High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill

Debate between Kwasi Kwarteng and Andrew Turner

Wednesday 26th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I am pleased that we have Members with such fertile imaginations in this House that the hon. Gentleman has his own scheme. I have not looked at it, though, so I could not possibly comment.

What is clear to me, as a Member for a south-east constituency that is very built-up and highly residential, is that disputes about infrastructure spending are inevitable. I suggested that when the Tower of London was built, people objected to it on quite worthy grounds. There have been objections to every piece of infrastructure spending in this country for hundreds of years, but that does not mean that we have not gone ahead and built the railways or the ports. We are a commercial nation with incredible skills in engineering. We have, or we used to have, great architecture and engineering—I am not casting aspersions on current architecture, just suggesting that it was very good in the past—so there is no reason to suggest, as some have, that HS2 will be a blight on the countryside. It will change of course, but as has been pointed out, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and other Victorians completely transformed the landscape of this country, but they did not make it worse in any way.

[Mr Andrew Turner]

It was the private sector that did it, not the public sector.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I hear my hon. Friend chuntering from a sedentary position. We have an extremely interesting side of the Conservative party that refuses to countenance any Government spending on infrastructure. Happily, I am not of that wing of the party and recommend that both sides of the House come together in support of the Bill.

My final few words will be about the financing. Yes, £50 billion is a lot of money, but it will be spent over 20 years and, if one uses straight line depreciation, it is not much more than the infrastructure spend on Crossrail. I would suggest that HS2’s benefits are much more transformative than the Crossrail project’s, so on that basis alone, I urge colleagues to vote in favour of Second Reading.