High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill
Jack Straw Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
May I offer the right hon. Gentleman, without any caveats, my full support and say to him that most colleagues representing constituencies in the north actively back this scheme, for the very reasons he has spelt out? Does he also accept that those who represent some home counties through which this route is going of course have legitimate constituency concerns but that, for example, the Chiltern railway line has benefited twice over from investment—from the last phase of investment by British Rail and from Evergreen—and that the M40 was far more disruptive to people living in the Chilterns but nobody would now suggest it should be abandoned or greened over?
Mr McLoughlin
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman and I completely agree with him. One of this morning’s papers, I believe it was The Daily Telegraph, said that this Bill will certainly have been scrutinised more than any major infrastructure project we have dealt with, across the whole piece.
Mary Creagh
Absolutely. It is right for Wakefield council to represent the views of local residents. The costs of HS2 are significant, but I believe, as does the hon. Gentleman, that the benefits are great.
As I said earlier, we want a one nation economic recovery to rebalance the growth across sectors, nations and regions. A long-term high-speed rail investment programme presents huge opportunities for the UK’s design, engineering, construction and manufacturing sectors. It offers a secure future for the railway supply chain and will showcase the UK’s expertise in the global high-speed market. The Olympics, Thameslink and Crossrail have transformed travel in London. It is time for the wider UK economy and society to benefit from the transformational opportunities that a major infrastructure project brings. The first phase will bring more than 40,000 jobs: 9,000 jobs in construction, 1,500 permanent jobs in operation and maintenance, and 30,000 jobs at Old Oak Common, Euston and Birmingham.
Mr Straw
I entirely support the case that my hon. Friend is making. Would she like to remind sceptics like the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) that as much money is being spent on a single railway station that serves his constituents, namely Reading, as is being spent on the electrification of services across the north-west?
Mary Creagh
That was an excellent point, well made. My right hon. Friend has triggered my memory. There has been £6 billion for Reading, £6 billion for Thameslink and £18 billion for Crossrail—pretty soon there will be enough for a high-speed rail network. I have read about the debates over the disruption that Crossrail has caused. Tottenham Court Road station was closed for two years, yet the centre of our global capital was prepared to put up with that because it realised the benefits that it would bring through reduced journey times. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) has the freight flyover at Reading station, as well as a couple of new platforms and re-signalling work. He will no doubt enjoy the faster journey times to London. I would like the same for my constituents and the constituents of the hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith).
I wonder when the Government will be able to report on the vocational training elements of phase 1, which were provided for by Labour’s amendment to the paving Bill. We want to see the annual report and to see what is happening. We welcome the new further education college that will train the next generation of young women and men to become rail engineers. Members on both sides of the House have been bidding to host the college. I look forward to hearing where and when it will open.
Sir David Higgins’s report called on the Government to be more ambitious in the development of Euston station. The iconic new developments at King’s Cross and St Pancras show how stations can transform and regenerate their local areas. I hope that that will also happen at Reading. Euston is potentially central London’s biggest regeneration site. Its redevelopment must provide new social housing to tackle the acute housing crisis in Camden, as well as retail and office space. It would be a disaster if it followed the housing developments in the city centre that are sold off-plan to foreign investors, creating ghost towns, rather than going to local people.
I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) and Councillor Sarah Hayward, the leader of Camden council, will continue to battle to get the best deal for their community. It has been inspirational to talk to my right hon. Friend about the life sciences hub that he wants to see around the Francis Crick Institute, which is due to open near Euston in 2015. To have the tech hub at Old Street and a life sciences hub at Euston would be an enormous boost for young people and jobs in his constituency.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)
I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “That” to the end of the Question and add:
“this House, while accepting the need to increase overall railway capacity, declines to give a second reading to the Bill because there has been inadequate opportunity for Members and those affected by the Bill to consider and respond to the report of the Assessor appointed under Standing Order 224A, which was not published until shortly before the Easter recess; because assessments of the relative costs and benefits of works envisaged by the Bill have been repeatedly unconvincing and still fail to demonstrate a sound economic case for the proposed works, particularly in relation to other options; because the Secretary of State has declined to publish the Major Projects Authority report on High Speed 2, with the result that Members have been denied access to highly significant evidence on the viability of the project; because the case for starting further high-speed rail construction in this country with a line from London to the West Midlands rather than in the north of England has not been convincingly made out; because the Bill will cause widespread environmental disruption to many areas of the country including areas of outstanding natural beauty; and because the Bill should be preceded by proper consideration of and a strategy for integrating high-speed rail with other transport modes including the UK’s international airport hubs.”
This cross-party amendment commences by stating that we accept the need to increase overall railway capacity, and I make my remarks against that background. It is good to follow the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), but I am afraid my speech will break the cosy consensus over this project between those on the two Front Benches, which will be no surprise to anybody in this Chamber.
It has been four years since Labour first announced HS2, and I want to thank the vast armies of people from all the conservation groups, including the Chiltern Countryside group and the Chilterns Conservation board, lobby groups such as HS2 Action Alliance, district and parish councils, individuals, and volunteer engineers and county councillors, who have contributed to trying to put this project under scrutiny. In Buckinghamshire I am most grateful for the support of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington), and to Mr Speaker himself. All our constituencies are affected by this project.
I believe that more than 50 Members have applied to speak about this project, and in the short time available I hope to register the risks associated with it and the pain and anguish that it continues to bring to so many people, and to ask the House whether this is really the top priority and the best way to spend £50 billion of taxpayers’ money. I started as a nimby, but over time I have come to look at this project and I do not believe it is the answer to the UK’s transport issues.
Let us consider some of those issues. Originally, the costs totalled about £20 billion, yet they have now doubled to £42.6 billion and we should not forget that that does not include the trains, which are budgeted at £7.5 billion. An apparent leak from the Treasury to the Financial Times estimated that the costs as they stand could run to £73 billion or more. In fact, such high risks are attached to the project, that the contingency is £14 billion. We are now on the fifth business case for phase 1 and the benefit-cost ratio is now 1.4, so for every £1 of taxpayers’ money spent, only £1.40 comes back. If we strip away the flawed assumptions and replace them with a more realistic value of time, the true benefit-cost ratio falls way below £1, and there would actually be a loss to the taxpayer.
Mrs Gillan
I am sorry; I do not have enough time to give way.
Economists claim that the benefits of HS2 are also exaggerated. Some 79% of those benefits arose from the value allocated to time savings by businesses assuming no valuable work was done on trains and a huge increase in business travellers. If that is now not correct or has been overestimated, the benefits fall again considerably. Looking back, HS1 predicted 28 million passengers per annum—the reality is 9 million. Should we really trust the projections by the Department for Transport? The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee have already raised significant concerns about the project and the passenger projections for HS2, but despite that the figures have not been revised.
Mrs Gillan
I am awfully sorry, but if I give way to the right hon. Gentleman I will have to give way to others, and so many people want to speak that I will eat into the time allowed to them. The right hon. Gentleman can make his own speech.
The Secretary of State for Transport claims that HS2 is essential to deal with an impending capacity crisis on the west coast main line. However, the available figures show that intercity trains on the west coast main line coming into Euston are on average just 52% full in peak hours. There is severe commuter overcrowding on many commuter lines into all our major cities, and HS2 will do very little, or in many cases nothing at all, to relieve that. Is the commute into Euston really the priority over other areas?
The big picture is the claim that HS2 will heal the north-south divide. Even today the Institute of Economic Affairs has again questioned the promises of an economic transformation of the north. There is no academic peer-reviewed evidence to show that the presence of a high-speed rail line will lead to increased economic output at the levels suggested in what is now a questionable report from KPMG, commissioned by HS2. The report claims that HS2 would bring benefits of £15 billion per year. However, it assumes that rail connectivity is the only variable driving local economic growth. We know that that is simply not the case; if it were, Ebbsfleet in Kent would be a boom town.
However, London could be the winner. The majority of academic evidence available in other countries shows that where a high-speed rail line connects a dominant city to a less dominant town or city, it is the dominant city that gains. HS2 will suck skills and businesses to London rather than to our regions. If HS2 had a viable business case, it should have been built starting in the north, connecting the northern cities to each other and then eventually to London.
We are getting a project that has markedly changed since it was first proposed. HS2 was going to allow someone to jump on a train in Manchester and travel straight to Brussels, but that has now been ditched. The direct link to Heathrow has of course now been dropped, but in any event why are we not going for maximum connectivity to our airports in the south by finalising our high-speed rail policy after the result of the Howard Davies commission?
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield would also like assurances from the Government on the so-called Heathrow spur, on which he still has many questions. Even the much vaunted connections between the towns and cities are far from perfect. In fact, HS2 connects only four city centres. The proposals for Euston are not settled and Old Oak Common will require an enormous amount of work to connect it to the rest of London’s transport infrastructure. The HS2 station in Birmingham is a 15 minute walk through an underpass to Birmingham New Street, where the rest of the city’s trains come in. If we look to the plans for Sheffield Meadowhall, Toton and Derby, the HS2 stations will be miles outside city centres. The latest business case included £8.3 billion of cuts to existing rail services, affecting many towns and cities, and the KPMG report showed that many local economies away from the line of the route would suffer. The main objective to shorten journey times drastically has now been questioned by calls from the Environmental Audit Committee to decrease average speeds. That means that HS2 may not even achieve its original aims on either speed or connectivity.
Finally, HS2 is not really green. A meagre 1% of HS2 passengers are predicted to transfer from air, and just 4% from cars. The remaining 95% of passengers are predicted to be new journeys or transfers from less polluting modes of transport, and that is before we examine closely the vast amount of power needed to power the railway. If the project goes ahead, it is important that we protect the environment and the people who will be affected. People expect the project to be implemented to the highest standards, ensuring the best environmental protections and giving support to the communities and individuals who are severely affected.
The Chilterns area of outstanding natural beauty is in my constituency, as everybody now knows. It is known as the lungs of London and is the last large expanse of protected unspoilt countryside in the south-east of England. There are more than 50 million visits annually, and many of the villages, hamlets, ancient woodlands and hedgerows remain largely unchanged since Norman times. The Chilterns is designated under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, and the Government have a legal duty to adhere to those protections: anything less would make a mockery of all the Government’s pledges to protect our natural environment.
The Environmental Audit Committee’s report of 7 April was highly critical of the project and said that the Government have “significant work to do” to prove that they are prioritising environmental protection. Some 40% of the route is yet to be examined. If the project does proceed, I now believe that the only way to mitigate properly the damage to the AONB is to fully tunnel the whole area. The demand for longer tunnelling through the AONB was the most frequently raised concern in the responses to the environmental statement, with more than 8,000 people raising it as an issue. The line will already have a devastating impact on the AONB, including destroying 10.2 hectares of irreplaceable ancient woodland, as well as communities such as South Heath and Wendover.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury and I have worked together on considering HS2 and the long tunnelling option. He has said to me that if he is not satisfied with the arrangements for mitigation of the AONB and compensation, particularly where Dunsmore, Wendover Dean and Wendover are concerned, he will join me in the Lobby and vote against the project on Report and Third Reading. As it stands, Buckinghamshire will take all the pain and have no gain. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield has constituents in Denham who remain entirely unpersuaded by the arguments put forward both in respect of the generality of the proposal for HS2 and of the detail. The impact of the Colne valley viaduct travelling through a site of special scientific interest, with no details on how the noise will impact on the local community, is a source of real anxiety. His constituents have argued for further tunnelling under the Colne. It is important to remember that the voices of our Buckinghamshire colleagues in Government are as equally important as the voices of Back Benchers, if not more so. I want allies inside the Government, as well as on the Back Benches, as we scrutinise this project.
On compensation, we have had no fewer than five consultations and still those people whose homes and livelihoods have been devastated by HS2 have had to wait for over four years for the final compensation scheme to be announced. The eventual compensation announcement on 9 April was not popular. I know that the concerns are shared by Mr Speaker. He believes that the fact there is no provision for homeowners whose properties are further than 300 metres from the line but who have seen their property fall in value as a result, is unacceptable and so do I.
Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
I want to compare the relative wealth of the home counties, including Buckinghamshire—with Chesham and Amersham and many other constituencies—with that of the north-west, using figures provided to me by the House of Commons Library. Sixty years ago, the GDP per person in the home counties was just below that of Britain as a whole, and it was identical to that of the north-west. In the four and a half decades to 2001, a large gap opened up. By 2001, the home counties were on average nearly 20% better off than the average for mainland Great Britain, while the north-west had fallen back relatively to more than 10 percentage points below the average, 30 percentage points below the home counties. Similar data apply to the north of England as well.
Part of this widening gap is a consequence of factors that were, to a great extent, beyond the control of any Government—not least the fact that mass manufacturing migrated to the east of the globe. It was also due to factors within our control, however. I am not suggesting that, in the intervening period, the great cities of the north—Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle—have sat and wallowed in self-pity. When my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) was leader of Manchester city council, for example, that city pulled itself up by its bootstraps. A big gap remains, however.
Among many others, there is one significant reason for that gap. Ironically, a clue is to be found in today’s report by the Institute of Economic Affairs that is otherwise noteworthy only for its internal incoherence. In the report, the institute comments on the regeneration of London’s docklands, which it says
“has been subsidised by taxpayers through large sums spent on government transport schemes and other projects”.
It lists some of those projects. They include
“the Jubilee Line Extension, Docklands Light Railway…the south-east leg of Crossrail”,
as well as many road schemes. This is the same engine of growth that has benefited Buckinghamshire and the home counties, and that has led to the widening gap.
I do not blame any Member for speaking up for their constituency. I have no direct constituency interest in this matter. In any configuration, the line will not go through Blackburn, but I believe that it will greatly benefit us. I part company with those who have spoken in defence of their constituencies, however, when they try to elevate their understandable constituency concerns into some overall economic case against the project; that is frankly disingenuous.
The amendment speaks of its acceptance of the need to increase overall railway capacity. Had I been able to make an intervention on the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) in her untimed speech, I would have asked her, given that she accepts that need for increased capacity, how she intended to achieve it in the absence of HS2. I have been in the Chamber since the moment the debate started, and everyone has accepted that the west coast main line is full to capacity—[Interruption.] I hear someone say no. They have obviously not been on that line.
Mr McLoughlin
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that one of the biggest problems of capacity relates to the feed into London? That is our biggest capacity problem. A lot of people have said that we should start in the north, but although that is tempting, the biggest capacity problem is in the south.
Mr Straw
I accept that. I came into the House a long time ago, when the line to Manchester and Liverpool was so slow that there was still a need for sleeper trains. They were very reliable, because they went slowly. I accept that for those travelling from the north-west and from the midlands, the main capacity constraints are those south of Rugby. The amendment proclaims a need for greater capacity, but it fails to provide further and better particulars on how to achieve it.
One reason that the west coast main line upgrade took so long and cost so much was that it had to be added on to the existing infrastructure. That was far more disruptive and costly than the provision of additional lines. I look forward to hearing alternative suggestions, but the only way I have heard of providing additional capacity for passengers and, critically, for freight is through the provision of additional two-track capacity. That would be far less disruptive than the construction of the M40 or any other motorway, and it would produce benefits to constituents in the home counties, as well as to those in the north and north-west, by relieving the present capacity constraints.
I am passionately in favour of the HS2 proposals—all the way: phase 1 and phase 2—but they can go ahead only on an all-party basis. I welcome the decisions of the Cabinet and the shadow Cabinet to back the Bill now and for whoever wins the election to back it, the other side of the election.
Mark Reckless
I agree with the Secretary of State. I would add, however, that further benefits to these northern cities and Birmingham could be accrued if we did more than just fulfil the intention of the direct links through to the continent of Europe. Although I understand why the previously proposed way of doing that has not gained support, I hope that we will still look at the possibility of reinstituting a direct connection between HS1 and HS2, and that when we look at the costs and benefits of that we look not only at the benefits to the north of being able to get through to Europe, but at the benefits for people from Manchester or Birmingham of being able to go directly through to east London, Kent or East Anglia from a connection at Stratford. The work Greengauge 21 did on that shows that the benefits will be huge. Yes, there would be benefits for my constituents and people in east London from being able to go from Stratford or Ebbsfleet through to Old Oak Common and on to the north, but a connection would also significantly add to the benefits for people coming from Birmingham and the north. I hope we will look at that.
I believe that there is scope within this Bill to make such improvements. From listening to some of the opponents, it is as if they assume that the costs are going to spiral out of control and that the benefits are all grossly exaggerated, but when I look through the work and the detail of the estimates and calculations, they strike me as extraordinarily conservative.
We have learned the lessons from the great infrastructure projects of the past. If we consider Crossrail or the Olympics, we see it is possible to deliver projects to time and to budget, and possibly faster or cheaper. Part of the reason for that is the very big estimate for contingency. Some people criticised, and we have heard Opposition Front Benchers saying that perhaps they would not support a project if costs were spiralling, but actually a substantial contingency had been factored in: £14.5 billion of the £42.6 billion is contingency. It is not contingency in order to get to our best estimate of what the cost is going to be; the contingency has been padded to the degree that we are 95% certain that the cost will come in below the number given. It is expected that more than £4 billion of that contingency will not be used, so perhaps some of that could be put towards providing a decent quality link between HS1 and HS2, to everybody’s benefit.
Mark Reckless
Yes, I am reassured. I consider there to be a degree of pessimism bias in this case; £700 million has been taken out for the link and it has just been absorbed into even more contingency. I think that the contingency is much too high and that the project will come in significantly below the estimates, and that is just on the cost side. We must also look at the benefits side. We have heard a lot of talk about working on trains and how things are calculated, but there is something much more important when we are projecting the growth in traffic and looking at the benefits.
Over the past 10 years, long-distance rail travel has grown by 5.2% each year on average, yet we are assuming that in the future it is going to grow by only 2.2% per year. I do not understand why there is suddenly to be this collapse in the growth rate for rail traffic, and it is on that basis that projections are made. Furthermore, we are assuming that once we get to 2036, only three years after the project has been completed, there will be no further growth in traffic at all. If we had some more realistic calculations on both costs and benefits, we would see that this becomes an even more attractive project. I believe that it will be more attractive still if we have a proper link between HS2 and HS1, bringing benefits to all.
High-speed Rail
Jack Straw Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr McLoughlin
The full consultation process for the part of the line that goes through my hon. Friend’s constituency is ongoing, and no final decision has been made. I hope to be able to say something about the compensation relating to phase 1 very shortly.
Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
May I thank the Secretary of State for the report and congratulate Sir David Higgins on it? Does the Secretary of State accept that the data on page 8 of Sir David Higgins’s report, which show that investment per head in London and the south-east has been running at least three times that of any other region, emphasise his point that this is not a zero-sum game between HS2 investment and investment in other services but rather the reverse—that this investment, properly co-ordinated with control period 6, should beget further investment in rail services across the north?
Mr McLoughlin
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman; I think he is right. I will not chastise him about when this huge extra expenditure in London was first committed to—we will leave that to one side. What is important is getting the long-term investment in infrastructure right for all the northern cities. That is vital to all of us who care about those cities, and those connections, and about making sure that they have the right opportunities. As I said in my statement, this kind of project does not happen over one Parliament but runs over several Parliaments. That is why it is so important to have as much cross-party support as possible for such a big scheme. I believe that this will be an evolutionary change in transport. As I said, it will do for future generations what the motorways have done for today’s generation.
Oral Answers to Questions
Jack Straw Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Stephen Hammond
I am well aware of my hon. Friend’s long-standing campaign. She would not expect me to comment on a specific scheme, but stadium developments such as those are exactly the sort of thing that local enterprise partnerships and local authorities will want to look at. I met representatives of the West of England LEP on 22 November, and I am aware of phase 2 of its MetroWest scheme. It has been allocated £44.9 million for improvements in the six-year period to 2021.
Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
May I draw to the Minister’s attention the bizarre situation that has arisen in respect of the Todmorden curve in east Lancashire? After years of campaigning, work on the curve has been completed at a cost of £8 million, and we all welcome that. It will facilitate a service from Blackburn, Accrington and Burnley through Rochdale to Manchester Victoria, which is excellent. The problem is that there are no trains. Will the Minister agree to intervene on this matter, and to meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones)?
Stephen Hammond
The right hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that I have already been lobbied on this matter by a number of other Lancashire MPs. He will of course recognise the huge amount of investment that is going into the railway network. I recognise the issues involved in this case, and I have already intervened. I expect to have good news for him on rolling stock next year, but I would nevertheless be delighted to meet him and other hon. Members.
High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill
Jack Straw Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Mrs Gillan
No, not at all. I am not arguing that, but I have always been of the principle that if it is to be done, it is to be done properly. I am quite clear about my position—I do not want HS2 at all, but I also do not want a Bill to go through the House that does not reflect what I think the project should encompass, and indeed what the Bill itself states it encompasses.
Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
Would the right hon. Lady not accept that, on the current plans for phase 1 and 2, there will be a 45-minute reduction in journey times to Edinburgh?
Mrs Gillan
The right hon. Gentleman makes a good point, but the Government recently produced the new business case, and I believe that there is doubt over the timing used for Edinburgh to London. I have been informed by a commentator that they failed to take into account the new rolling stock and the existing time savings from improvements being made to the line. I stand to be corrected—perhaps the Minister can tell us—but I believe that there has been an error in the calculation.
I would like the Bill to refer to Scotland, because it is important that a definite intent be put in the Bill. It would send a good message to Scotland, at a time when we are trying to keep this United Kingdom together, in the teeth of opposition from the nationalist parties, and I think it should be in the Bill simply for that reason.
Eric Ollerenshaw
I thank my right hon. Friend for bringing us back to reality—[Interruption.] Sorry, he is my hon. Friend, soon to be right hon. Friend.
We must be serious on capacity. I and fellow Lancashire Members have been fighting for some time for a direct train service from London Euston to Blackpool. We had the agreement of Virgin, and a cross-party group was involved, including me, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) and the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden). We thought we were there, but only a month ago, Network Rail said, “We cannot put on two direct trains per day from Euston to Blackpool because the line cannot cope.”
Mr Straw
I confirm what the hon. Gentleman says, although I would much prefer all trains to turn right at Preston to go to Blackburn. The truth is we all have an interest in the prosperity of Lancashire as a whole. I would like the line to start from the north, but all the economic arguments say that it should start from the south. Does he accept that the benefit of the reduction in journey time to Preston is one of the best in the plans for the area? The journey time is improved by 44 minutes—it is cut to an hour and a half—which will have a dramatic impact not only on Preston and central Lancashire, but on the whole county.
Eric Ollerenshaw
Lancaster is not on the line yet—it might be eventually, and I might stand here in future asking for a stop there—but we will reap the benefit, as the right hon. Gentleman says. The spur line that will be built means that high-speed trains will enter the normal west coast main line just above Wigan. We will enjoy the benefits of that service, which will be fantastic for the economy of our area.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), the previous Minister. I congratulate him on his incredible speech and I am grateful for the support he has provided all the way through the process to get the Bill right.
Another issue is the north-south balance. People in some areas of the north ask why we are spending that money. I am grateful for what appears to be an outbreak of political consensus. Some Government Members and some northern Members were worried that the consensus would break down, but from what right hon. and hon. Opposition Members have said today, it looks like the consensus is restored, for which I am grateful.
Mr Straw
I shall speak particularly to amendment 25, which has the support of my Front Bench and, I am pleased to say, of the Government as well. I was a member of the Cabinet in 2009 which first gave formal approval to HS2. That was endorsed in the run-up to the general election by all-party agreement. Although I have taken a close interest in the project ever since, I have seen nothing in the intervening period to persuade me to withdraw my support for it.
The case is clear. First, thanks to a dramatic increase in the usage of the railways in the past 15 years—I am very proud of Labour’s record—we face a situation where, for both freight and passengers, the existing lines cannot cope. As someone who for years has had to endure the west coast main line, I have to say that large sums of money were spent during that period—one of the reasons why there was so little electrification—on patch and mend to that line and on quadrupling the line in the Trent valley, with very little overall benefit. If folk in the House and outside think there is an alternative to HS2, they are right that there is, but it is a worse alternative, with more disruption and greater cost.
The second reason why I strongly support HS2 is that it will help to rebalance our economies. I have listened to some fancy arguments in the House, but among the fanciest are those that I have heard today and from colleagues in the Tea Room—that if we put in this investment, it will somehow suck more economic activity into London. It is worth turning that argument on its head or, as the Treasury likes to say, looking at the counterfactual. If that were the case, it would be overwhelmingly an argument for reducing the capacity of the railways north-south and for slowing up the lines. It is simple nonsense.
Mr Straw
I will in a moment, but I am conscious that others want to get in before the knife.
I come to the issue of the costs. No one is in favour of providing blank cheques for schemes, but I have seen no evidence that a blank cheque is being provided for this scheme. What we are talking about is £42 billion until 2033, which works out at just over £2 billion a year. That is a lot of money but, in the grand scheme of things, including infrastructure investment, it is not huge, particularly when compared with the massive amount of money that has rightly been put in by successive Governments to improve infrastructure in London and the south-east. I would be happy to support that, but it is time that the investment went elsewhere.
Frank Dobson
Does my right hon. Friend feel that some people might be a bit suspicious that a contingency sum of £14 billion closely resembles a blank cheque?
Andrew Bridgen
The right hon. Gentleman is obviously an advocate of HS2, and that can be his view, but will he explain the discrepancy between his view and that of the noble Lord Mandelson, who was also a member of the previous Labour Government?
Mr Straw
I have certainly never wished to speak for my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Mandelson. All I can report as a matter of fact is that my right hon. and noble Friend was in the same Cabinet Room in 2009 when the project was endorsed. If he has had some reverse damascene conversion, it is for him to explain that, not me.
Let me turn to the issue of costs. I was chairman of the Cabinet Committee on the Olympics for its first four years. The first bid was put in at about £2.5 billion and the ultimate cost came out at £9 billion. Let me explain why there is no direct comparison. The bid was not based on the contingency but on a prayer that we would win it. Not a huge amount of effort was put into costing it because, frankly, very few people ever thought we would win. It was only after we had won on 6 July 2005 that the serious work began and led, quite properly, by the Treasury, we considered the contingencies.
I say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) that a contingency of such a size is sensible, because there needs to be an optimism bias. That was what was put into the budget for the Olympics by the man who is now Sir David Higgins, who turned that project around. Contrary to what was said by the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), the Olympics as an infrastructure project came in not only on time, because it had to, but on budget. Those who are worried about a blank cheque—any Chancellor or shadow Chancellor needs to be—should be reassured that Sir David Higgins is now in charge. I have every confidence in him, not only from his time running this operation and the Olympics, but from his time at Network Rail. He got costs down and took a close interest in the detail of the projects.
Frank Dobson
Can my right hon. Friend confirm that Sir David Higgins spent all the contingency sum on the Olympics?
Mr Straw
Not quite, I think. There were reasons for that, however, and for the contingencies. These are very large projects. There were also contingencies for Crossrail, for Thameslink and for the expansion of Euston in 1968 and I do not recall Members who would have benefited directly from those projects raising issues about contingencies at the time.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman and I worked with David Higgins on the improvements to the Blackburn-Manchester rail line, which serves both our constituencies. Given the right hon. Gentleman’s experience with that project, does he regret the fact that a long-term view, which we found we needed, is not being taken by those on his own Front Bench, who seem to be holding a question mark over the future of HS2?
Mr Straw
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that he and I have had direct experience of dealing with Sir David Higgins on a micro-level as well as a macro-level, and very impressive he is too. I do not criticise anybody who either holds or might hold the purse strings for wanting to ensure that we bear down on costs, but those on my Front Bench and the whole of the parliamentary Labour party, as has been made clear, support the project and the Bill. That is why, if a Division is called at 5 o’clock, we will be in the Lobby with the Government in support of the Third Reading of the Bill. Let me make that clear. We started this project and I hope very much that the Labour party is in a position to ensure that we finish it.
Steve McCabe
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it might help those who want to support the project and perhaps make it easier for the softer opponents if the contingency figure was reduced? At a third of the projected total cost, it seems remarkably high, and it might risk inflating the project’s costs.
Mr Straw
I know about optimism bias contingency costs because I faced exactly the same situation when I chaired the Cabinet Committee for the Olympics. My initial reaction was the same as that of my hon. Friend and my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras: “Why on earth are we building in a contingency reserve on this scale?” I got the Treasury officials in and cross-examined them—I bumped into one the other day who remembers it—but in the end I was convinced that what was proposed was prudent, to use an adjective that used to be owned by the Labour party, and still is. Contingency reserves of that size are sensible and realistic. Yes, the cost is £42 billion, but that is over 20 years, so we are looking at a cost of about £2 billion a year, of which the optimism bias contingency reserve is about £700 million. In my judgment, such things are manageable.
Mr Straw
I must make some progress.
Of course I understand the concerns of Members on both sides of the House about their constituencies. Were I in their position, I would probably be voicing similar concerns. However, when the grand motorway schemes were being built across the country, including in the Chilterns—the M40 goes right through them—there was no parliamentary process of this kind at all. There were no private Bills; there were private inquiries and compulsory purchase orders, and on it went. Of course there was an argument about the exact route the M40 would take when it went through the escarpment out of the Chilterns and around Oxfordshire, but I do not recall any Member from Buckinghamshire standing up in the House recently to say that building it was a disaster, that the effect on biodiversity was terrible and that we should return the land to the way it was.
Had there been a parliamentary process for the M40, the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham can bet her life that such would have been the opposition in the Chilterns—I understand exactly why, because we are all concerned about our own back gardens, including me—that it would never have been built. However, that road, at far greater disruption to the area than any railway will ever cause, has brought benefits to her constituency and county. While she continues to pursue her constituency concerns, I hope that she also recognises that there is a national interest in rebalancing our economy and ensuring that people in the north can get to the south more quickly.
Mrs Gillan
My concern is not only about my constituency, but about how we use taxpayers’ money. I am as keen as the right hon. Gentleman to rebalance the economy between the north and the south; I just do not think that HS2 is the way to do it. The M40 has of course brought benefits, but that does not mean that the damage that will be done to the environment by yet another breach of the area of outstanding natural beauty can be brushed aside, although it is quite obvious that he thinks that the suffering of my constituents and their businesses is a price worth paying.
Mr Straw
My last point is this: far from being brushed aside, the environmental concerns are being taken into account in far greater measure than was ever the case with the motorway schemes. I hope that the Bill goes through this afternoon so that we can then see an all-party consensus behind the project and introduce the hybrid Bill, if possible before the general election.
West Coast Main Line
Jack Straw Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
Successive reports this year from the Transport Committee and a National Audit Office report last week have indicated that the Department is running a huge underspend on its capital programme. The NAO report last week talks about addressing
“£1.7 billion unexpected funds for infrastructure”.
I realise that the Secretary of State has been in office for only a few weeks, but can he say to what extent the slimming down of the Department and its preoccupation with the issue of rail franchising has meant that it lacked the capacity to ensure that funds properly allocated to it—for example, for road repairs and desperately needed regional rail infrastructure improvements—are spent, and what he is doing to address that?
Mr McLoughlin
The right hon. Gentleman’s question goes slightly wider than my statement this afternoon, but I point out that I made an announcement just a few weeks ago about a pinch-point plan to relieve certain areas of road congestion, which will cost £170 million. Wherever money is spent, I am determined to ensure that good value is obtained and that we do not waste public money. That is more important to a Minister than making sure he spends the money, come what may.
Rail Investment
Jack Straw Excerpts(12 years, 3 months ago)
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Justine Greening
Absolutely it does. It is this Government who have brought forward the investment plans for the northern hub and been prepared to finance them and it is this Government who have gone on with High Speed 2, which is critical in the longer term for improving connectivity across the whole country. It will particularly benefit the great northern cities, one of which the hon. Gentleman represents.
Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
I assume from the welcome reference in the Secretary of State’s statement to high-value, small-scale schemes that she accepts that, to avoid a two-tier railway, lines such as the Blackburn to Bolton line are in urgent need of doubling and improvement. What progress is likely to be made on that?
Justine Greening
The good news is that our investment in the northern hub opens up more capacity on that stretch of the line. Of course, the decision about how the capacity is then used is a local and regional decision. For the first time, the opportunity will open up and I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will want to make his case to his local passenger transport executive.
Rail Services (Clitheroe, Blackburn and Manchester)
Jack Straw Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
Thank you very much for that, Mr Speaker, and for the opportunity you have given me to raise this important local issue of rail services between Clitheroe, Blackburn and Manchester in my first Adjournment debate at least in this century and going back a good part of the previous one.
With the Transport Secretary’s key announcement earlier this afternoon of the Government’s commitment to press ahead with the High Speed 2 line, today will go down as a day of great significance in the development of public transport in the United Kingdom. Of course I welcome that announcement, as I welcomed the earlier announcements to extend electrification to the Manchester-Liverpool and Manchester-Preston rail corridors. HS2 will not, however, be completed until at least 2026, and the north-west electrification schemes will not be completed until at least 2016. So this evening I want to make the case for the pressing and much more immediate improvements needed in the north-south rail services from Clitheroe, which run through Blackburn and Darwen, and into Manchester. I also want to seek the advice and guidance of the Minister on how we can break out of an apparent Catch-22 that is in the way of those improvements, whose benefits for existing and future rail passengers, and for the wider economy of east Lancashire and the north-west, will, we believe, be significant.
The campaign for improvement in the services is supported by all the Members of Parliament for the area, all the political parties and all the local authorities affected. My constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry), is in his place and will speak immediately after me, and the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) would be vocal in his support for this cause but for the fact that, as a Deputy Speaker, he can take no part in debates.
Let me set the scene. Rail services in our area run east-west and north-south, with the main interchange being at Blackburn. When I became its Member of Parliament in 1979, these services in east Lancashire were, like those elsewhere, in the shadow of Dr Beeching’s axe, and they were in a process of what appeared to be terminal decline. Some lines had been closed altogether or had had their passenger services ended. On other lines, double tracking had been replaced by single tracks, and service frequencies had been greatly reduced—that is the fundamental problem on the line under consideration.
In the 33 years since I became an MP, there have been some significant improvements in rail services. In the early 1980s, the Copy Pit line to west Yorkshire was reopened for passenger services. There is now an hourly fast service across the Pennines that, combined with a local stopping service to Colne, gives a half hourly east-west service throughout the day. In 1994, following a great campaign by rail groups in the Ribble Valley, with the support of the MP for that constituency and the county council and district councils, passenger services and stations from Clitheroe to Blackburn were reinstated. The new service has proved immensely popular.
Significant sums have been spent on station improvements. In 2000, Railtrack replaced the old and decaying train shed at Blackburn station with well-designed new station facilities, which were part of a £5 million regeneration project. That set of improvements has been augmented in the past few months by new buildings on platform 4 at Blackburn station, which were made necessary by the increased demand for rail services on both the east-west and north-south lines. Much needed improvements at Darwen station will be completed in April and regional growth fund moneys for the Todmorden curve, enabling direct services from Burnley to Manchester, have just been agreed.
Office of Rail Regulation data show that there has been a 90% increase in rail travel within the north-west in the 12 years from 1995-96 to 2007-08, exceeding by 20 percentage points the overall growth in all rail passenger journeys in Great Britain over the same period. The data also show that east Lancashire has been part of that extraordinary growth in local rail services in the north-west. There has been a 27% increase to 1.2 million a year in the number of passengers going through Blackburn station in the five years from 2004-05 to 2009-10 and an astonishing 46% increase in the number of passengers going through Darwen railway station, which is now 250,000 a year.
Overall, the north-south Clitheroe to Manchester line is forecast to be used by 1.7 million passengers this financial year, the highest patronage ever enjoyed by the route. The service developments that are already taking place at Manchester Victoria will put more stress on the service as connections become even easier to a larger range of destinations, including Manchester airport.
The irony is that alongside that catalogue of significant improvements, the one service that cannot be significantly improved at the moment is the line under consideration. The reason is very simple: the track between Blackburn and Bolton was singled in the 1960s. The result is that the maximum level of service that is possible to run on that line is that run today—basically, an hourly service with a half hourly service in the morning and evening peaks. Even maintaining that pattern of service is difficult as, because of the long sections of single track, delays become amplified, sometimes throughout the day. Overcrowding on the services can be intense, as all of us who use it can bear witness, and the quality of the rolling stock is poor on the whole—it is made up of the old Pacers and Sprinters of the 1970s and 1980s—despite the best efforts of Northern Rail, the train operating company. Essentially, other areas’ cast-offs are “cascaded” —I think that is the polite term—as new stock is brought in not in east Lancashire but elsewhere.
The solution to that systemically unsatisfactory situation is obvious: to double track some, although not all, of the line between Blackburn and Bolton, to lengthen trains and to improve the quality of the rolling stock. A great deal of technical work has been undertaken already on the key issue of doubling the track. The north-west rail utilisation strategy for 2007 put the “anticipated cost” of the necessary infrastructure improvement at “over £20 million”.
The consultants commissioned by the local authorities, Faber Maunsell, concluded in their 2007 report that a
“positive business case is achievable for some of the options”
under consideration. That said, the scheme has not so far scored highly enough on the standard cost-benefit analysis tools to feature in Network Rail’s confirmed investment programmes. The frustration that we all feel—the Catch 22—is that we know as a fact that there has been a huge increase in ridership even given the less than satisfactory frequency, reliability and comfort of the current service and we are convinced that pretty modest improvements in the scale of things would enable there to be dramatic improvements in reliability, frequency and ridership, with major benefits to the local economy. We see proposals elsewhere in the region and in the country whose intrinsic benefits appear to be no greater being more successful in the competition for funds, yet the formulae used do not appear satisfactorily to capture the economic and social benefits that we are sure will accrue from this investment. So, we look forward with optimism and anticipation to the advice from the Minister on how we can break away from the circular trap we are in and progress this scheme.