High Speed 2
Debate between Geoffrey Robinson and Richard Burden(13 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Robinson
I will in a moment if my hon. Friend will hang on just a tick. I have only got 10 minutes, and time taken now will shorten someone else’s time.
We really do not need this project. What we need is for the pinch points to be relieved and some of the capacity bottlenecks to be relieved, and we could get the whole capacity increase we need on that line. Centro, which is responsible for the west midlands portion of the line, has said that it desperately needs that to be done now. That is the way to do it, not to wait until—
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr Robinson
I will give way in a moment, but I know what my hon. Friend is going to say because he represents a Birmingham constituency. I take those points too, but on the argument about this being a regional policy, let me say that any remotely sensible study that has been done on it says that 75% of the jobs are going to be created in the south-east, so we should forget the idea that it is a regional policy: that does not stack up. It is a convenience for certain metropolitan centres in the north, and the idea is that if ever it gets up to Edinburgh and Glasgow it could be a spinal cord that unites the country despite the tensions we feel at present—so why not start it up there? Why not start it from Leeds or York? That is what needs doing—and urgently—but of course they will not do that, because everyone knows that the subsidy for that area would be enormous and could not be justified. It can be justified only for the small London-Birmingham stretch where the subsidy will be highest, and it will not benefit ordinary travellers in any sense. It will be subsidised to a massive extent by the taxpayer and, by those businessmen, and others—
Mr Robinson
I do not accept that at all, and the hon. Lady should look at what Centro and others have said. There is a capacity problem. The Government’s capacity projections are way over the top, just as they were for HS1, which was the biggest flop ever. Their capacity projections said that the minimum would be a fifth of the maximum, but they could not even get the capacity up to that level. It lost money from day one, and it was flogged off recently to someone in Canada who has no interest in it at all, at a whopping loss of £2 billion or £3 billion. That is the truth.
Mr Robinson
I just mention in passing that when I was being selected—those few years ago—