High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Lord Framlingham Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Lords & Report stage: House of Lords
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw]

I support what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has said. The scheme as envisaged is extravagant, and this is not a time when we can afford extravagance. There is a good case for having an independent assessment of the costs, particularly to consider such things as how long this railway can terminate at Old Oak Common, which would set aside a considerable sum of money. If a connection has to be made to Euston, how can that be done in the most economical way? I do not believe that that issue has been addressed. We are not talking about small sums of money; we are talking about billions of pounds.

One thing that I was told about the Bill was that people had made assumptions about the time it took to turn round a train from the north that was heading in the direction of London. I have run a lot of London stations. I can assure noble Lords that, with the number of trains that it is proposed to run from Manchester to Old Oak Common, it would be quite easy, given the six platforms there, to turn the trains round. What one has to factor in is the capacity at Old Oak Common. That means that there has to be a sufficient number of people to service the trains. Special attention also needs to be given to the access to and from the platforms.

I rather agree with the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about the Handsacre link, which seems to cost a lot of money. I certainly agree on the issue about speed. There is a complete misapprehension of the value of journey time savings when we talk about savings of two minutes or less, yet that structure holds up the whole of our transport evaluation, whether in road, rail or anything else—the biggest factor to be taken into consideration is the value of the small time savings, which are all added together and form a colossal sum. However, people making a journey do not take into consideration whether they are going to be two minutes quicker, because in lots of modes of transport unpredictability is a much bigger factor than the journey time saving.

I also want to probe—to push very hard—on the time savings. We should be very careful about speeds which go much above 125 miles per hour, possibly up to 150. It costs a lot once you push speeds towards the upper end of the limit. I am happy to join the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, in his call for independent costings, but there is also a need for re-evaluation of the economic basis on which the line is to be built.

[Lord Framlingham (Con)]

My Lords, we have dealt with only two amendments so far, and any member of the public sitting listening to the Committee will be asking themselves: “Why on earth are you going ahead with this project?”. All we have are problems, which seem to me almost insurmountable; we have no answers to them. When we ask about the trek from St Pancras to Euston, the answer is, apparently, offer £3 million to the local authority as a prize if it can come up with the answer. That does not sound to me like much of a solution.

I know that this is not Second Reading, but we must ask ourselves whether there is any sense in going ahead with this whole project. We have not yet dealt with the environmental problems, which will be huge and last for years. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, whose amendment I support, that the whole scheme is not properly costed and nobody knows what will happen in the long run.

The Minister described it as a vital scheme. It is not. The money could be much better spent on all sorts of things: hospitals, schools, or Liverpool-to-Hull transport. If we pursue it, I think we will regret it for a long time. As this matter proceeds, I hope that your Lordships’ House will think it through very carefully and perhaps have second thoughts about proceeding with the whole scheme.

[Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, particularly Amendments 5 and 6, tabled in the name of my noble friend Lord Stevenson who, I understand, cannot be here today but will be here to make some remarks if Committee continues on Thursday. These amendments call for further things which need to be done before work starts on the project, the first being the cost-benefit analysis of the environmental impact of the work and the second being the traffic management requirements.

I apologise to the Committee: I was unable to speak at Second Reading and should therefore declare my interests. I lived in the Chilterns for 36 years, not in an area directly affected. Further along the proposed line, I know personally every one of the villages mentioned in the amendments on the Marshalled List today. Quainton, Twyford, Chetwode, Mixbury and Barton-Hartshorn—I know them all and have known them for 50 years. I do not just know the villages, their names and the roads; I know the farms, fields, the woodlands and some of the people still living there, and I have seen the devastating effect that the Bill is already having on their lives and their communities. The environmental, not to mention the social impact, is enormous. I know that I am not allowed to make a Second Reading speech, although I did not make one before, and I shall strain every sinew not to do so.

The Government tell us that the public have a right to require value for money, and I totally agree. The cost changes each time I see a figure, but £57 billion is the latest one, and no one with the slightest grasp of reality believes that it will stop there. This House, in the detailed report of the Economic Affairs Committee, chaired by my noble friend Lord Hollick, has already drawn attention to the need for a number of the central questions to be answered. Those questions were posed and not adequately answered by the Government’s very flimsy response in July 2005; nor do I believe they have been since, although I know the Minister said at Second Reading that he thought they had been. Where is the answer to a key question in that list, as to whether HS2 is the best way to spend £50 billion—although I up that now to £57 billion—to stimulate the UK economy?

One thing that has not been done is that the environmental impact has not been subject to any cost-benefit analysis. Surely the public, who are going to have to pay for this project in so many ways and relatively few of whom will see any actual benefit, are entitled to a proper cost-benefit analysis before our countryside is destroyed. As for the pressure to carry on with this project without a cost-benefit analysis, I will come to how it was conceived in a moment, but I understand from the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, when he spoke in this House on an earlier debate on this topic, that the Labour Cabinet was searching for a legacy project and someone suggested that China and France had high-speed railways. I do not think the pressure for it comes from the rail users on Southern, from the commuters standing on trains day after day coming into London or even from those whose businesses in the north of England are hampered by the absence of a good trans-Pennine rail link. We are told there is going to be a lack of capacity, but it is not visible to me as I stand on the excellent Chiltern line stations and see an excellent service at present—not overcrowded —from London to Birmingham. What about spending money on capacity which is really urgent right now, as we have all been seeing in the last few weeks and indeed right up to today?

The reality is that, in choosing that legacy, scant consideration was given to the devastating environmental damage which will inevitably result to a very special piece of English countryside. My noble friend Lord Stevenson was going to talk about the Chilterns, and I will just say a few words about it. It is a unique area of beech wood but has also become, in the 36 years I have lived there, the lungs of London. Anyone who goes down to the Chilterns on a weekend will see people pouring out of London to walk and enjoy the peace which reigns over most of it. Beyond that, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire—the area I know well—is not tourist country. It is not even really walkers’ country but it is old England—the England that we ought to preserve and celebrate. If we destroy those things and take them away from the public, at vast expense and for relatively little benefit to very few people, without making a proper cost-benefit analysis of what we are doing, I do not think we will be forgiven. Indeed, not having such a cost-benefit analysis would be pure vandalism, and I hope the Minister will say that the Government will address all the things set out in the five amendments in the group before anybody starts work with the bulldozers and the concrete and does damage that can never be repaired.

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[Lord Framlingham]

I understand that this is not the place to make a Second Reading speech but we are entitled to talk about the value of these amendments in the whole scheme. What is being highlighted is that there are no solutions and that is very important.

[Lord Snape]

Again, with respect to the noble Lord, I do not mind him speaking about the amendments; procedural matters are not for me, anyway. But he said, in effect, that the money being spent—whether that is £50 billion as my noble friend said or whatever—would be better spent on other things. That, I have to say, is a Second Reading speech, and the question, “Why are you spending money on this rather than that?” could be asked in either Chamber in relation to any matter under the sun. As for my noble friend’s contribution, while I had better be careful that I do not make a Second Reading speech myself, I am somewhat sick of hearing about the enormous damage that is being done to an area of natural beauty by a two-track railway line.

[Lord Snape]

I will come to the tunnels in later amendments—my noble friend should not distract me just yet; I will deal with them in a moment or two.

As it was said, the garden of England, Kent, was not destroyed by High Speed 1, although I sat and listened for months on end to petitioners telling me that it would be. I am glad to say that was the last hybrid Bill I served on; I do not want to do another one after that experience. The destruction never happened, and, indeed, the economy of various parts of Kent has been boosted enormously by HS1, as we heard earlier. I do not know where my noble friend was when the M40 was being built. There are of course no tunnels on it, but I presume that it is a great asset to the Chilterns. I would have thought that objections to it, such as they were, would have been somewhat muted by the convenience to the objectors of getting their motor cars back to London from the lovely parts of the Chilterns in which they lived or were visiting.

[Lord Framlingham]

I accept what the noble Lord says about the building of a two-track railway, but surely given the size of this project he will concede that every possible effort should be made to ensure it has a minimum impact on the countryside. Given that huge size—£55 billion—even reasonable amounts of money should be given, without much discussion, to make sure the damage is kept to a minimum.

[Lord Snape]

I am immensely sorry to refute the noble Lord’s assertions but we spent a long time looking into this project and a considerable amount of money has been and is being spent trying to meet some of the objections that he outlined.

Those who, like my noble friend, were against the project denounced it for costing some £50 billion, yet with every speech they want to add to that cost because there is something in their area that they wish to preserve. I pay tribute, as others have, to the Select Committee, and note that my noble friend Lord Adonis has joined us. It spent months listening to various petitioners, many of whom were against the project, but all anxious for more public money to be spent on the bit they objected to. We could go on like this for ever and not build anything at all. Presumably that was the objective behind the speech of the noble Lord opposite. For my noble friend to pray in aid my noble friend Lord Mandelson by describing it as a vanity project—this from the man in charge of the Dome, a vanity project if ever there one—is, in addition to the other Second Reading speeches that have been made, of no great service to the Committee or the project.

I am fascinated by the agreement between my noble friend Lord Berkeley and the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. My noble friend wants to extend the line from Hanslope to Crewe. I am not sure how much that would cost. He also wants to build a four-track railway to replace the short distance of three-track railway from Hanslope Junction—as he will recall, there is another three-track railway going north from Rugby. Although it is neither in the Bill nor his amendments, it should not be too great a project to build that replacement. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, meanwhile, wants to reduce the other end of the line to Old Oak Common. Yet they say they are in agreement with one another—by the sound of it, they both want to redesign the whole project. I am not quite sure how much that would cost, either.

I do not know whether there is any great merit in these amendments. I know that my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, spent a considerable time behind the scenes in the attempt to redesign Euston station and I am sure that we will come to that issue under a future amendment. However, it seems to me that this Committee will not make much progress if those who were against the project in the first place make similar speeches on every set of amendments between now and whenever the Committee adjourns later today or on Thursday.

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[Viscount Astor]

All I can say to the noble Lord is that some of those involved in parish councils felt unable to present in the way that they should have; I quite respect what he said.

[Lord Framlingham]

I am sorry to speak again, but I am beginning to wonder what we are doing. If the Select Committee has done everything that needs doing and the Minister will not accept any of the amendments, I am not sure how this Committee will contribute much to the process.

[Viscount Astor]

I do not know whether my noble friend wants to answer that, but perhaps I may finish responding to the noble Lord. He is quite right that there were a lot of petitions, and I am not in any way criticising the Select Committee or any of the work it did, but the petitions affected the route as proposed. The committee was unable to look any wider into some of the other issues. That was the point I was trying to make. I was not disagreeing with the noble Lord, but I was pointing out that the Select Committee was under certain restrictions. Having said that, unless my noble friend wishes to say anything, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.