North of England: Rapid Mass Transport System

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The absolute priority for this Government is to get it right. Endless amounts of pressure—questions such as “When will it be published?”—is probably not particularly helpful and leads to an awful lot of speculation. As I have said previously, we are taking due consideration of what stakeholders are saying and we are working very hard to come up with a robust, deliverable plan. That is exactly what this Government are going to do.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister is right about the Shanghai maglev, which I have been on. It is very fast and very noisy, but the technology, and therefore the costs, are very tight, because the track has to be kept within plus or minus half a millimetre in both directions, vertical and horizontal. She is absolutely right to reject it and I hope that the Government stick to their promises.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

Now we are all very jealous—I too would love to go on that maglev. The noble Lord makes an important point: it is not just about the cost of infrastructure, but of operation, because it has a very high electricity consumption and can therefore be more costly to operate. I know that the Japanese system will be using superconducting electromagnetics, which should be cheaper but, although maglev has some great applications, it is not applicable everywhere.