High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

When the previous Government launched this project four years ago, the noble Lord Adonis said that Britain required transport networks that are high-capacity, efficient and sustainable. That statement remains true today. In the light of continued growth in passenger demand, a lack of resilience against severe weather, and a need for regionally balanced economic growth, the case for those networks is arguably more urgent than ever before.

Many Members have made the case for investment today, and not just for high-speed rail, which is precisely why Network Rail has been allocated more than £37 billion to spend on our existing railways over the next five years, including in the south-west.

The doubling of passenger numbers over the past 20 years has placed enormous demands on our existing infrastructure. The railways are carrying the same number of passengers as they did in the 1920s on a network half the size, and some sections are now reaching the limits of their capacity. As the hon. Members for Redditch (Karen Lumley), for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) and for Northampton South (Mr Binley) have said, nowhere is that more acutely felt than on the west coast main line between Birmingham and London. A vital passenger and freight route, it is the busiest and arguably the most complex rail line in Europe. It is notorious for its heavy gradients and large numbers of challenging bends and curves, many of which are now boxed in by housing developments. They have become a permanent legacy of the line’s original piecemeal construction and they continue to inhibit attempts to bring the west coast main line up to 21st-century standards.

Over the past 50 years, enormous investment has gone into electrification, the ingenuity of tilting trains and, most recently, a 10-year route modernisation programme, which cost the taxpayer at least £9 billion. Just a few years after its completion, we have exhausted nearly all the extra capacity that that £9 billion bought us. Network Rail has warned that by 2024 the line will effectively be full. The lack of capacity is not an abstract problem or a far-off dilemma for future generations to resolve; its effects are already being felt, because as demand for inter-city services increases, providing extra trains inevitably has an impact on commuter services. As hon. Members in the region know, the constraints are so severe that passengers in the west midlands are already at what Peter Parker, the late chairman of British Rail, once called the “crumbling edge of quality”.

If we look back at the timetable changes that took place in December 2008, we see that more services were put into London, but they were at the expense of local services. Journey times were slowed down and services withdrawn. To see this trend’s logical extreme, we need only travel 30 miles north of Birmingham, to the rural stations in Staffordshire that were closed during the west coast modernisation project, and now cannot be reopened, because the paths have been reassigned. The message is clear: we need more capacity. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) said, HS2 is the plan to provide it.

Across the network, freight, commuter, and fast inter-city services all compete for a diminishing number of paths. Those limitations cause innumerable conflicts and compromises in timetables. I cannot agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) and the right hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr O'Brien) who said that we should just enhance the existing line. A full upgrade would be enormously costly, and it would cause an unacceptable amount of disruption, leading to misery for passengers and enormous compensation payments to train operators. At the end of it, such a project would deliver less than half the capacity of a new line. That is why, when the previous Labour Government launched HS2, the need for more capacity was at the heart of their case. For a long time after the election, that message was lost. As the former Minister with responsibility for rail, the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), later admitted, the Government should have concentrated more on the critical issue of capacity.

It was not just the Government’s arguments that showed alarming signs of drift. It took three years to produce this Bill, meaning that there is now no prospect of its receiving Royal Assent before the election. The initial consultation on compensation was found to be

“so unfair as to be unlawful,”

causing prolonged uncertainty for homeowners, tenants and businesses along the route. Not enough emphasis was placed on the regenerative potential of HS2, or the benefits it could bring to the existing rail network. More work needs to be done in this area, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), the Chair of the Transport Committee, set out. Some environmental information is incomplete and the words mitigation and compensation are used interchangeably by the Government when they mean very different things. There has been real confusion about plans for Euston station. Three times now, HS2 Ltd has made radically different proposals and local residents and businesses deserve better.

Perhaps most serious of all, costs seem to be spiralling out of control and that is why Labour forced the Government to introduce much tougher reporting of the spending through an amendment to the preparation Act, tabled by me and my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh). We also amended the Bill to require better integration with existing transport networks and specific reporting of the jobs and skills generated in connection with the project. I am proud that even in opposition Labour has improved this project and ensured better value for taxpayers’ money.

With the appointment of Sir David Higgins, the Government are finally taking the delivery of the project seriously and Labour will continue to be a critical friend to HS2. We will subject the Bill to close line-by-line scrutiny and will keep up the pressure on the Government to bring down the cost of the project. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield argued in her opening speech, the Higgins report concluded that substantial savings can be achieved if there is better leadership of the project and also sensibly recommended removing the proposed link with the north London line, which was always an inadequate compromise and satisfied no one.

We welcome the recommendation that there should be a new focus on the benefits that phase 2 of the project can bring through new connections between the great cities of the midlands and the north. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) noted, we have been operating without one central connection since much of the Great Central Railway disappeared. In my own city, part of it is under a tram line and part of it is under a shopping centre.

I know from experience just how poor the links are between Birmingham, the east midlands, the north-west and Leeds. As Members including my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), the hon. Members for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) and for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker), my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) and the hon. Members for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry), for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) and for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) all recognised, improving those connections will help to deliver sustainable, balanced growth and send the message that we are prepared to invest in 21st-century infrastructure for the midlands and the north, not just for London and the south-east.

It is worth emphasising that the Government have yet to respond to the consultation on the proposed route for phase 2. I know that some hon. Members have concerns about the impact of those proposals on their constituencies, including my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent South and for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) and the hon. Members for Warrington South (David Mowat) and for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), but voting for the Bill today in no way sets in stone the route for phase 2. It is vital that submissions to that route consultation are considered on their merits and we look forward to the Government’s response.

[Andrew Bridgen]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. She quotes the noble Lord Adonis, but she does not quote the noble Lord Mandelson, who said that HS2 was merely a ploy for the last election drawn up on the back of an envelope, or the noble Lord Prescott, who calls HS2 the “great northern con”.

[Lilian Greenwood]

We will see who changes their mind, but I think that the case for our needing this railway has been clearly made.

When petitioners appear before the Committee to make their case for changes in mitigation, they need to know that they will receive a fair and impartial hearing. Unlike the Mayor of London, we do not dismiss genuine concerns about the environmental impact. The Bill has some way to go and I hope that the new Committee will hear evidence in the areas most affected by the construction, including Euston and the constituencies of my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson), the hon. Members for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) and for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles), the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) and the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray).

Last month, I visited Birmingham to see the plans that the city council and Centro, the transport authority, put in place for HS2. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) described some of them. Anyone would be struck by the ambition of those plans, the number of jobs that will be created and the regeneration that will be achieved. Similar benefits should and can be achieved for both Euston and Old Oak Common.

The west midlands and the nation as a whole need this project to meet rail capacity challenges, but it can also deliver huge economic benefits and address the transport inequalities that continue to hold our regions back. HS2 represents a great opportunity for the whole country and I hope that hon. Members will support the principle of the Bill by giving it a Second Reading.