High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill
Debate between Graham Stringer and Damian Collins(10 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Graham Stringer
It is a relative figure from a general uplift.
We should look at the experience of countries that have high-speed lines, such as France, Spain and Germany. The most direct comparator is the line between Lyon and Paris. When the Transport Committee went there in 2011, it found, and was told by the director-general of SNCF, that both cities had benefited from it. All the economic benefit had not been sucked out of Lyon and into Paris; both ends had benefited. The same is true of the lines between Frankfurt and Cologne and between Lille and other parts of France. That does not just happen because the line is built, however; it happens if there is a strategy of the Government and the city governments to make sure there is benefit from that high-speed route. It relies on active involvement from local and city government to make sure all the benefit of that investment is captured.
Graham Stringer
No, as I have given way once and many Members want to speak in this debate.
There are people with genuine and serious constituency interests in this debate, but some of the interests lined up against the project are vested interests. Referring back to what the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns) said, I wrote an article recently about HS2 in which I guessed that when the railways started, in the early and mid-19th century, they would have been opposed by the stagecoach owners and bargees at that time. The editor of the journal I wrote the article for found a cartoon of the 1830s depicting horses that were unemployed queuing up. So there are vested interests against this project, as well as constituency interests.
My second point is about capacity. The point has been well made that this project is driven by capacity issues and it will have economic benefits. The question that people who want to stop this project have to answer is this: are they really saying to our country that, by the middle of this century, we are going to be relying on railways that were built in the middle of the 19th century and motorways that were built in the middle of the 20th century for our transport infrastructure? There has been very little investment in any of our transport infrastructure—motorways, roads and airport runways—over the last 30 or 40 years. That would be a disgrace to the United Kingdom and it would mean that we fell further behind our competitors.
The final point I want to make has two aspects. I sympathise with the arguments made by those Members who have constituency interests and are opposing this Bill, and I hope the Secretary of State will listen carefully, because my experience of being involved in more than one major infrastructure project is that if we pay more and earlier in compensation, we save in the long term and the projects happen more quickly. A lot of the resistance comes from people who think they are being treated unfairly. So I hope the Secretary of State will listen.
The other side of the coin has already been referred to. The Higgins report calls for the project to be speeded up and I agree with that, but I think we can do still better. Building north to south as well as south to north and speeding up the project would bring more immediate benefits. Whatever we say about the cost-benefit analysis, all the analysis shows it is not the actual quantum of money—£25 billion, £30 billion or £40 billion—that counts; it is that we will get more economic benefit back than the money we put in. So the quicker we do it, the better.