High Speed Rail (West Midlands-Crewe) Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 9th November 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Select Committee and the chair for the report. At least two colleagues who are speaking to this amendment—the noble Lords, Lord Snape and Lord Liddle—were on the Select Committee and I think it did a good job. My only concern is that the House has not had the opportunity to receive the report formally and debate it, but that is something for a different day.

I do not support this amendment, but not for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, might think. Whatever the timings of phase 2a—we can debate those at length—I think the Government are right to think again on 2b, particularly the east side. I hope they will also think again on the last part into Manchester. Several noble Lords have talked about the importance of regional services and I suppose my vision would be to see the north—and the Midlands—get a rail service that is as good as the commuting service around London. I think most noble Lords would agree that there is a big difference between them at the moment. That really affects the customers. You have to remember that most rail customers in those areas are doing short or medium journeys every day—or they were before coronavirus—and a lot of them are doing them by car. If the services were better, more reliable and more frequent, maybe, I think a lot of them would transfer to rail, which is good for the environment.

We have to debate whether it is more important for people in those centres to get to London more quickly or to go elsewhere. I was struck, going around with a short consultation for the Oakervee report, how many of the people we talked to in the regions were actually just as interested in going north—from, say, Leeds to Newcastle—as they were in going to London. As my noble friend Lord Liddle has said, he can get to London very quickly but he could not get to York quickly if the House ever moved there. He is actually arguing, with me, that the importance of regional services needs to be incorporated into the rethink of HS2—if this is what is happening.

The other thing about the present HS2 design is that it is wrong to terminate at buffer stops at Manchester and Leeds. The trend across Europe for many years has been not to have buffers if you can run trains straight through, because that saves a lot of space and perhaps a lot of cost, and gives much more flexibility. Of course, it is better for the passengers, too. Brussels, Lille and Lyon Satolas are examples. I could explain them all, but I do not think I need to. I hope that the Government will therefore take the time to listen to the various interests in the north and the Midlands and come up with a plan that integrates local and regional services with any faster link to London that they plan.

My other reason for wanting to speak today is to do with money. I am not going to start arguing about how much HS2 might or might not cost, but there is a question about how it might be financed. My understanding has always been that government would like to see HS2 financed in the private sector, certainly when the construction has moved forward. Of course, this is what happened with HS1, which, I think, was sold off to the private sector for about £2 billion.

HS1 is now in quite serious financial trouble because its revenue from Eurostar is evaporating, as are the Eurostar services. I am told that there will be only one return journey a day to Brussels and one to Paris from the beginning of December. Okay, the Javelins are still running, thanks to government support for domestic services, but I have to ask what the Government are doing to preserve the Eurostar service and HS1 while the coronavirus is stopping people travelling.

As the Minister will know, I have been asking for a long time how much money the Government are giving to the different modes of transport internationally from the UK to other parts of Europe and the Republic of Ireland. I am always told that that is confidential, but I can help her with that if she does not want to tell me. I can tell her from publicly available information that the Government are spending about £1.4 billion on helping the ferry services and the ports support Brexit, which I have no complaint about. There was the £12 million for the non-existent ferry service, which noble Lords will remember. Ministers seem very keen to spend a lot of money on the airlines. The Secretary of State made a speech on 19 October on sorting out airport slots. I am not sure why we need to sort out the slots, because nobody is flying much these days. The Government are spending £55 million on furlough for aviation employees, deferring loans and taxes, and providing £1.8 billion through Covid corporate financing, which, apparently, is 11% of total national funding under that programme, covering the whole sector.

We have to ask: why are the Government not doing anything to help the cross-channel passenger rail service? Noble Lords may know that, across Europe, the Commission has recommended that every member state reduce infrastructure charges or eliminate them entirely. France has done it for freight, and I hope it will do it for passengers. Eurostar, however, is losing £1 billion in revenue this year. This really cannot go on. What will it do? If it goes bust, presumably, it can sell the trains to the Germans because they work in Germany quite well. If ever anybody wanted to start going by train across the channel, it would probably take five years or so to get new trains. Surely there is a solution. HS1, when it was owned by the state, made about £2 billion for the Treasury. Surely the Treasury could give a little bit of it back.

I raise that issue in the context of this amendment to question gently: what is the point of building a new high-speed line north of London—be it 1, 2a, 2b west or 2b east, in any order we like—if the Government show so little support for high-speed rail as to allow HS1 possibly to go bust? If that happens, who in the private sector will invest in HS2 when they see the shabby way the Government are apparently treating the investors and owners of HS1 and Eurostar? I look forward to the Minister’s response.

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Moved by

[Lord Berkeley]

3: Clause 49, page 20, line 44, at end insert—
“( ) A TWA order which relates to an extension or works referred to in subsection (2) may also provide for any provision of this Act to cease to have effect to the extent that the content of the TWA order replaces it.”Member’s explanatory statement
This is intended to clarify the extent to which a Transport and Works Act Order may be used to alter the proposals under the Bill, and the means by which one may be obtained.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

This is very much a probing amendment so that we can have a debate about the role that Transport and Works Act orders play in and around a hybrid Bill. I will talk about one or two examples but I want to stick to the principle. This has been raised many times during the passage of many previous hybrid Bills, and the problem does not go away. This particular Bill and the transcript of the Select Committee hearings give us some interesting issues to debate.

As I think all noble Lords know, a hybrid Bill is a public Bill which includes private interests. A Select Committee is therefore appointed in each House and follows very similar procedures, except that if anyone—including the Government or a petitioner—wants to propose small changes to the Bill, in the House of Commons, which is usually the first House on these occasions, that is quite often done by an additional provision. However, it cannot be done in the Lords, for very good timetabling reasons. The only other option is for it to be done by way of a Transport and Works Act order process. That is provided for in Clause 49, and my small amendment seeks to clarify the extent to which it could be used. However, to some extent that is not really the question I want to debate and put to the Minister.

Going back to the phase 2 Bill, which is what we are talking about, we have talked before about the Stone railhead. It has been discussed in the House of Commons and in debates here, and when the Minister kindly had a meeting with a number of noble Lords last week it came up then. However, I do not want to discuss that—except to say that some people, the promoters, believe that it will save £98 million and could be completed three years earlier, but that is a question for debate. Something similar has happened on phase 1 regarding Wendover, which has also been rejected by the Government because they will not do a Transport and Works Act order there. It is said that that would save £300 million and save between one and three years, with enormous environmental benefits; I know that because I used to live around there.

I do not want to discuss the pros and cons but I want to explore why the Government have decided that there should be no alterations to hybrid Bills in the second House, even arguing that alternatives that require a Transport and Works Act order, the only option open to petitioners to the second House, should not even be discussed in the Select Committee. I understand why they might not want that, but the extent to which Mr Strachan, the government counsel in the Select Committee, went to long and repeated lengths to tell the committee that it really should not go for a Transport and Works Act order was extraordinary. I could read out several paragraphs but I will save the Committee, except to draw attention to paragraphs 146 and 165 on 16 March. I can find no instance in the transcript of the Government instructing the committee that it should not use the Transport and Works Act, but I would say that it was almost threatened by the government counsel that it really should not do so. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, who chaired the committee so well, said in paragraph 9 of Appendix 2 in the committee’s report that

“certain petitioners have suggested that changes similar to those that might be made by additional provision might instead be effected through an order under the Transport and Works Act 1992; that would involve a process which is separate from the parliamentary process on this Bill, and it is highly unlikely that we could be persuaded that there was any recommendation that we could … make.”

I find that extraordinary, given that the Transport and Works Act option is included in Clause 49, something that Mr Strachan did not draw to the committee’s attention. Since he spent the whole day introducing the project to the committee, which I am sure was necessary, it is surprising that he did not raise it.

Even more surprising is the precedent in phase 1 where the Government are proposing a tunnel in place of a viaduct, I think, at a place called Bromford by a Transport and Works Act order, claiming that the tunnel will increase its length by almost double, remove the need for complex engineering and so on. I believe that the Government are proposing another one at Calvert. My contribution is going to go on for some time, incidentally, so if the Chair wants me to stop then I will. These procedures that the Government are doing are exactly the same as the Wendover one. It seems to me that the decisions are taken out of the hands of the committee in order to be made by the Government and their own promoter, who have very good reasons for resisting change. That limits the ability of petitioners, who on the whole do not have highly paid lawyers, to put their case against what I would call guerrilla warfare by government counsel to close down debate, making the Government both judge and jury. I have been involved in Transport and Works Act processes and hybrid Bill processes and I find that conflict very odd.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, I have had no requests to speak after the Minister, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. This was a probing amendment. I shall never convince my noble friend Lord Adonis that I am not trying to stop HS2; I think we will carry on debating that for many years. My probe—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but I am sure that he can hear that a Division is under way. The Committee will adjourn for five minutes to allow noble Lords to register their vote.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. I had not intended this to be something on which to divide the House; it is a probing amendment. I said that I would never convince my noble friend Lord Adonis that I am not trying to stop this; I am just trying to suggest some ideas of how to ensure that petitioners feel that they have been treated fairly, because there will be many more of these hybrid Bills in the future.

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, for his comments and to the Minister for her explanation of Transport and Works Act orders. We all agree on the process and whether it is fast or slow does not make any difference. For me, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, put his finger on it. The question is whether, if a committee wished to see a change that could not be done by an additional provision and would therefore have to be done by a Transport and Works Act order, the committee would be able to give a direction either to the Government or to the House. I have taken advice on this from some of the experts and we do not have an answer, as the noble and learned Lord said.

As the Minister said, there will be a consultation on the hybrid Bill process generally. These are the kinds of issues that we should be looking at. We all want to see railway improvements, subject to a few criteria here and there; if a railway needs a new bit of line and it needs a hybrid Bill, so be it—that is the process that we use. It will help everyone, however, if it is done in the least confrontational and least expensive way, so that the petitioners can feel that they have had a good hearing and have been treated fairly and can be reasonably happy with the result. I look forward to discussing this further, not as part of this Bill, and I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.

Amendment 3 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Berkeley]

4: After Clause 58, insert the following new Clause—
“Quarterly reports on environmental impact, costs and progress
(1) The Secretary of State must publish quarterly reports on the scheduled works throughout the period in which those works take place.(2) Each such report must contain an assessment of—(a) environmental impact;(b) costs, including costs of land acquisition;(c) progress; and(d) revenue forecasts and Cost Benefit Analyses,compared to the relevant information contained in the Bill documentation.(3) The first such report must be laid before Parliament within the period ending three months after the day the scheduled works commence.(4) Each subsequent report must be laid before Parliament within three months of the publication of the last report under this section.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to require the Government to provide consistent, regular and complete reports to Parliament.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, after I put this amendment down, it was slightly taken over by events in the form of an interesting letter from the Public Accounts Committee to the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport dated 4 November. I was interested in the comments made during the various stages in the Commons on this Bill, when many Members of Parliament were critical of the way HS2 handled issues in their constituencies. This came from all parts of the House. From what I have read and heard, this criticism was much more justified because the situation seemed to be much worse than in the case of the promoters of HS1.

One issue was the lack of information, so I thought that it would be reasonable to ask that HS2 and the Government provide quarterly reports that include overviews of the project, the programming schedule, the community and environmental impact of the whole project and more details of each phase. Since then, or probably at about the same time, Ministers have started to produce six-monthly reports, which are a great step forward. I thank Ministers for that. Whether they should be quarterly or six-monthly can be debated, but certain things are missing from all of them—they are identified strongly in the Public Account Committee’s letter. I will summarise one or two, because I think that they could go into the reports. I hope that Ministers will agree to do this, because we do not want to have to divide the House on something like this.

The PAC talks about the programme uncertainties within HS2. There seems to be evidence of that and it is frustrating that there are so few signs that HS2 and the department are taking PAC concerns about transparency seriously. It asked for information and did not get it. There were questions about phase 2b—my noble friend Lord Adonis mentioned this—and the implications for rail connections in the north as well as decisions on Euston Station.

Then there is the question of value for money. We have talked about that before, but it relates to the post-Covid potential demand for travel. The letter points out that, in giving evidence to the committee, the Permanent Secretary, Bernadette Kelly,

“appeared to assume that travel patterns and growth will return to, or be the same as, those before the pandemic. This assumption should be thoroughly tested and explicitly justified, if it remains the Government’s best estimate.”


There was then something that one does not often see in letters from the PAC: a recommendation, although some people would call it a demand. It suggested that,

“you perform an up to date assessment of the different scenarios that could affect the long-term business case of HS2 as a result of the pandemic … Please write to us within six months”.

I have raised in the House on various occasions the question of future demand for all railways. My impression is that Ministers are not taking it seriously at the moment, or perhaps they do not have an answer. Well, nobody has an answer, but I suggest that at least it should be part of some scenario planning: we are not going to get one answer, but we can probably get a range. It is reasonable to ask for the revenue forecasts and the cost-benefit analyses, whether it is every three months or every six months. I hope that the Minister can say that, as part of the six-monthly reports that they are now providing, they will in future add in some of the things that I suggest are missing. They would fit in nicely with the response that, presumably, Ministers are going to give to the PAC. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I perfectly understand the need for the Committee to have a break and a stiff drink after any of my speeches; it is just a pity that we cannot get the stiff drinks any more. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, on this group. I wish the Government had implemented his report rather than the Oakervee one, but that train has long since left the platform.

I will speak first on Amendment 9, on which I declare my interest as in the register. I am embarrassed to be so high up in the speakers’ list when there are so many experts, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and my noble friend Lord Randall, who are better qualified than I am to talk about ancient woodlands. This is a modest little amendment, calling simply for an annual report on the impact of the work on ancient woodland. I also support Amendment 4 in this group, which is much more demanding than the modest request in Amendment 9.

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[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I think my comments still stand. What the noble Baroness has outlined highlights the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between all environmental NGOs, including the Woodland Trust, and HS2. Building large-scale transport infrastructure is never easy. It is always a very challenging time. People with different interests will want different things and compromises have to be reached. I hope that the noble Baroness will join me, Minister Stephenson and other noble Lords when we go into environmental matters in a bit more depth after Committee stage and before Report. Perhaps I will be able to reassure noble Lords that HS2 is learning lessons and will take them forward into phase 2a.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to wind up the debate on these amendments. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. The debate has ranged widely from those who, frankly, do not trust HS2 further than they can throw it and others who say that it is doing fine on reporting.

It is certainly true that the Government are trying to produce more reports, which many noble Lords think is a good start while others are less trusting—I suppose that in the end it comes back to trust. The environmental effect of a railway could be massively mitigated if the speeds of the trains were reduced so that it could go around ancient woodlands and avoid so many deep cuttings and embankments. That is something which the French learned 30 years ago, and I suspect that it is being learned for phase 2b—certainly for the east side, maybe the west side as well—but my noble friend Lord Adonis will then complain that the trains are not going fast enough. That can be debated.

Some regular reporting is needed to provide the transparency that many noble Lords believe is necessary, me included. It needs to cover each phase, as well as the whole thing, and must cover all the things which are in my amendment and probably a few others as well. Yes, there is an independent construction commissioner, but to some extent that is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, although the commissioner does a really good job.

If we were to sit around the table and the Minister was prepared to do it, I am sure that some amendment or addition to the existing reporting could be achieved. However, the real question is this: is there sufficient trust among noble Lords for it to be done without some independent scrutiny, which I shall discuss when we come to Amendment 6? That is something to reflect on and it all comes back to trust. We have had a really good debate on it. The Minister said that she would be happy to talk between now and Report and we should take her up on it. I am sure that we can reach some compromise on reporting not just what has happened but what will happen in the future, or what is planned to happen, and any issues that may come alongside it.

I again thank all noble Lords who have spoken. We have heard a wide variety of opinions, which is great. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 4 withdrawn.

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[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have listened carefully to the explanation by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, of the problems with compulsory purchase and payments to those affected—mostly by HS1, because so far that is where the experience is available, unless we go back to Crossrail, which I think we will come to later. With his professional knowledge, the noble Earl has told the Committee many things that are of serious concern. If HS2 really wants to succeed then we have to accept, and I am sure we all do, that it has to be seen to be a good neighbour and to demonstrate that, but at the moment there is a serious lack of trust in many areas.

I heard about some of the problems on HS1 probably three or four years ago when it was quite clear that the company was trying to get access to land and purchase it, whether for permanent or temporary works, but basically did not have enough money allocated from the Treasury to do so. All the results that the noble Earl explained then took place. There was one particular and rather unfortunate set of examples where HS2 wanted to drill boreholes to find out what the soil was so that it could design the foundations for bridges, embankments or whatever. Sometimes the landowners were so fed up with not being paid what was due that they refused access. That was then one of the reasons HS2 used to explain why some of the costs had rocketed, because it could not design the foundations until it had done the boreholes. We can believe that or not, but it was an issue, and it stems from HS2 not asking for enough money from the Government, the Treasury or whoever to do the job properly from the start.

I do not know how many cases of failure to pay compensation are still outstanding; maybe the Minister could tell us when she winds up or write to us afterwards. For me, the whole issue demonstrates that the current arrangements are not fair and will cause a lot of problems for people if and when there is another phase. When the land purchase for phase 2a starts taking place, people are going to say, “It wasn’t done right in phase 1 so we’re going to dig our heels in for phase 2.”

One other issue was raised in the House of Commons that I do not believe was answered. Within all the categories of people who think that they are eligible for compensation, what happens to those with boat moorings on a canal that is affected? They may be hard to locate if they go walkabout, but they may not do that. It seems to me that along with tenants, short-term and long-term, and other people, anyone affected should be capable of receiving some kind of compensation on a fair basis.

[Lord Haselhurst (Con) [V]]

The last thing I would want to argue against is a fairness regime for dealing with compensation. I can only base my impressions of this on the time I spent as a member of the Select Committee. From the moment we were appointed to when, because of the obvious delays caused by the disruption of the pandemic, we actually got down to work, the number of petitions that had been raised by dissatisfied persons or groups had diminished because there had been a settlement. During the course of our proceedings, by the time some of those who had an outstanding petition were due to appear they did not do so because their claim had been settled. So at that stage we heard only what proved to be the difficult cases, and one has to assume that many other people, whether they did so with regret or willingly, had withdrawn their petitions because they had reached a satisfactory conclusion. Of course, while one thinks in a most concerned way about the individual or small community, or the person with a small business who would seem to be in a very difficult situation, generally speaking, most of the claimants were people who had themselves been able to take professional advice. They were not exactly innocents battling against hard-headed professionals in the shape of HS2.

Other members of the Select Committee will speak now or on a future occasion before the legislation has passed through your Lordships’ House, but I do not think that we had the impression that there were so many difficult cases where the levels of compensation were not adequate. Clearly there are the statutory schemes, along with many others that statute has added over the years, to which different categories of claimant could turn. Again, we felt that, through further negotiation, an accommodation could be achieved between the understandably very different points of view—the promoter on the one side and the person facing a diminution of their enjoyment of the place where they live or work on the other.

It is obviously difficult to create a scheme that covers every nook and cranny. We saw a wide range of cases in the petitions that reached us. Some were down to individuals with, in some respects, a heartbreaking tale to tell, but it was hard to see how legislation could have been crafted in a way that would have eliminated that sense of grievance without setting compensation rates at a very high level. It is the case that HS2 has been accused of splashing the cash irresponsibly in many other ways, but still, given the levels of reserves accorded to it, it has to be careful about the level of compensation that it pays. It has that responsibility.

The safeguard in many cases has been the fact that one can petition Parliament. If you are not satisfied with what you get appearing before the House of Commons, you have another chance, for the most part, with the House of Lords. I like to think that all those with grievances who brought petitions were helped by the deliberations of the committee and the lubrication that we may have added to the process of further discussion between the two sides in order to come out with a satisfactory solution.

Simply on the evidence that we have, those who had complaints felt that quite considerable progress was achieved between the two sides. I cannot be satisfied that a whole new range of conditions has to be created, as covered by some of these amendments. Yes, we have to ensure that the basic principles on which compensation operates are fair, but I certainly do not have the impression that they are grossly unfair in a large number of cases. I dare say that further discussions will take place on whether there can be a responsible tightening-up to ensure that we are not leaving out protection for people who really are hit badly by the construction of the railway and are not getting a fair outcome. I am sympathetic to the purposes of the amendments, but I wonder whether they are a sledgehammer to crack what might not be a very large nut.