High Speed 2

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on his firm speech. I am speaking because I was responsible, at some time in my career, for the management of all the four main lines which go out of London to the north. They are now at least 85% full. When a system—a railway, water pipes, gas or anything—is at 85% capacity it is full, because just a small incident can spill over and cause havoc with punctuality or supply of service. So the capacity enhancement is urgently needed, but I am sorry that this thing ever got called High Speed 2 because it is not a high speed railway in international terms: they are not talking about going at about 250 mph.

The upgrading of existing routes is a hopeless proposition. I have just read that next year the west coast main line will be shut for 36 days for urgent engineering work at the London end, running through Watford. That will bring back the horrors but this time it will affect more people because more people are now using the railway. The London end of this project needs rethinking because the way it has been drawn up is wrong. I do not believe there is any need, at least in phase one, to demolish houses in the Camden area. I must cast doubt on the quality of leadership of the project because it has not gone for the most sensible option. We do not need to demolish lots of houses for phase one: we can do that quite easily by other means.

I was also responsible for the first stage of the HS1 extension. At the time people talked—in this House, I am sure, although I was not here—about the rape of the garden of England: it would never be the same again. However, a week or two ago I met a Labour MP from one of the constituencies affected. I asked him if he was getting a lot of trouble from HS1. He said, “No, none at all, but if you ask me about gay marriage I will bring you a few bags of letters”. That is the way in which the ill effects of this project have been grossly exaggerated by various opponents. There will be disruption while it is built but, as someone remarked, the wildlife and the birds come back. The railway does not have lots of service stations, garages and posters. It fits into the countryside and I am sure that noble Lords who travel around by train know many places where the significant Victorian railway buildings are not a blot on the landscape but blend beautifully into it.

The new line will free up a lot of existing capacity and the talk about Coventry, Rugby and Milton Keynes not having as good a service is just not true. This month the Desiro company, which has built many of the excellent suburban trains used between London and Birmingham, has been given permission to increase the line speed of these trains to 115 mph. They are more comfortable and will be nearly as fast as the Pendolinos, and I am sure that customers will like them better. I am certain that all the places affected will have a far better service than they have now.

I have a few requests for the Minister. Will she please facilitate the ongoing discussions about the London end? The Secretary of State knows about them and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and I have been to see him. We believe that we can save a lot of money, not the odd million but the odd billion, by these proposals. Look again at the appraisal methodology that these people used. They used the old-fashioned cost-benefit analysis that was invented by the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment in the 1960s and 1970s that compared the value of road schemes to see which was best. The process was never intended to value a project such as this. A recent publication by High Speed 1 has shown that the value of HS1 over 60 years is £17.6 billion. Will the Minister look again at the external benefits? This has been done by HS1, which looked at the effect on the value of property. Recently at Ealing Broadway it found that property prices are increasing sharply in anticipation of Crossrail. None of that value gets into the public purse but there is no doubt that it is of value, and it is time that the department looked at this issue to find a way to ensure that some of that value gets into public hands.

Finally, I ask the Minister to reiterate the commitment to the continuing expenditure on the rest of the network, such as the ongoing improvements at Reading and Birmingham New Street. They are a compliment to what our engineers can do but there is a limit to what can be done within the confines of the existing railway.