High Speed Rail (Crewe - Manchester) Bill (Instruction) (No. 3)

Grahame Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker—I will respect your wishes. I had not intended to speak in the debate, so I apologise for being late. I serve on the House of Commons Transport Committee, along with colleagues who spoke earlier from the Government Benches. I also served on the HS2 hybrid Bill Committee that dealt with the section from Crewe to Manchester Piccadilly.

[Sir William Cash]

Is the hon. Gentleman actually involved with a Bill that is currently in existence, or is he suggesting that something should be done in respect of a Bill that is not the same as the Bill that was introduced in the first place?

[Grahame Morris]

My goodness, that is a complicated intervention—I am not sure that I am suitably qualified to answer it. I just thought that I might share some of my thoughts having served on the Bill Committee, without any particular axe to grind.

I served on the Bill Committee because I was asked to do so as a servant of the House, in order to consider the merits or otherwise of the various petitions. I do not know whether Members are familiar with the process. I am not suggesting for a moment that it is perfect, and I know that there are arguments for revising the hybrid Bill procedure, which is quite lengthy, but some right hon. and hon. Members have suggested—perhaps through a lack of understanding of the process—that it is a mechanism for steamrolling through opposition, and I can absolutely assure them that that does not happen. In fact, if anything, petitioners—who may be individuals, businesses, environmental groups, local authorities or groups representing commercial interests, such as the National Farmers’ Union—are given ample opportunity to make representations to the Committee through petitions, and then to speak to those petitions and articulate their arguments for mitigation, compensation and route variation.

[Jack Brereton]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Grahame Morris]

I will, but I am conscious of time.

[Jack Brereton]

The hon. Member will know from Transport Committee visits that some of the commitments made in the hybrid Bill Committee have not been honoured. Does he share my concerns about that?

--- Later in debate ---

[Grahame Morris]

As well as having served on the hybrid Bill Committee, I serve on the Transport Committee, and part of that Committee’s duties is to scrutinise HS2 and hold the Rail Minister, who is responsible for the delivery of HS2, to account. Certainly, concerns were expressed to the Transport Committee that statutory undertakings and assurances were not honoured—at least not in the form in which they were presented to the Committee.

[Jim McMahon]

Will my hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Grahame Morris]

I will give way one more time, very briefly.

[Jim McMahon]

This was only separated out because, as in this debate, some tried to make out that residents were opposed to the project overall. However, my hon. Friend must have seen in the hybrid Bill Committee process that quite a lot of the opposition was about the operational performance of HS2 Ltd and the considerations for local people in construction traffic, delays and the rest of it, which probably could have been done much better.

[Grahame Morris]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that perfectly reasonable point. Indeed, it is certainly true of requests for variations to traffic in locations of construction sites and so forth. However, I only have a couple of minutes, so I do not want to be tempted on to the wrong track, as it were, and will just share a couple of thoughts.

I am a bit of a buff. I might be an anti-node, but I am familiar with the locations on the route.

This afternoon, those of us on the Transport Committee have been involved in the pre-legislative scrutiny of the rail reform Bill, and have been listening to representations from representatives of the Welsh Government and the sub-national transport bodies. They were commenting on the new structure and the new draft Bill, and there is general recognition—not just from Transport for the North in my region; we had witnesses from Midlands Connect and Transport East, as well as the Welsh Government—that there is a major transport infrastructure issue. For many decades, we have concentrated on north-south connectivity—principally on connectivity with the capital city. We have done that for sound economic reasons, but the case for east-west connections is supported vociferously by the metro Mayors of Manchester, Liverpool and West Yorkshire, and there are sound economic and connectivity arguments for addressing the need for those connections.

This mechanism is far from perfect. As a separate matter, the House should look at whether the pre-legislative scrutiny process can be truncated in some way to speed it up, but we must give petitioners—Members of Parliament, individuals and businesses—the opportunity to raise their concerns. Imperfect though the mechanism may be, and imperfect though I may be in advocating for it, it does have its merits when it comes to scrutinising major infrastructure schemes such as this one, so I will support today’s motion.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the Minister, I think the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) opened his remarks by saying that he might have been late for the debate. I can assure him that I have been told he was certainly in the Chamber at the beginning of the debate. Otherwise, I would not have let him speak. I call the Minister.