HS2 Cancellation and Network North

Debate between Jack Brereton and Michael Fabricant

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Network North and the cancellation of HS2 Phase 2a.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Davies. I am delighted to have secured this debate. The cancellation of High Speed 2 phase 2a is an important topic for consideration, as is the transfer of funding to what has been dubbed Network North. I will start by making my position crystal clear. I welcome the cancellation of HS2 phase 2a because the reality is that it would have caused great pain to Staffordshire, and I welcome the Network North initiative because it promises great gains for Staffordshire. Because Staffordshire is the heart of the country, and is increasingly a national base for north-south and east-west logistic operations, its gains will be gains for the whole United Kingdom economy.

There is of course a big “but”. Network North is greatly encouraging—but it must not merely illustrate projects; it must deliver them in a coherent programme of transport improvements that get the country moving and deliver productivity gains.

[Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate on an issue that is very important for Staffordshire, as he rightly points out. Does he know—perhaps the Minister can clarify this later if he does not—where the money will be allocated in the west midlands region? In Lichfield, we are very keen to extend the cross-city line, which runs through Birmingham and Lichfield to Burton. There will be a station to serve the National Memorial Arboretum. Does he think funding might be available for that?

[Jack Brereton]

My hon. Friend has been a long advocate of restoring the important cross-city line. I very much hope that such local considerations will be taken on board and that funding will be directed locally to make a difference. I am sure the Minister will clarify the position and expand on what my hon. Friend said.

When we can see the wood for the trees, the important point is this: there are localised projects that will help knit together our national transport network for the benefit of a far wider range of people than the elite who want to get in and out of London on business expenses as quickly as possible regardless of the consequences for local communities in Staffordshire, like those in Yarnfield and Swynnerton in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). We have already experienced that in north Staffordshire, even before HS2 phase 2a. I am not just talking about the Beeching axe, which was bad enough and of course did not exclusively affect the Potteries; I am talking about the last Labour Government’s decision to make it quicker to get between Manchester and London via the west coast mainline Potteries arc by annihilating three local stations that had survived the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

[Jack Brereton]

Absolutely. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Stone station was a victim of the west coast upgrade changes, but thanks to his work and that of those who campaigned for its reopening, it has reopened and been extremely successful. I hope we continue to see those types of station reopen.

The west coast upgrade meant that in Stoke-on-Trent, for marginal time gains between Manchester and London, Etruria station—the very place where the fist sod was cut for the North Staffordshire railway in September 1846—was closed by the Labour Government in September 2005. To the south of the city, Wedgwood and Barlaston stations were suspended in 2004 and neither has subsequently reopened or been maintained in a good state of repair. I understand from Network Rail that neither can now be reopened to passenger services without significant investment and potentially being completely rebuilt, which means that there is now no intermediate local station between Stoke-on-Trent and Stone.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Stone illustrated, the same happened with Stone station, but thanks to his efforts and those of the community, it was reopened in December 2008 and now has some services for that town. So much for Labour’s Strategic Rail Authority! That experience has made us determined that HS2 would either have to work for Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, or we would have to drop it entirely. Unfortunately, it had become clearer and clearer that HS2 would not bring benefits to Staffordshire, certainly not the net benefit that we would need to see to justify the horrendous disruption, painful compulsory purchases and the disruption of ancient woodland.

A constituent attended my surgery recently whose business has been and continues to be affected. Unbelievably, he has recently been asked by HS2 Ltd to commission further thousands of pounds of costly reports to prove the value of his business, despite the 2a route no longer even going ahead. He is not alone: many businesses and property owners throughout Staffordshire continue to be hounded by HS2 Ltd and forced to give up their businesses or sell their land, despite phase 2a being cancelled. A line must be drawn under the compulsory purchase order process. I am sure we will hear more about that tomorrow in the Backbench Business debate on HS2 compensation that is being led by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke). Ultimately, however, it is essential that the Government keep to their word and urgently lift the safeguards on the 2a route, and that efforts are made to rapidly extricate HS2 from the lives of people in those communities and elsewhere in Staffordshire.

Every day that goes by costs the public purse considerably in extortionate security costs and wasteful legal processes for sites that are no longer even needed. If further clarity were needed that HS2 would not bring benefits to Staffordshire or indeed nationally, it was striking to hear from Trevor Parkin and Trevor Gould from the Stone Railway Campaign Group at the oral evidence session of the Transport Committee in Birmingham on 30 November last year. Trevor Gould said:

“I was a great advocate of the HS2 project. I fully support the idea in principle and I still think that it is important that high-speed trains are segregated from freight and slower passenger trains, but unfortunately this HS2 is not the way to do it; it does not do what it says on the tin. It does not release capacity north of Birmingham, it does not improve connectivity because of that”.

As we know, the three fast trains an hour currently serving Staffordshire—one via Stafford and two via Stoke-on-Trent—were set to be replaced by one HS2 service calling at both, which would have terminated at Macclesfield. That is a major reduction on what we currently enjoy, so it is not at all clear that there would have been extra capacity or connectivity, which is what HS2 was supposed to address. In fact, according to HS2 Ltd’s updated 2022 strategic outline business case, the only places north of Birmingham that would have received a higher number of services than they do today would have been Runcorn and Liverpool.

In the meantime, there is a pressing list of other projects that need to be delivered to ensure local services and connectivity into the hub stations are maximised. The reason for that is the major constraints at Crewe, particularly Crewe North junction, which were made worse post phase 2. HS2 had no plans to increase the number of platforms or address the constraints at Crewe North junction, which means the only possible way to run HS2 services would have been to take out what already exists, removing local and regional connectivity. I am not even convinced that HS2 intended to run any meaningful service to Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield.

On 10 January, the executive chair of HS2 Ltd, Sir Jon Thompson, appeared before the Transport Committee and I asked him to clarify some striking comments that he had made to the Public Accounts Committee on 16 November. I put it to him that he had said to the PAC that if HS2 phase 2a had indeed been built,

“HS2 trains would never have gone on to the west coast main line”

at Handsacre and that “they would have joined” the west coast main line only “north of Manchester.” To that he replied: “Yes.” Of course, I pressed him on that because it would mean that the proposed services to Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield were never actually going to materialise, even on completion of phase 2a. Sir Jon said that

“if 2a had been constructed, the advice to me, which I have got written down here, is that we would not have used that junction.”

That is Handsacre junction. I await further clarity in writing, but that does, at face value, confirm my worst fears about what HS2 Ltd was actually planning at Handsacre, which is a fait accompli of connections that would not have carried HS2 trains up the Potteries arc—and it would have all been too late by then to do anything about it.

Macclesfield—always a very odd choice of terminus, fine though that market town undoubtedly is—appears to have been a fig leaf to quieten Staffordshire down during the construction phase. Originally, under the hybrid Bill of 2013, it was proposed to create a full connection at Handsacre for HS2 by connecting the new track into the existing fast lines, enabling HS2 services to join on to the west coast main line. Then, in 2019—Trevor Parkin of the Stone Railway Campaign Group made this point very well at the Transport Committee on 30 November—HS2 redrew its intentions at Handsacre in order to join the slow lines of the west coast main line and not the fast lines. The options analysis for that extraordinary move has never been published, and we still do not know why that bizarre decision was taken.

With the cancellation of phase 2, it is clearly essential that we now revert to the original design for the Handsacre junction, to enable a proper connection with the fast lines to maximise capacity and allow services to run beyond. As I said, we await further clarification in writing about the reasons behind the changes, which are unlikely to be to do with cost, as people have attempted to claim. It seems unlikely that HS2 had intended any real, meaningful Stafford-Stoke-Macclesfield services to run at all.

[Michael Fabricant]

I am sorry to intervene on my hon. Friend again, but he mentions Handsacre, which of course is in my Lichfield constituency, and I am fascinated by what he says. I know, for example, that the Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, is banking on the service from Curzon Street in Birmingham providing an HS2 service, albeit not necessarily at high speed, up to Manchester. That would be impossible if the Handsacre link were now not to go ahead. My constituents need clarity on this and I hope that the Minister, in his reply, will be very clear about whether the Handsacre link is going ahead—we all assume that it is.

[Jack Brereton]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. It is essential that the Handsacre link goes ahead, otherwise there is no way to connect those services back on to the west coast main line to provide that service into Manchester, Liverpool, the rest of the north-west and ultimately up to Scotland. It is vital that the Handsacre link is done right and that we see HS2 connect not just on to the slow lines at Handsacre, but on to the fast lines. If we connected it on to the slow lines, that would severely constrain the capacity of the west coast main line in that location, so it is essential that we revert to the original design and that HS2 connects on to the fast lines at Handsacre to maximise the potential of that capacity release.

The issues that we have been raising about Handsacre are things that we have long feared. In January 2020, I wrote—with my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon), for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Aaron Bell) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley)—to the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to make it clear that our support for HS2 was conditional on realising the Handsacre link in full, with services to Stoke-on-Trent and on to Manchester, and not just Macclesfield. Then, of course, the whole world changed for two years because of the covid pandemic.

It became increasingly clear that the costs of HS2 were going to balloon and that the focus on whether to deliver on it at all had changed. Further, given the many failings of the project and the few solutions it offered to the problems of capacity and connectivity, with costs spiralling out of control, it is right that it was paused for a period of reflection and that ultimately phase 2 was dropped.

That decision frees up huge amounts of funding for other pressing projects that are better suited to the post-covid reality of the trend of working from home, and more flexible and online working. Few of us had heard of Zoom or Teams before covid, but their use is now commonplace, including for entire conferences. At the same time, leisure travel by train has been very strong. We need to see a network that meets today’s challenges and consumer demands, and I think Network North can help us to achieve that.

For a start, unlike HS2, Network North recognises that the transport network is not rail alone and nor is it just about getting to and from Euston. Got right, the national transport network improvements focused on the midlands and the north, with enhancements such as junction 15 of the M6, which I hope will be completely upgraded, will facilitate much more seamless travel, faster journeys, more destinations and considerable freight gains, including reduced carbon miles and greater connectivity north-south and east-west that will benefit the midlands and the north. Even projects undertaken outside the midlands and the north will benefit those areas.

I particularly highlight the proposed rail upgrade at Ely junction, which will drive the momentum we need to see towards re-establishing a proper east-west freight route, with options to increase freight from Immingham and Felixstowe to Liverpool via the Potteries. Much of that currently takes a significantly elongated route down to the north London line, across and then up the west coast main line. That could also include reuse of the North Staffordshire line. That would facilitate the reopening of a station at Keele University, which was one of the aims of the restoring your railway bid sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme. Its time will come, and probably sooner if the result of dropping phase 2a is to closely look at east-west links just as much as at north-south. The advantage of that would be a significantly increased capacity on the west coast main line by moving more freight on to other lines and significantly reducing journey lengths for freight. That would deliver major cost and environmental savings. Indeed, there is now an amazing opportunity to look not just at linking up our big cities with even quicker rail links than they already enjoy, but at transport connections within city regions.

That brings me nicely to the major area of my speech today, which is the use of capital release from HS2 phase 2a to fund restoring your railway projects. Restoring your railway is a very good scheme. It has been hugely popular among colleagues across the House and the communities we represent. Its flaw has been that it runs to only £500 million and that it expects some of the poorest areas of the country to stump up 25% of the funding for any projects taken to delivery. That local contribution hurdle has threatened to be insurmountable for a number of schemes, so I am completely delighted that that is no longer necessarily the case. Suddenly, it becomes possible to get 100% funding for the delivery stage of transformational projects, such as the reopening of Meir station in my constituency and the reopening of the Stoke to Leek line, which includes a station at Fenton Manor, which is also in my constituency. That is hugely welcome and we will continue to press the case for that funding in order to achieve the national objectives of levelling up: increased productivity, better connectivity, improved life chances, carbon reductions and much more.

The misery of HS2 was going to be fully funded, so it is only right that its successor projects are fully funded too. As I am always keen to say, I fully support levelling up, but we cannot simply level ourselves up after years of having so much taken away from us by Beeching and the Strategic Rail Authority. Much of our transport planning has been focused on making north Staffordshire an easy place to get to and for outsiders to travel through, but it is harder for local people to travel around. Meir in my constituency, which has the A50 running through it, has some of the worst traffic congestion. Despite 40% or more of households in Meir North being without a car, there are still major traffic issues there. Similar issues are seen in communities such as Blyth Bridge, where local roads often take the brunt of congestion, especially when anything goes wrong on the A50 or the A500. Further consideration needs to be given to addressing reliability problems on the A500 and A50 corridor, and it is positive to see that corridor listed for improvements as part of Network North.

In north Staffordshire, public transport—where it exists—is based mainly on buses that often do not go to where people need them or at a time when people want them. We have secured major investment to improve our local bus services—there is £31 million of planned bus service improvement funding—but the time has come to restore our rail services as well. We should reverse the Beeching axe, so that skills, training and employment opportunities are opened up to communities such as Meir that are deprived on multiple measures.

I am delighted that Meir station is now at the advanced project stage of RYR, and very advanced in that stage. I want shovels in the ground as soon as possible. A station will put Meir within 10 minutes’ direct train journey from the heart of the university quarter in Stoke-on-Trent, whereas the bus journey can take over an hour in traffic. I hope that, following the opening of Meir station, we might also see a doubling of passenger services on the line from Crewe, through Stoke and Derby, to Nottingham, and go from one train an hour to two.

Meir is not alone in needing rail connectivity to Stoke town and the university quarter—connectivity not provided by bus—so I am delighted to see that restoring your railway has taken the Stoke-to-Leek line project forward to the feasibility stage, our strategic outline business case having been accepted. This line was closed to passenger traffic in 1956, except for a few football specials, and to freight in 1989, and has never served some of the biggest post-war estates in Stoke-on-Trent. Even when it ran, in the 1950s, there was no station for inter-war estates such as Abbey Hulton, which has many of the same challenges as Meir. Fenton Manor in my constituency will reopen under the Stoke-to-Leek line proposals. That opens up a major centre for leisure, employment and secondary education—St Peter’s Academy —to more of our city’s residents, while reconnecting residents of Fenton to the rail network.

Sadly, my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands is unable to be with us today, but she very ably chaired the Stoke-to-Leek line project. It would be remiss of me not to plug the benefits of visiting her beautiful constituency, which more of our constituents will be able to do with ease once the Stoke-to-Leek line is rebuilt. It can easily take longer to get from Leek to Stoke-on-Trent station by road—especially by bus—than it takes to get from Stoke-on-Trent to London by train. Again, that makes the point that getting to and from London and big cities such as Manchester slightly faster is not as pressing a priority for people in Staffordshire as getting around and across our county and its sub-regions more easily and quickly.

To make that work, we really need Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Network Rail finally to deliver the funded and promised packages of the transforming cities fund. The city’s MPs have had to watch with horror as delay upon delay has been announced in delivering the package, although we busted a gut to secure the funding, as the city council repeatedly seeks to redefine schemes that should already have been delivered. I am particularly concerned about the promised improvements to Longton station and the environments of public realm around Times Square, with its iconic railway bridge. Covid has too long been an excuse for the delays to these projects. Longton needs a properly accessible station with lifts. The Victorian ticket hall could also be restored. The station needs to look and act like a station, rather than being just a backwater of the town.

The Department has shown great patience, and I am grateful for that. I hope it will consider all the options available to get the transforming cities fund package over the line and delivered in Stoke-on-Trent. I note that paragraph 69 of the Network North document makes an explicit commitment to improving the accessibility of our train stations, with £350 million more having been provided for 100 stations. Funding released from HS2 can easily rescue aspects of TCF from further downgrading and delay. Further improvements are needed at Stoke station to increase its capacity, in terms of both platform and concourse space.

The cancellation of phase 2 means that it is more likely that high-speed services will run through Stoke to Manchester, so it is essential that Stoke station be properly equipped to accommodate those additional services. That is alongside the Stoke-to-Leek services, the upgrade to two trains per hour that we need on the Crewe to Derby line, and the potential for additional freight. A lot of mothballed railway infrastructure in north Staffordshire needs to be brought back into play, including not only the Stoke-to-Leek line, which is still a statutory railway that is owned by Network Rail, but a number of other parts of the network.

On the Crewe-to-Derby line, we also need a redoubling of the track between Crewe and Alsager, which would help to release significant capacity and allow for increased services through that part of the network. I would like to see track re-laid around the back of Stoke station and new platforms to the west of the station, which is currently a car park but was formerly full of freight lines that ran around the back of the station to the goods yard. The goods yard is now a major levelling-up project; it is time for the station and its capacity to be levelled up as well.

Given the tens of billions in funding released from HS2, there will now be many hands in the air for projects across the country, either those already included in the “Network North” document or projects elsewhere. I have already mentioned junction 15, which was part of the road investment strategy 3 pipeline, the A500 and A50 corridor, Meir station, and the Stoke-to-Leek line. There are also existing RNEP—rail network enhancements pipeline—projects that would be useful. I hope that the Minister can say whether the Department intends to reallocate HS2 money to any of those projects, or add in HS2-ready works that we need on parts of the west coast main line to upgrade it to take phase 1 services.

When the RNEP was first introduced in 2018, the Rail Industry Association welcomed it as an open and transparent way of sharing the forward pipeline of potential works. It was updated in October 2019, in what was intended to be the first annual update, but there have been no updates published since, despite repeated requests. It may be another casualty of covid, but the time is right to revisit the RNEP and publish an updated list that takes account of the changed focus following the cancellation of HS2 phase 2 and other, more recent publications. That will help to prioritise schemes that will have the greatest impact on connectivity, levelling up and productivity. I am confident that Meir and the Stoke-to-Leek proposals will be important additions.

A new station to serve Trentham or Barlaston, which I have been campaigning for, would also be welcome. I am actively engaging with Network Rail and the West Midlands Rail Executive on how they could deliver that. It would restore the rail connectivity that was lost with the suspension and demise of Wedgwood and Barlaston in 2004, and to the Beeching axe, which closed Trentham station in the 1960s. I have been on site with Network Rail at the former location of Trentham station, and I look forward to seeing Network Rail’s plans for how restored rail connectivity at either Trentham or Barlaston could best serve communities between Stoke and Stone.

Our transport problems in Stoke-on-Trent and north Staffordshire cannot be solved by buses alone. We have tried that. Cross-city journeys that were once reliably fast on our local train network are now painfully slow on multiple buses that are extremely unreliable because of severe road congestion. It is not that buses have no place—they absolutely do—but they solve different transport problems. They are not always the most viable alternative to the car, or the most effective at cutting road congestion, but that does not stop them being a valued part of the public transport mix.

I welcome the extension of the £2 fare until the end of this year; that will help get people back on buses. Passenger numbers were in steep decline even before covid, and costs were certainly a factor. I hope that the bus service improvement plan for Stoke-on-Trent, which provides all-day bus travel for £3.50, will galvanise that effect. However, if cross-city bus services are to be restored, much rests on delivering a seamless bus-rail transport interchange at Stoke station, which was promised under TCF. Even then, they will not cover the cross-city journeys that could easily be completed with a restored Potteries rail network. Ultimately, we need an Oyster-style system that will allow passengers to travel by both local bus and rail across the Potteries. That might eventually also apply to a tram network—something we are keen to see delivered in north Staffordshire. To work up those proposals to the required level of detail and engineering feasibility, some of the released HS2 moneys might need to be set aside for development funds. That worked in the case of the restoring your railway fund, where the initial hurdle is to prove that a transport problem exists, and that a public transport solution needs to be explored—although I repeat that a 25% local funding requirement is a major barrier to achieving that.

I want to mention briefly the improvements that might be needed on the west coast main line to make the network HS2-ready. In addition to Handsacre reverting to the original design, we must see action to address the issues at Colwich and create a properly grade-separated junction there. Consideration should also be given to what could be done to achieve four tracks at Shugborough. At Shugborough tunnel, there is a section where there are only two tracks. If that were addressed, there could then be four tracks all the way to Crewe. As with Stoke station, we need to look again at how best to optimise Crewe station. I have already mentioned the need to redouble the Crewe-Alsager section of the Crewe-Derby line, and the opportunity to reuse old sidings at Longport to relieve congestion on that line.

We also need to look at the capacity constraints at Crewe that HS2 Ltd failed to address, not least by drawing on Network Rail’s 2016 report, “Crewe Hub: improving capacity and connectivity for our customers”. That report noted that services have to cross over and share tracks at the Crewe North and South junctions, which cannot fit any more crossing train movements. There is an opportunity with the cancellation of phase 2 to focus on Crewe station to help address some of those constraints.

In particular, we should seriously consider delivering the bi-facing island platform on the Manchester independent lines to the west of Crewe station. That was envisaged in the hybrid Bill but subsequently scrapped by HS2 Ltd. I hope the Minister will revisit that, because using those independent lines with a bi-facing island platform will solve a lot of the conflicting movements and congestion issues at Crewe, especially for the Cardiff-Manchester train, and open up possibilities for more frequent local services and new services, and for restoring lines to Crewe. There can also be freight gains, and we need to remember that our transport network is not just for passengers but for goods and logistics.

Finally, I want to mention Northern Powerhouse Rail, which is obviously impacted by the decision on phase 2, given that it was proposed that it would share some of the track. However, I have recently seen alternative proposals for upgrading to a different, shorter route, which could offer a much more viable solution to NPR. I will share those proposals with the Minister, and I hope that he will give them serious consideration, as they could mean delivering NPR sooner, with greater benefits, and at a third of the cost of what is being proposed.

In conclusion, the cancellation of HS2 phase 2a promises to release resources that can make Staffordshire a place of great transport gain, instead of a place of great transport pain, which is what HS2 was likely to make it. For the many people who have had their properties compulsorily purchased, the pain has already been incurred, and that pain needs to be drawn to a final close, and properly compensated and addressed. At the end of the day, HS2 phase 2a just did not add up, or rather its costs kept mounting, but its benefits kept diminishing. We have an opportunity to focus on local benefits that will add up to a more coherent, productive and well-connected transport system across road and rail, for the benefit of more than just those elite travellers moving between our biggest cities. Meir station and the Stoke-Leek line must be among the local schemes that are delivered. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.