High Speed 2 (Warrington)

Helen Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2014 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) and to the Minister for allowing me to participate in this debate, not least because I applied for it and somehow it ended up in his name—strange are the ways of the Table Office. Nevertheless, we are both here because although we may have political differences on a number of issues, even perhaps on some aspects of HS2, we are united in the belief that this initial proposed route around Warrington is both bad for the town and, increasingly, economically unjustifiable.

In the time allowed to me, I cannot deal with every issue, but this route will inflict huge disturbance and environmental damage on my constituency. It is already inflicting housing blight and it will, I believe, lead to economic damage in the villages affected, rather than prosperity. All of that arises from the perverse decision to send the route to join the west coast main line north of Warrington, rather than north of Crewe. I think the case for that has to come under increasing scrutiny, particularly in view of the damage it will inflict, and I do not believe that the figures stack up. In that respect, I am very grateful to my constituent, Mr Alan Debenham, for the detailed work he has done on the figures, and to the Culcheth and District Rail Action Group and the Rixton-with-Glazebrook HS2 Action Group for the information that they have supplied to me.

The spur, as we call it, is estimated to cost about £1 billion. Originally, in 2013, HS2 Ltd said that it would cost £800 million, as opposed to the £750 million cost of joining the west coast line north of Crewe. In fact, even those figures need to be scrutinised carefully, because that is a cost of £22.9 million per kilometre. That is only 28.6% of the average cost of the line elsewhere, despite the fact that a viaduct has to be built over the ship canal, as well as a new link at Lymm and bridges over the motorways. It is hardly believable. Mr Debenham has estimated that even if we take out the cost of building new stations on the line elsewhere and tunnels, it still only comes out at 40% of the average cost of building the rest of the line. I urge the Minister to scrutinise those figures very carefully indeed.

Attempts to get more details on the economic cost of the line have failed, but it is very clear from parliamentary answers to me that none of the case takes into account the economic cost to the villages around Warrington. For some, that is quite severe. The line will go through the Taylor business park, which is actually in the parish of Croft but just outside Culcheth, with a loss of 500 jobs. There will be a consequent loss of jobs among businesses in Culcheth that depend on trade from the business park, and even more jobs will be lost, because three of the main routes out of the village—the routes that lead into Warrington—are going to have to be closed during construction.

We saw recently what happened when only one route was closed: businesses lost an awful lot of trade and some closed during and after the closure of the road. The Minister has to understand that businesses in Culcheth not only serve the village, but attract a lot of people from outside to do their shopping or to come and eat there. My two favourite eateries, the Raj and the China Rose, for instance, attract people from outside the village as well as a clientele from within it. The Black Swan in Hollins Green, which is an excellent pub, if the Minister is ever passing, brings people into the village because of events that it puts on, such as farmers’ markets. The estimate for the loss of business rates from the business park is more than £635,000 per annum. The economic loss to Culcheth, including lost salaries and wages, is estimated at £10.2 million per annum. None of those are included in the costings for the line.

The environmental impact is also very serious. Rixton-with-Glazebrook will see a big viaduct and raised embankments going through the villages, cutting one half of the parish off from the other. The village of Hollins Green, which is an ancient village, will be dominated by the viaduct, and the network of footpaths around Hollins Green will be destroyed. They, too, bring people in from outside the village. I well remember opening—if you can open them, Mr Hollobone—the boards that first set up the maps for those. The Culcheth linear park will be destroyed. Ironically, in the consultation, it is down as a “dismantled railway” line—well, it used to be, but it is not now. It is a park with plant and tree conservation programmes, access for the disabled, and routes for walkers and riders. Those facilities cannot be replicated elsewhere in the village, and there is no attempt to calculate the cost to public health and the consequent cost to the public purse from getting rid of these facilities. It is ironic that at a time that we are all being encouraged to walk more, ways of doing that around the area will be destroyed.

I also urge the Minister to look carefully at the idea of building a big viaduct in an area of high winds. The Thelwall viaduct on the M6 frequently has speed limits on it and sometimes has to be closed because of the high winds in the area. No one seems to have taken account of that in the engineering.

Most serious of all is the blight on property that is now affecting the villages. Parliamentary answers that I have received said blithely that there would be 21 properties demolished, only four of which would be residential, and three would be at risk of demolition. In fact, the situation is much worse than that. In Rixton-with-Glazebrook, 505 properties will be within 500 metres of the line. If the Minister knows anyone who wants to buy a house in a village with a great big viaduct going through it, I am sure that people will be delighted to hear from him. In Culcheth, the total is 947 properties. Many of those do not qualify for the exceptional hardship scheme. They are not owned by wealthy people, but by people who have struggled and sacrificed to buy their own home, and who now see buyers walking away. We also see stories of people being refused mortgages because of the uncertainty about the route. In total, if we look at the PricewaterhouseCoopers report on the property bond and the loss of values, it is estimated that even a 10% drop in property prices in Culcheth wipes £23 million off the value of property in the area, and that is at today’s prices.

As one gentleman said to me, there might be a point if we were gaining elsewhere—it happened to be someone who lived very close to the proposed line—but we are not. This spur, as the hon. Member for Warrington South has shown, does not actually seem to benefit anyone. In fact, building the line in that way disadvantages the whole of the west of the region, because it takes the HS2 line away from it, and I think Liverpool is already making its case about that. I admire Manchester’s lobbying skills, but the region is not all about Manchester. We need to ensure that other places benefit as well.

The Minister and his colleagues have a chance to put this right, because the Higgins report proposes a transport hub at Crewe, and part of the reason for not joining the line north of Crewe was the work that would have to be done to Crewe station. If it is being done anyway, he has a real chance to look again at these proposals to ensure that we get the line joining the west coast main line north of Crewe and that that line is upgraded, so that then we can connect to Liverpool, Warrington and many of the other towns and cities around the route as well. If he does that, he will not only be avoiding a loss of habitat, environmental destruction and economic problems in my constituency, but providing a better service to the region as a whole and saving the Government probably £1 billion and, as I have said to my colleagues, any future Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer £1 billion as well, so I hope that he does the right thing and gets it right for Warrington.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) on applying for this debate and my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) on speaking first in it. For Warrington, there is no north-south divide as far as HS2 is concerned, but HS2 itself does address the very big issue of the north-south divide as far as our country is concerned. There is very good cross-party agreement on that point, but I will not rehearse the arguments, as they have already been well rehearsed on the Floor of the House and in Committee.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has announced details of the route for phase 2 of HS2, to Leeds and Manchester, and with intermediate stations at Manchester airport, the east midlands and Sheffield. We have consulted on that route and received more than 10,000 responses, including one from my hon. Friend, all of which are being carefully analysed. Let me be clear. No decisions have yet been taken on the route or station options. The Secretary of State has committed to respond to the phase 2 consultation by the end of the year, and that remains his intention. He will make an announcement in the autumn.

My hon. Friend has expressed concerns, as has the hon. Lady, that Warrington will lose out from HS2. I understand and share his view that we should continue to develop our understanding of the local economic impacts of HS2. Although we do not have a full estimate of the economic benefits of the section of the high-speed line that is limited to the Warrington area, I can tell him that under our current plans, Warrington will, under phase 1, be served by high-speed trains running on the dedicated HS2 line to Handsacre and then on the classic rail network to Warrington Bank Quay from day one of HS2 starting operations.

[Helen Jones]

The Minister has been very generous, but may I point out to him that Warrington already has one train an hour both to Scotland and to London? Under these proposals, it may not get that many services.

[Mr Goodwill]

Certainly the intention is to have comparable or better services following HS2, but given that we are in the middle of the consultation, things may well start to gel a little more before the end of the year.

When phase 2 opens, it will be possible to travel more quickly—by 30 minutes—between London and Warrington; and from 2036, three years after phase 2 opens, the transport user benefits to the region of trips starting in the north-west will be equivalent to roughly £342 million every year. HS2 Ltd’s analysis of the mainline connection at Golborne suggests that it could provide benefits in the order of £1.2 billion and revenue of about £600 million. Also, HS2 will free up space for additional commuter, regional and freight services on our main north-south lines, including the west coast main line. Passengers and businesses in Warrington will be well placed to take advantage of those benefits.

I know that my hon. Friend is concerned about the impact on local and regional services from Warrington and the potential loss of direct services to London. Under the train service specification that we have published for HS2, there will be one train an hour between London and Warrington. The TSS is not a train service proposal as such, but has merely been adopted for demand-modelling purposes as part of the economic case for HS2.

The train service pattern across the rail network that will operate from the launch of high-speed services in 2026 will be developed iteratively over the next decade and beyond, in consultation with key stakeholders. It is too early to make detailed commitments about how the rail network will operate when HS2 services start, but one of the key aims for future service patterns is that all towns or cities that currently have a direct service to London will retain broadly comparable or better services once HS2 is completed.

Regarding the loss of Taylor business park and the damaging economic impact of HS2, I note what my hon. Friend and the hon. Lady have said about the potential effect on that business park. We are mindful of the impacts that HS2 could have on businesses, and HS2 Ltd will work with local stakeholders to ensure that unwanted impacts are kept to a minimum, including through potential route refinements where required. We have received many representations about the impact of our proposals on the Taylor business park and are considering them carefully alongside other consultation responses.

Our consultation is a genuine attempt to learn more about the proposed route’s likely impacts and benefits, and there is potential for it to change as a result of the consultation. Indeed, this afternoon’s debate is an important part of the dialogue that is taking place between Ministers and HS2 on one side and local representatives and residents on the other. I hope that we can bridge that divide. My goal is to have everyone on the same side if possible.

From the point at which a confirmed route was announced, we began a detailed assessment of its impact and we will seek to mitigate the most adverse impacts, including visual intrusion and noise, through our design work. In doing so, we will keep local community representatives informed of our plans and seek their input on how to achieve the best outcomes for local people. It is worth remembering that in order to obtain the powers needed to build the railway, via a further hybrid Bill, we will need to demonstrate that we have done all that we reasonably could to understand and manage its impacts.

My hon. Friend mentioned Scotland. He is absolutely right. No decisions have been taken yet on whether there will be a high-speed link to Scotland. A bilateral working group with the Scottish Government is working to consider options for improving rail links to Scotland. The results will be announced in due course. I think that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer put his oar in as well, with a suggestion that HS3 might be an east-west link connecting Yorkshire to Lancashire. I can understand why people might want to travel from Lancashire to Yorkshire but possibly not in the opposite direction.

[Mr Goodwill]

My hon. Friend makes a very valid point indeed, and certainly that is one of the points that we are taking into consideration.

In terms of the additional station at Crewe or Warrington Bank Quay, the consultation exercise was designed to bring in a range of ideas, and I welcome the responses that we have received, including those from the hon. Members who have spoken today. I can confirm that we are carefully considering the response from my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South alongside those from other consultees. He will be aware that Sir David Higgins, the chairman of HS2 Ltd, has recommended that to deliver benefits to the north more quickly, we could accelerate the building of the line to Crewe before the rest of phase 2 and build a new station to receive HS2 services from 2027. We can see potential benefits from doing that, but to allow us to consider it fully, the Secretary of State has asked HS2 Ltd to undertake more detailed work, so that we can consider the suggestion very carefully, as part of the response that he will make to the phase 2 consultation later this year.

In conclusion, we and HS2 Ltd are working hard to implement a scheme that will not only bring the widest possible benefits to the country, but help to bring all those who would be affected together. HS2 Ltd has been taking forward an extensive engagement programme in Warrington involving local councillors, action groups and other stakeholders in the area. That includes briefing sessions for elected members at Warrington town hall. I understand that my hon. Friend attended the last of those sessions in June. Was the hon. Lady there as well?

[Helen Jones]

Yes.

[Mr Goodwill]

She was. That engagement will continue as we develop our plans for HS2. The Government are keen to get as many views as possible to ensure that the phase 2 route of HS2 will be the best that it can be. We want, as far as possible, to reduce the impacts on people and the environment, so that not only will the towns and cities in the midlands and the north get the connections that they need to thrive, but HS2 will be taken forward in such a way that it realises the full benefits of the scheme for the country as a whole.