HS2 Funding Referendum Bill

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

First, let me thank my right hon. Friends the Members for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) and for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall), and my hon. Friends the Members for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), for Welling- borough (Mr Bone) and for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) for their support for this Bill. I am pretty certain that, had he been free so to do at the time, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) would also have been sponsoring the Bill, and I am delighted to see him in his place today. I am also sure that if the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) had been on my radar when I was collecting the signatures, I would have been able to recruit him, too. Again, I am pleased to see him in the Chamber.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

What about me? The hon. Gentleman has mentioned my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), but I have consistently opposed this high-speed rail.

[Mr Chope]

I plead guilty to a serious omission, as I should indeed have mentioned the hon. Gentleman, as Coventry is one of the areas that is probably going to suffer as a result of HS2; not only is it not going to benefit from HS2, but there will be an adverse economic effect on Coventry. We may hear a little more about that later.

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[Mr Chope]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to look at proposals on an integrated basis. That is one of the messages that comes out loud and clear from today’s report by the Transport Committee, “Investing in the railway”, which was published just after midnight. The Committee emphasises the importance of planned investment right across the railways to maximise the benefits of that investment. It is critical of the idea of just putting a certain amount of money into the HS2 project on its own.

When the Government realised that the project could not be justified on the basis that it would reduce demand at Heathrow airport, they started the line that it would reduce long-distance journey times. However, it was clear that the cost-benefit analysis that was carried out overvalued business time on the basis that business men did not spend any of their time on trains working. All the benefits were calculated on the basis of an improvement in speed that would mean that 15 minutes could be knocked off the time it took to get from London to Birmingham. My constituency is about 100 miles from London. This morning I got on the train at Hinton Admiral and arrived here two hours and 10 minutes later. Given the nature of a lot of our rail infrastructure, people expect to spend that sort of time travelling such distances.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

As a result of HS2, the existing frequency of services on the west coast main line could be curtailed, to say the least, while fares would rise. While we might now have three trains an hour, that could go down to one an hour or even fewer, and yet, as the hon. Gentleman knows, fares are far too high—beyond the public’s reach.

The first person I ever heard proposing HS2 was the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, when she was shadow Transport Secretary, although the hon. Gentleman is right that Labour picked up the idea. To return to the point made by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), a lot of the money for HS2 could be spent on increasing nurses’ pay and stopping cuts to local authority budgets, and therefore providing better public services.

[Mr Chope]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. He will be aware that the New Economics Foundation published a report in June 2013 entitled “High Speed 2: The best we can do? Creating more value from £33 billion”. The essence of this debate is that if we are to spend that amount of taxpayers’ money—assuming that that is affordable—are there better ways in which to do so?

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[Mr Grieve]

I agree entirely. One of the difficulties we have is that when we ask questions and seek further information, it seems that we extract it by dribs and drabs. One of the great merits of my hon. Friend’s Bill is that it would have the valuable consequence of crystallizing debate and obliging those who wish to promote the project to come forward with all the detail that we have so much difficulty extracting when we write letters and which the Select Committee considering the hybrid Bill, which I know is doing sterling work, also has great difficulty in obtaining.

Let me give the House one example, which is particularly relevant to my constituency. My constituency will be principally affected by a viaduct that will be built over the River Colne. It cuts through a site of special scientific interest. The Colne valley is a regional park, the landscape of which, it has long been acknowledged, should be protected even when development goes on around it. But the theme that has been put forward consistently by the Government and the proposers of HS2 is that tunnelling under the Colne is entirely out of the question. The two arguments advanced are that the cost would be entirely disproportionate to the environmental gain—it was estimated that it would cost around £1.5 billion more, which I accept is a substantial sum—and furthermore that there would be major engineering problems connected with it, because there has to be an area which is outside the tunnel where the Heathrow spur link joins up at the tunnel mouth going into the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan).

Those are two proper contentions, but the more this debate has gone on, the more I have come to realise that those assertions, which have been made to me repeatedly, do not bear close scrutiny any more. For example, the latest figure that I was able to glean for the differential cost between the viaduct, which apparently is a major piece of engineering of the highest complexity, and tunnelling under the River Colne is only £200 million. In the context of a project costing £50 billion and rising, that starts to make it look almost affordable. When will we get some clarity about that, without having a referendum to get people to come out and demand that proponents of the scheme explain what they are about?

There is ample evidence that the Heathrow spur is not needed. The mood music is clear that the success of the Old Oak Common interchange, which may be hugely advantageous to the borough in which it is located, and the train times into Heathrow airport mean that no one is interested in it any more. And if people are not interested in it, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham said, we could remove planning blight over a substantial part of my constituency in Denham and Iver, where properties cannot be sold because people believe that trains will run either through them or under them.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman raises an important point. I have people in my constituency, such as Mr and Mrs Elliot of Coventry, who have invested their life savings in their property but, because they are outside the formula area, do not qualify for compensation.

[Mr Grieve]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I will come to another point about compensation in a moment.

If the Heathrow spur is not needed, the junction at the entrance to the tunnel into the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham is not needed, which would make the tunnelling even easier. I am a constituency MP, wanting to do right by my constituents and trying to apply myself rationally to the fact that areas sometimes have to be disadvantaged to promote national infrastructure projects that may be in the wider public interest. The House will understand my frustration at being unable to get any clarity on these really key issues, which must be resolved if there is to be informed debate, and my real anxiety that, although we will go through the entire hybrid Bill process—through the Committee, with the evidence taking—when we get to Third Reading all sorts of issues will just have been left hanging in the air.

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[Mr Jim Cunningham]

My right hon. Friend mentioned disruption caused by this proposal. If it went ahead in Coventry, it would seriously affect some of the finer scientific measuring equipment that is used at the university of Warwick

[Frank Dobson]

Yes, indeed.

Apart from those who are paid supporters of the scheme, it has virtually no supporters. When I say “paid supporters”, I am including some of the civil engineering advisers and consultants who are producing reports in favour because they are paid to do so. There is a danger that they are damaging the reputation of British civil engineering consultants.

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[Frank Dobson]

There are mandates and there are mandates, are there not?

One of the problems is that as each argument in favour of this ludicrous proposition fails, the proponents come up with another. The first one was speed. Oh, it was wonderful! People would be able to speed to Birmingham —or speed from Birmingham to London, but that tended not to get mentioned too much. Time would also be saved for business people. The first calculations were based on time saved when using motorways, but people are not supposed to read when they are driving, so there is a considerable gain in getting from A to B as quickly as possible, whereas on a train they can do some work. The calculations were modified, but even then they were wrong.

The next argument was that the proposal was going to add to train capacity. The proponents then had to admit that sorting out two or three particular bottlenecks on the west coast main line, which they intended to do anyway, would add considerably to the line capacity. They have never done a calculation—this would be of interest to those who use the west coast main line—of the incapacity that the massive engineering works at Euston will force on the line. These works will result in a lot of interference to access to and egress from Euston. People’s journeys from the midlands and the north-west will be interfered with one way or another for the best part of 15 years, but that is not part of the capacity argument.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

Although the situation in Coventry is not exactly the same as that in Euston, there will still be major effects on the traffic flow and major disruption in Coventry. That could go on for many years, and blighting is another issue we will have to address somewhere along the line.

[Frank Dobson]

The other problem is that the people behind the proposition live from hand to mouth. They said, “There’ll be a way around this, because we’ll be able to divert quite a lot of the local services that come into Euston to Old Oak Common and therefore relieve the pressure on Euston during the works period.” They have now admitted, however, that they cannot divert the local services to Old Oak Common to bring about that relief, so they are still lumbered with the fact that they will louse up access to Euston station for the next dozen to 15 years.

I am sure my hon. Friend will agree that an alternative option for improving the passenger service from London to Birmingham would be substantially to improve the performance of the Chiltern line and thus relieve a lot of passenger need on the west coast main line. All over the country, minor improvements to the track, signalling and electrification could bring about big improvements for passengers. As a lad originally from just outside York, I am always conscious of the fact that the east coast main line is electrified from King’s Cross to Leeds and from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, but that the link between York and Leeds is not electrified. Consequently, anyone who wants to go to Leeds from Edinburgh, Newcastle or Durham cannot do so on an electrified train; they have to change at York or find one of the trains that are still diesel.