High Speed 2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to address the House again after being ill for a long time, but I am sad that we have come to this point. I can say only that I agree with the conclusions of the report before us.

The initial reason for building HS2 has not changed. There is no way that forecast demand for passenger or freight can be met using existing main lines. There has to be more capacity, and talk about incremental enhancements to the west coast main line, the east coast main line and the Midlands main line is nonsense, because the amount of disruption caused would be enormous and last for years.

However, HS2 has been developed as an engineer’s dream project, meeting neither market demands nor cost constraints. It is too fast, as the committee said. I believe that 140 miles per hour would meet market demand, as that is pretty fast. Fast speeds are driven by extravagant emphasis by the department and the Treasury on values of time, which are a very weak way of assessing value. Indeed, the factual economic basis for the whole business is flawed in the extreme. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, may remember a meeting in his office where I begged him to take up the whole question of Wabtec, which is the method used, and the Treasury Green Book. That was shouted down by officials who I believe had a vested interest in what was for them a good little earner in working out values of time, because it employs a lot of people. We have spoken about the station surveys; they are just one example of slovenly methodology. We need to evaluate the benefits to the community at large, such as the regeneration benefits—solid things which will last for a very long time.

The trains using this route should be what is called in railway terms “classic compatible”. That means that, when a train runs to Birmingham and it eventually goes off HS2 towards Scotland, if it has tilting capacity, it can use it on all the twisting curves around the Lake District. There is little point in saving a lot of money from London to Birmingham and then squandering it because you cannot use tilting capacity as you go further north.

The north and the Midlands desperately need improved services, but those are very much dependent on HS2. I have seen some good work done by Midlands Connect, which shows the impact of HS2 on the journey times between places like Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln going into Birmingham, not London, because people mostly do not want to go that far. However, there is huge potential in building up commuting in this very congested area by making use of the services provided by HS2.

I will not go on very long, but this is the most important part of what I have to say, and I would like to meet with the Minister to talk about it. The traffic forecasts prepared by the National Infrastructure Commission for the period 2033 to 2043, on which current projections are based, were prepared before the major paradigm shift to net zero in 2050. Because of this, there is a likelihood that the whole basis of official forecasting has changed. It is most unlikely that by 2050 we will have a satisfactory replacement available for the 44-tonne lorry—one that does not use diesel. It would be sensible to connect the country to an electric freight railway. That does not require very much more electrification, but filling in a few gaps would give us the opportunity of connecting every port, inland terminal and quarry to either a city centre or an inland freight terminal. On the demand generated by this—I will not go on about this for long—it would require six extra trains an hour between Felixstowe and Nuneaton, and four trains an hour on the west coast main line. That is the pressure on capacity for freight, let alone the pressure that may arise and is still arising from passenger flows. The sums urgently need doing again.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, I strongly support the termination at Old Oak Common. I would like to have the job of running Old Oak Common as the terminus, because in fact the speed at which you turn trains back is a function of the number of staff you have and the ease of access to and from the station. You can turn the trains round very fast, as they do in Japan, by having staff at the ready to pounce on the train instead of leisurely taking half an hour or an hour to do so.

So much can be done with this, and I entirely endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said. However, we need HS2—one which is scaled back, uses less energy, and has lower engineering costs and lower speeds.