 acres for environmental mitigation. The family objected to the land being taken on a temporary basis, as they did not want to be responsible for the future maintenance of all the things that were being put on it. Further grazing land of approximately 100 acres was taken under temporary possession in January 2023. A proportion of that land was purchased in July 2023. Meanwhile, preparation for the diversion of a high-pressure gas main began in March 2023. Fencing was erected, hundreds of metres of hedges were ripped out and a compound was built, before work was halted in May 2023. Following the announcement of phase 2a’s cancellation, the family expected the compulsory purchase order to be cancelled and the land to be returned. However, further land was purchased in November 2023. Last time I checked, November definitely came after October, so that was after the Prime Minister announced that the scheme was not continuing.

What are the impacts on these farmers? They are considerable, because HS2 has a very different understanding of the concept of the purchase of land. If any of us in this place, or any of our constituents, wants to purchase land, usually we enter into an agreement, then we pay money, and after we have paid the money, we may get the land. It works very differently for HS2. It can purchase land and never pay for the land. Those affected then have the problem of having to work around HS2, which will never actually build anything on the land.

Here we have a business, a farm, with a 400-cow dairy unit. Because of all the infrastructure changes that HS2 has made, such as removing access to parts of the grazing area, it is difficult for the farmers to move livestock around. It is difficult for them to gain access to land for which they have never been paid, or of which HS2 has taken temporary possession. All this is creating an additional workload, and they have not been compensated and are not clear about when that will happen.

Another example is a small nursery business whose owners depend on people knowing where it is. HS2, which has placed a charge on the land through the Land Registry, will not allow them to cut the hedges that it now owns but has never paid for, but it is willing to charge them, at an incredibly high rate, for the freedom to cut the hedges so that people know where their business is.

This is not the way in which we expect a Government-owned company—a company owned not by some multi- national, but by the Secretary of State for Transport—to be able to proceed. I wonder whether, if I pass on the contact details of those two businesses and other detailed information, the Minister will ensure that their cases are examined closely and that a resolution is found.

So many messages have been sent to me about the manner in which HS2 has conducted itself—about the delays that people have had to suffer, about the uncertainty, and about people having to put their hands in their own pockets and spend tens of thousands of pounds on land agents and consultants to try to get some money back from HS2, but still not receiving anything. So many people have had land taken from them—land that they no longer own, but for which they have never received a single penny.

We need to have clarity. We cannot wait months and months more. I hope that the Minister, who I know is a diligent and caring Minister, will give that clarity today, or, at the very minimum, give a clear timeline for when everyone who has been impacted by HS2 will know the rules by which it is playing, and ensure that there is fairness for the people in Staffordshire who have been affected.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) on securing this important debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the time. I also thank the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Gavin Williamson) and the hon. Members for Chesham and Amersham (Sarah Green), for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan), for Buckingham (Greg Smith) and for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) for contributing to the debate.

The stories we have heard, and those that have been reported over the years, show the very real consequences of this Tory HS2 fiasco—[Interruption.] There is some muttering from Conservative MPs. If the civil service and the Department for Transport were not involved in the decision to cancel that was announced by the Prime Minister in Manchester—it was done on the back of a fag packet, which has been used today, all day—it is no wonder that we got this type of fiasco.

We have heard of people having to leave the family home that they worked hard for, businesses having to pack up and leave their premises, towns and villages seeing homes targeted after they were bought and later left to rot, and farmers being forced to move or unable to use their land for years because of more and more delays to HS2., We have heard of cash-strapped councils such as Cheshire East Council, which the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich told us paid out £11 million. I commend the Labour spokesman Connor Naismith on his campaign to have the council reimbursed for the money lost.

Communities have had their future put on pause for years and families have found getting compensation to be a painful and drawn-out experience. Lives and businesses have been disrupted for a decade, and for what? A staggering £65 billion high-speed train line that will now not even reach the communities that have been impacted—a train line that, according to the chair of HS2, will result in fewer seats and longer journeys for those travelling north of Birmingham. What a result for the people living in those communities and across the north.

All that is even before we consider how much taxpayers’ money has been spent on the compensation. According to reports, almost £423 million has been spent buying up 424 properties on the western leg from Birmingham to Manchester, and £164 million spent buying 530 “blighted” properties on the eastern leg to Leeds. Today comes the news that the Government are lifting safeguarding on the land; not content with cancelling high-speed rail to the north, the Prime Minister has now decided to salt the earth. If we were not aware already, that must be the final nail in the coffin for levelling-up.

[Sir Gavin Williamson]

Can the hon. Gentleman clarify whether, in the unfortunate and unlikely event of a Labour Government, they would reimpose safeguarding on phase 2a?

[Mike Kane]

Like Napoleon out of Moscow, it is routed through the poisoned-earth strategy with the lifting of the safeguarding today. We have to be responsible. We will have to see what the books tell us if we are to enter Government in the weeks or months to come.

We have seen 14 years of promises to the north and the midlands broken. In the Prime Minister’s desperate, failing attempt to rebrand himself as the change candidate at the next election, he decided to rush through an alternative plan at the party conference—a plan that mentions places such as Crewe, which, as the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich rightly said, would have greatly benefited, but a plan that the Prime Minister admitted was only “illustrative”. Illustrative? The Network North plan announced fantastic news for my Wythenshawe and Sale East constituency—a new Metrolink line to Manchester airport. It opened in 2016. That illustrates the chaos and the confusion of that announcement.

The now Foreign Secretary was not alone on the Conservative side in criticising the decision. Two former Chancellors warned the Prime Minister that his actions were “huge economic self-harm”, while the Tory Mayor of the West Midlands described it as “cancelling the future”—a great line, if I may say so to the hon. Member for Lichfield. In what is a consistent theme for this Government, this whole mess has been created by not consulting the communities affected, not speaking to our Metro Mayors and not listening to the businesses across the country that were depending on the project.

After 14 years, communities have had enough of the broken promises from this broken Government. Labour will not repeat those mistakes—mismanaging major projects, turning people’s lives upside down, taking their trust for granted, impacting their businesses and livelihoods and failing to deliver.