Kieran Mullan
Main Page: Kieran Mullan (Conservative - Bexhill and Battle)Department Debates - View all Kieran Mullan's debates with the Department for Transport
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. When I became a candidate for Crewe and Nantwich in 2018, one of the big decisions for me was whether or not I supported HS2. It was not well-paid lobbyists or Government or business interests that convinced me of my position but knocking on doors and speaking to dozens of local men and women who worked on the local railways and told me how vital this project was. Although I recognise many of the concerns raised by Members, and I hope that HS2 representatives are listening to them, I support the project.
Crewe has a proud and close relationship with this country’s railways. It was a village until the locomotive works and the railway station were founded in the 1830s. It built on that industrial heritage to forge a new future as a home for a wide variety of businesses, but with the railway remaining at its heart. That future is at risk if we cannot deliver locally and improve links via the railway.
Members have raised the issue of reduced capacity as a result of covid. It is important to note that some travel routes are already back up to 70% of pre-pandemic levels. It would be unwise to make major, decades-long decisions about transport in this country on the basis of less than a few years of travel patterns, which I fully expect to return to normal.
I think that the west coast main line will return to being the busiest mixed-use railway line in Europe. For my local residents and businesses, that means no capacity for freight, congested timetables and fewer smaller local journeys, because inter-city journeys take priority. The answer for some is to just upgrade what we have, but I remind everybody that the last time we did that we faced similar cost overruns and delays to those currently being experienced by HS2. I have said before in the House that I do not think that arguments about our ability to deliver big infrastructure are valid. We have to become better at doing infrastructure. As we deliver projects, we have to listen to MPs in order to improve them. We should not say no. If we stand still, we are certainly not going to deliver or improve our local infrastructure.
I understand the concerns. I also want to flag up the context of the money we are spending. It is a lot of money but let us keep in mind that we already plan to spend £6 billion a year maintaining and making much smaller upgrades across the railway network, and £40 billion over the next five years on projects other than HS2. In the context of those figures, it is naive to think that we can build a major new railway line without substantial forms of public investment. Are we really saying that this country is never going to build a big, major new railway line? I do not think that that is wise or that it reflects the ambition in my part of the UK, all of the north and the rest of the country—an ambition that HS2 helps to deliver.