High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr McLoughlin]

One of the things we are trying to do is drive out some of the subsidy in the railways to make it cheaper and more affordable for companies, but it is certainly true that there is subsidy in the rail industry. However, we have to think about people being able to get to work and what that subsidy supports. Sometimes the commuter in London, and the commuter in my hon. Friend’s constituency, deserves that support to enable him to get to the jobs that are available elsewhere. One has to be realistic and understanding about that.

I will now try to make some progress, because I have been speaking for longer than I had intended to take for my whole speech. This is not about a choice between upgrading the existing railway and building a new one. Upgrades will not provide the extra capacity we need. The choice is between a new high-speed line and a new conventional railway. The significant additional benefits make high-speed rail the right answer. Of course, big infrastructure projects are always controversial. As I often say, the easiest thing in the world for the Government to do would be not to build HS2 or to commit to it, but the costs of that would be huge.

It would be a cost in jobs. Our modest estimates indicate that HS2 will create and support 100,000 jobs, while the group of core cities predict that it will underpin 400,000 jobs, 70% of them outside London. It would be a cost in prosperity. Some estimates suggest that HS2 will add over £4 billion to the economy even before it is open. The line is estimated to provide around £50 billion in economic benefits once it is up and running. If we do not go ahead with HS2, there will also be a cost in lost opportunities for the towns and cities in the midlands and the north. I am not prepared to put up with a situation in which someone can get to Brussels on a high-speed train line, but not to Birmingham; to Strasbourg, but not to Sheffield; or to Lille, but not to Leeds. We cannot afford to leave the economic future of our great cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham and Derby to an overcrowded 200-year-old railway.

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

rose—

[Mr McLoughlin]

I did say that I would not give way any more, but I shall give way to my hon. Friend.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My right hon. Friend knows, as does the rest of the House, that much of that high-speed European railway was built with European money. How much investigation has he done with the European authorities into how much he might be able to reduce the enormous £32 billion cost of the railway?

[Mr McLoughlin]

We will be looking at that. I will say a bit more about costs a little later, if my hon. Friend will wait. As always, we will look at how we finance, and not necessarily just in respect of the area to which he has referred. We could see private sector investment in some of the stations that we are going to develop. I will say something more about the stations in a few moments.

We will deliver the investment to develop new stations and growth at places such as Old Oak Common in west London, where we will invest more than £920 million in a new hub linking the west country, Crossrail and HS2. At Curzon Street in Birmingham, we will invest £335 million on station developments. Similar investments are due in Manchester, Leeds and other great railway centres such as Sheffield and the east midlands.

HS2 will also allow for significant improvements to the rail service on the existing main north-south lines, providing benefits for towns such as Milton Keynes, Tamworth and Lichfield. It will provide real scope to get more freight on to the railways, which I would have thought the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) would welcome. It will also free up capacity on the M1, the M6 and the M40.

My second point this afternoon is about the Bill before the House. It will authorise essential expenditure on the preparation work for high-speed rail. Planning and building the line will take time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Eagle]

I do not accept the hon. Gentleman’s premise that there will be no benefit to Scotland before the high-speed rail line gets there at some time in the future. It is clear that it will benefit from the project.

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

Does the hon. Lady agree that, if we are going to spend this large amount of money on HS2, we should get the maximum benefit from it? At the moment, it is planned to connect HS2 with HS1 only by a rather tortuous single-rail route, but there is a better, double-rail solution available. Would it not make more sense to fully integrate HS1 with HS2?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

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

In the light of your entreaty and decision to cut us down to four minutes, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have binned my speech.

I say to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that I am going to support this Bill because I believe strongly in the principle of a superb infrastructure to enable this country to be competitive in the 21st century. I hope, however, that he will regard me as a critical friend, because I think that his proposed route contains two fundamental weaknesses.

Before I talk about that, I would like to concentrate on the costs. In discussing this Bill which we are, I hope, going to pass, we need to know precisely what costs we are dealing with. My right hon. Friend has now given us two lots of costs, and I hope that he or the Minister of State will clarify exactly what those costs are. I believe that we are now talking about £42 billion for phase 1 and phase 2, plus some £9 billion for rolling stock, making a total of about £51 billion. It would be enormously helpful if he could clarify those costs.

It was not an idle intervention that I made on my right hon. Friend earlier. I do think that money should be available from Europe in the transnational networks, and I hope that he and his Department are urgently investigating that. As the hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) said, a lot of the superb high-speed rail network was funded by Europe.

In the very short time I have available, let me deal with the two fundamental flaws in the proposed route. First, it is completely wrong to have an holistic transport policy that does not link HS2 with our major hub airport. Sir Howard Davies and his airport commission will not report until after the next election, so how can it make sense to fix a route when we do not know where the hub airport will be? If, for example, he favours—I make no recommendation as to which option he should favour—an estuarial hub airport solution, the current route would be in completely the wrong place.

The other fundamental flaw in the route is that it does not properly link HS2 and HS1. Other Members have talked about this, particularly the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). I would say to her, and to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, that they should look at the process that was involved with HS1. The then new Secretary of State, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), very late in the day, called in all the evidence and changed the route. That route, which had been designed by British Rail, went right through south London and was going to blight large numbers of houses, and he changed it at the very last minute. If he had not done so, Stratford International would never have come into being and the Olympics would never have taken place. I say this to my right hon. Friend: do please look at the route, because if we are spending this vast amount of money, let us, as a nation, get the maximum out of it.

I commend to my right hon. Friend a solution proposed by Ove Arup—the Heathrow hub. A Heathrow hub would produce a truly holistic transport policy integrating road, rail, freight and air. Above all, it would benefit my constituents in the west, because the newly electrified west coast main line would go into the Heathrow hub rather than having to go into Paddington and out again, as is currently the case if people want to get to Heathrow by rail. A Heathrow hub would also benefit my right hon. Friend—my good friend—the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), because the route could be altered to be taken along the M40. I ask my right hon. Friend to think about existing transport networks, as with HS1, because if HS2 is run along existing motorway links, each one cancels out the other.

I believe in this new HS2 project, which will put Britain into the forefront of competitiveness in the 21st century, but will my right hon. Friend please have a look at the route?