High Speed 2

Debate between Joan Walley and Lilian Greenwood

Wednesday 25th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) on securing the debate. She has been a doughty opponent of High Speed 2 throughout this Parliament, and while we have found ourselves on opposite sides of that argument, the tone of these debates has been constructive. I hope to continue in that spirit today.

HS2 has been improved through this House’s scrutiny, and I am sure that process will continue after the election. I speak in this debate in support of HS2. The project was first announced under the last Labour Government, and, if anything, the case for HS2 has grown stronger since then. Record passenger growth has continued. Data from the Office of Rail Regulation have recently shown that there were 430 million journeys between October and December last year, an increase of almost 7% compared with the same quarter in 2013. That growth has continued through periods of disruption and even through a recession.

As a consequence, the railways are reaching the limits of their capacity, and nowhere is that more keenly felt than on the west coast main line, the busiest and perhaps the most complex mixed-use line in Europe. Network Rail has warned that its capacity will be exhausted by 2024, and as demand continues to grow, that day of reckoning could come even sooner.

We cannot forget the money that has already been invested in the line, whether for electrification, the ingenuity of tilting trains or the ill-fated and hugely disruptive £9 billion modernisation programme of recent years. Just a few years on, we have already exhausted all the additional capacity that that investment brought us and we are still no nearer to achieving speeds above 125 mph than we were 50 years ago, when British Rail started to plan the advanced passenger train. Once the Norton Bridge area works are completed, the scope for further infrastructure improvements is limited.

The consequences are simple: we cannot continue to force every grade of traffic to compete for scarce paths without impairing passenger services. We have only to look at the 2008 timetable changes, which enabled more fast trains to London at the expense of commuter services in the west midlands, to see that. I have visited places south of Stoke where services were withdrawn during the modernisation programme, and residents have been told that the stations cannot be reopened because paths have been reassigned. Although those capacity constraints are most acute on the west coast main line, they are also felt on other trunk routes, including the midland main line and the east coast main line.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Lilian Greenwood]

I will not give way because I have very limited time; I am sorry.

It is sometimes said that we should just upgrade what we have, and of course we need to invest in the existing network, but the delayed and over-budget Great Western works are showing just how difficult such upgrading can be in practice. Opponents of HS2 are rightly concerned about costs and it is vital that taxpayers get the best value for their investment, so it should be a great concern to us all that the estimated cost of electrifying the Great Western main line has more than trebled, from £540 million in 2011 to more than £1.7 billion today, and the price is still rising. As Lord Adonis has said, it is like performing open heart surgery on a Victorian railway. Let there be no mistake: tracks may have been relayed and signals may have been upgraded since the Victorian railways were put down, but almost all our alignments are inherited from an age of slower traction, and almost 200 years later they have given us compromises.

It may be asked, “What is the alternative to HS2?” The truth is that the alternative, if it can be called that, is to prioritise the needs of one passenger against another. It is to make fast trains compete with commuter and freight services, and to spend even greater sums to extract diminishing returns from our eccentric and increasingly sclerotic network. To my mind, that is no alternative at all. It would lead to a meaner, less socially accessible and more London-centric railway. We urgently need new capacity and HS2 is the right project to provide it.

A number of concerns have been raised, both outside and inside this House. Much has been said about the project’s costs and it is certainly true that there was a loss of focus on costs after the election. That is why Labour successfully amended the High Speed Rail (Preparation) Act 2013 to enforce a much tougher scrutiny regime around the project’s budget. I will add that after the investment in High Speed 1, in Crossrail, in Thameslink and in Reading station, HS2 is a welcome commitment to building world-class infrastructure in the midlands and the north, and not just in London and the south-east.