High Speed Rail (West Midlands-Crewe) Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2020 Lords Chamber

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[Lord Adonis]

At end insert “and this House takes note of the further steps required to complete HS2 in line with the commitments given by successive Governments since 2010, including the necessity for early legislation to complete the promised HS2 lines from Crewe to Manchester and from Birmingham to Sheffield and Leeds.”

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I will begin by adding to the list of congratulations which the Minister gave. I congratulate her on her extremely professional handling of the passage of the Bill through this House, my noble friend Lord Rosser, who will be participating remotely later and who has applied his constructive and forensic skills to the Bill, the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, who has done an excellent job on behalf of the Lib Dems, and other noble Lords. I associate myself entirely with the Minister’s remarks about the Department for Transport and HS2 Ltd. I see in his place the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, who will be speaking later. Both he and I had the benefit of phenomenally professional and excellent support from officials in the Department for Transport. Some bits of Government have not been working brilliantly over the last 10 years, but the upgrading of the infrastructure of this country, led by the Department for Transport, is one of the bright and optimistic things going on in the country at the moment.

I know a lot of negative things are said about HS2 Ltd but, if you take stock of the net balance of achievements over the last 10 years, it has played a phenomenal role in taking forward the biggest infrastructure project in Europe over that period. It has not got everything right, but who does in this game? Has it been a successful partner in the delivery of a phenomenally important infrastructure project, which, as the Minister said, is about people and communities being able to get the infrastructure that they need in the 21st century? It definitely has, and we all pay tribute to it.

The issue now, which is why I make no apology for detaining the House for a few minutes, is how we go forward now. When the Bill becomes law, Parliament will have made provision for 172 route miles of HS2—that is, 134 miles from London to the West Midlands and 38 miles from the West Midlands to Crewe. If we are going to deliver the vision that the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, and I and four successive Governments since 2010 have committed to, we will need all 330 route miles of HS2, which means extending the current HS2 provision—the 172 miles that Parliament will have provided for—from Crewe to Manchester and from Birmingham to Sheffield and Leeds, so that we have balanced infrastructure provision to promote the prosperity of the entire country.

The contention that I want to lodge with the House as the Bill is passed—the Minister will not be surprised by what I shall now say, but it needs to be constantly said because we have to win this argument or else huge damage will be done to balanced growth in the UK over the next two generations—is that it is essential that the next 160 route miles, which will take HS2 through to Manchester and Leeds, are handled as a single stage. That was the basis on which both the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, and I sought to take HS2 forward: there would be a first stage, which would be from London to the West Midlands, and then a second. An initial stage 2a was introduced essentially as an addendum to the first stage, but the conception was always that the extensions to Manchester and Leeds would be taken forward together.

The big danger facing HS2 at the moment is that the second phase will be split between the extension to Manchester and the extension to Leeds, which would downgrade—and possibly postpone indefinitely—the extension to Leeds. That is taking two forms at the moment. The first danger is that the Government will not even commit to all of stage 2b. That is a very real danger at the moment. Tomorrow the National Infrastructure Commission report comes out and it may not even make the commitment to take the line through to Leeds. I assure your Lordships that if I were still chairing the National Infrastructure Commission, of which I had the privilege of being the founding chair, there is no way that such a recommendation would come forward because the job of the NIC is to promote the infrastructure required for the future prosperity of the UK, not to make arguments as to why it should not be completed at the behest of the Treasury seeking short-term economies.

On that point, I simply say to the Government and the House that if this big mistake is made, and the commitment is not made now to extend the full HS2 line through to Sheffield and Leeds, it is not that it will not happen; I believe that it will, but there will be a classic English mess-up in the development of infrastructure. What will happen is that in eight or nine years’ time the line to Birmingham will be opened, my noble friend Lord Hunt, who is here today, will have the benefit of being able to go back to Birmingham in half an hour, and everyone will say, “Wow, isn’t this absolutely phenomenal? Let’s get a move on to Manchester faster because we want to get there in one hour.”

Then suddenly people in Sheffield and Leeds will wake up to the fact that it is taking two hours to get to Sheffield and three to get to Leeds and, because we are a democracy, they will demand that the project be taken forward. Instead of doing this whole thing in 15 years, completing the line through to Manchester and Leeds, as we should have done, it will take 40 years and the poor people of the east Midlands, Sheffield and Leeds will get HS2 a generation later than they would otherwise have done, with big damage to their economies and societies in the interim.

As Lloyd George famously said, “When traversing a chasm, it is advisable to do so in one leap.” We know where this will end up. I can predict that, when somebody is reading Hansard in 2060, the line to Leeds and Manchester will have been completed. It will be a lot better for the country, and indispensable to the economic and social future of these communities, if we take these decisions now and do not, as I said at an earlier stage, have the equivalent of the Victorians building the railways up to Manchester but leaving Sheffield and Leeds with a canal.

The second proposition, which the Minister herself advanced earlier, is that splitting the provision for the next 160 miles into a Manchester leg and a Leeds leg will somehow facilitate the building of the railway—a classic case of trying to make a virtue of something when it has been decided not to proceed with it. I do not believe that that is the case. It is important for how it goes forward in future to understand this argument, so I will subdivide it. The argument is that splitting the provisions, with a Bill for phase 2b going up to Manchester and, in due course, a Bill for phase 2c going up to Leeds, makes enactment quicker and simpler. Also implicit in what the Minister said is that it makes construction more manageable and less expensive. Neither argument is valid.

The Minister herself made the argument against the first—that it facilitates the enactment. As she rightly said, this Bill has taken three years to enact, for just 38 miles. It would not have taken longer if the legislative provision had covered the whole way through to Manchester and Leeds. I say this with a serious note of warning to the Government. By my quick calculation, it has taken longer, not just in actual time but in parliamentary time—the sittings of the Select Committees and your Lordships’ post-committee processes—to enact the Bill for 38 miles than it took for the one covering 134 miles from London to Birmingham.

The reason for that is that so many of the objections to big infrastructure projects that this House has to listen to are generic. I say with real feeling to the noble Baroness and her successors: all the generic arguments that have been made will be made again and again, each time a subsequent Bill comes. It is much better to package them all into one Bill, rather than delay the process with two.

On the point about construction being more manageable, it is entirely up to the Government and whatever the delivery agency is to decide how they phase construction, but nothing can be constructed unless Parliament has granted the powers. The right thing to do is to get one piece of legislation on the statute book, dealing with all 160 miles, taking HS2 through to Manchester and Leeds. How the construction is phased can be decided afterwards.

There are big lessons. Over four Governments there has been consensus on taking forward HS2 up to Birmingham and now to Crewe, but I strongly urge the Government not to seek to divide the next phase, delay the introduction of legislation and, even worse, postpone indefinitely the leg to Sheffield and Leeds. Rather, they should seize the moment, seize the future, be true to the vision of HS2, which all Governments in the last 10 years have signed up to, and produce one Bill next year taking HS2 right through to Manchester and Leeds. It can be done. We are a great nation. The Prime Minister tells us all the time that we must be optimistic and forward-looking. I completely share that agenda. Let us get on with it. I beg to move.