High Speed Rail (Crewe - Manchester) Bill

Greg Smith Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 20th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

My opposition to HS2 has been expressed somewhat forcefully in this House over the two and a half years for which I have had the privilege of representing the Buckingham constituency. I note with some sadness, and certainly bewilderment, that we continue to debate this relic from the Blair-Brown Labour Government; and, worse than that, to extend it yet further with this Bill, bringing to more parts of the country, and more lives, the human misery that my constituents have experienced since enabling works and construction started. We have heard some commentary about the Leader of the Opposition’s previous stance, and perhaps this is one occasion on which Captain Hindsight got it right the first time.

It is not lost on me that this debate comes on the eve of the hard left and the unions bringing our railways to a halt, and preventing hard-working British people, schoolchildren and people who want to go out for the day from getting on the railways that we do have. I was struck by what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport said in his earlier statement, which provides important context to our debate:

“The railway is in a fight…not just competing with other forms of public and private transport but competing with Teams, Zoom and other forms of remote working. Today, many commuters who three years ago had no alternative but to travel by train have…the option of not travelling at all. Rail has lost a fifth of its passengers.”

In the light of the Secretary of State’s words, it has to be asked why on earth we continue to plough in excess of £100 billion into a railway project that blights the British countryside and delivers none of the real or quantifiable benefits that some—including, and I say this with great respect, hon. and right hon. Members who spoke before me—believe it does. I welcome the cancelling of the eastern leg and the cancelling of the Golborne spur, but even before those bits were chopped off, the benefit-cost ratio was only 0.6:1.7. We are yet to see from the Government where that BCR sits today with a scaled-back HS2.

I want to focus on two things. First, why on earth are we continuing to plough money into this thing? Secondly, from my constituency experience, I say to hon. and right hon. Members who support the Bill and want to extend HS2 further that they should be careful what they wish for. But before I get on to that, I want to explore a point that others have raised today about the ongoing HS2 debate.

At the start, HS2 was all about speed; it was all about how fast we could get to Birmingham or Manchester, which are fantastic parts of our United Kingdom. Personally, I have never had a problem with the time it has taken to get by rail to Birmingham, to Manchester or, for that matter, up to Glasgow, where I had clients when I ran my business. The debate very quickly became about capacity, and we have heard that word a lot today. As the Secretary of State said in his statement, however, rail has lost a fifth of its passengers, so presumably we no longer have that capacity problem. Earlier this year, we even saw suggestions reported in the press in relation to the Transport Committee and others that HS2 had become about propping up the construction industry. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) said in her excellent speech earlier, with 1.3 million vacancies in the economy, I do not think that the taxpayer should be propping up anything at all in the construction industry. At present, it is almost impossible to find a builder for either a big or a small project. It is almost impossible to work to a tight timescale.

I challenge my hon. Friend the Minister, when he sums up the debate, to give us an answer to this question. Is it about speed, is it about capacity, is it about propping up the building industry? There is a further question that should worry all those on this side of the House, all those with a free-market, low-tax, small-state viewpoint: how it can be that we are building this thing entirely at cost to the taxpayer? If there really is such high demand for HS2, if it really is the great railway, the golden bullet, that will solve all the north-south transport problems in the country, why does no one in the private sector want to risk their own pounds and pence in real investment? Why does no one have the confidence to put their own money into this project? That is a massive alarm bell that should sound in the minds of certainly every Conservative, if not every Member in the House.

As we look at extending high-speed rail yet further, from Crewe to Manchester, I say again that those who support this should be careful what they wish for. I extend an open invitation to any Member to visit my constituency, and to travel through villages and hamlets such as Terrick, Butlers Cross, Ellesborough, Little Kimble and Great Kimble, Marsh, Stone, Fleet Marston, Waddesdon, Quainton, Edgcott and Grendon Underwood, Steeple Claydon, Twyford, Charndon, Chetwode, Westbury, Turweston—and there are more. I invite Members to come and see the scale of not just the devastation caused to the Buckinghamshire countryside, but the real human misery that goes with that. There are the endless road closures, often taking place at a moment’s notice. In a rural environment, that does not mean a five-minute diversion to get the kids to school, to get to work, or to go wherever else people wish to go; it is often a half-hour or a 45-minute diversion.

Let me give the House a tangible example of where that can really strike. The Princes Centre is a daycare centre in Princes Risborough, quite a long way from the trace of HS2, but serving clients from all over the county of Buckinghamshire. It has had to pay 75% more in overtime rates for its employees to account for the time for which those carers are stuck in traffic—for no good reason, other than the HS2 road closures and endless traffic lights and diversions—while trying to reach the people who rely on their care. We have all seen the price of fuel rise in recent months, but the centre’s fuel consumption has increased by more than a quarter because of those diversions. This is an independent daycare centre, a charity, suffering severe financial penalties because of all the road closures and other disruptions that HS2 has brought to the county of Buckinghamshire.

Let us travel a little further up the road, to Fleet Marston on the edge of the town of Aylesbury, where the Hunters farm land all around the A41. HS2 has acquired a significant proportion of their land—farmland, arable land—and as a result of the way in which it has treated that land, it has become entirely waterlogged. No proper drainage has been put in place, and where the Hunters still have land to farm, their crops are completely ruined. No signs have been put up around the farm, and HS2 HGVs are constantly driving through the farmyard, finding it almost impossible to do three-point turns to get out again. This has also created an extremely dangerous stretch of the A41, the main road that runs through my constituency from Aylesbury to Bicester, where every day hundreds of HGVs come very close to people who are trying to go about their daily business. There have been many near misses on that stretch of road, and, sadly, there have been fatalities.

I could give countless examples of other farmers across the constituency who have been messed about time after time. They have, for instance, been subject to poor timescales for crop loss compensation, when they have not been able to farm their land or grow the crops or graze the cattle. In some cases, it has taken two harvests for farmers to receive the compensation.

Great Moor Sailing Club, just outside Calvert, has experienced massive construction disruption, which has almost prevented it from carrying out its activities. Agreements made between contractors and the club have constantly failed to be met and honoured. A good neighbour High Speed Two Ltd is categorically not.

Let us go a little further up the road to Steeple Claydon, where the bus company Langston & Tasker operates. That company has one of the main home-to-school contracts in the county of Buckinghamshire. Andy and Dan Price, who own the business, are having to deal not only with the increase in overheads that the cost of living pressures and the global oil price have brought to them, but massive increases in overheads because of the diversions that are affecting their school buses, and the damage to their vehicles caused by the crumbling roads that have been unable to cope with the thousands of daily HGV movements. Tyres have been torn off the company’s buses because the edge of the road has become like a bread knife as those thousands of HGVs have been forced out on to the verge, causing huge damage.

There are cases of landowners being messed around by not being offered a fair price for their land, or having land taken only to be told, “We have taken too much” or “We have taken too little and will have to take a bit more, but we are not going to tell you when you will get it back, or if you will get it back”. There was one tragic case of a farmer in my constituency who suffered a fatal heart attack. It is certainly the family’s view that the strains and the pressures and the stresses of the way in which he was treated by High Speed 2 Ltd were in part, if not wholly, to blame.

Construction projects like this bring real misery to communities. They will bring that same misery along the stretch from Crewe to Manchester. They will bring that same misery wherever big state infrastructure is put in place.

I am grateful to the HS2 Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), who has visited the constituency and always been available to discuss concerns. I am grateful to the new residents commissioner, Stewart Jackson, for spending two and a half hours in my car on Friday morning as I personally drove him round all the sites where roads have been damaged and showed him the inexplicable contradictions between what HS2 said it would do and what it has actually done. I showed him some of the farms that have been so badly messed about, and the homes have been boarded up and taken. I am also grateful to the construction commissioner, Sir Mark Worthington, for the time he has spent in the constituency and in engaging with me.

However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) said earlier, there are still no answers about the price that has to be hit before anyone says, “Enough!” The reality is that when these big projects set off, with their huge commitments and unlimited budgets, they take on a life of their own. Completing these projects becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and the contractors are out of control, no matter how much goodwill and fantastic effort goes into trying to rein them in.

To put this into perspective, let me say that I doubt that any other right hon. or hon. Member has a member of staff working full time just on the construction of this railway and East West Rail in their constituency. Such is the scale of the workload—the incoming—on HS2-related matters in my constituency.

No matter how much goodwill and engagement there is, and no matter how much the issues are looked at and properly interrogated, the contractors will carry on regardless. HS2 Ltd will carry on regardless. They see it as building this railway, full stop. We often get warm words. We often get roadshows at which they say they are listening, but the problem is that nothing changes. I give this to the House as a warning: this is the reality that underpins some of these infrastructure projects, particularly this one. I live in hope that one day sense will be seen and this project can be scrapped for good, but in the meantime we need a massive change of attitude from HS2 Ltd, from the contractors and from all who work for them, so that they start to put communities first.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Largan]

I could not have put it better myself. When I flagged this point earlier, Opposition Members said it is a constituency interest, which is very revealing. A Member of Parliament’s list of priorities is supposed to be country, constituency, party and then self. It is slightly worrying that, when the interests of the country come up against the interests of a narrow corner of north London, the leader of the Labour party opts for self, party, constituency and then country last, which is very revealing about his priorities.

HS2 is an important infrastructure project, so I take great pleasure in busting some of the myths we have heard this evening. A series of myths about high-speed rail have been perpetuated over the last decade by a combination of muddled thinking and well-financed interest groups, and I will take them one by one.

As we have heard tonight, this is all about time. Who needs an extra 30 minutes off rail journeys down to London? First, this has never been primarily about journey times and speed; this has always been about capacity.

[Greg Smith]

My hon. Friend and I never fell out when we took opposite sides in the Brexit referendum, and we will not fall out over this. He says HS2 has always been about capacity, so why did it have to be built as a high-speed line so dead straight that it had to go through the middle of ancient woodland and the Calvert Jubilee nature reserve? If it were about capacity, the line could have been slower from the outset and could therefore have gone around ancient woodland and nature reserves.

[Robert Largan]

If we are going to spend billions of pounds on a new railway line, we want to make it a fast line. If we were to give in to my hon. Friend’s demands and scrap HS2 tomorrow, we would quickly run up against gridlock on the west coast main line, which is almost at complete capacity already.