High Speed 2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Framlingham Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Framlingham (Con)]

My Lords, it is great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Forsyth for organising this debate, which has been wide ranging, as always. Lots of experts have spoken on the topic.

On 31 January 2017, in this House, I tabled an amendment to the HS2 Bill that would have killed the project off at a stroke; it would have stopped it in its tracks and saved us all, and the country, an awful lot of time and money, not to mention the anguish suffered by householders and landowners affected by the scheme. I do not intend to rehearse the totally convincing arguments that I deployed at that time. No one was listening then; now they are.

The scheme is a farce, dreamed up in a fit of madness, pushed forward by vanity and vested interests, and allowed to progress by a total lack of objectivity or critical assessment. Sound, experienced, professional railway advice has been constantly offered and totally rejected. On 31 January 2017, 26 Members of your Lordships’ House voted with me: they have all been totally vindicated. Two of them were former Permanent Secretaries to the Treasury—the noble Lord, Lord Burns, saw HS2 at first hand under Gordon Brown, and the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, studied it under David Cameron and George Osborne. They of all people knew the precise position, but no one was listening.

My objective today is not to say, “I told you so”—although it rather sounds as if I am and tempting though that may be. I want to take what may well be a final opportunity to beg and plead with the Minister, the Government and the Prime Minister to stop this madness. The point that I want to make above all other—above the madness, stupidity and total lack of any kind of democratic accountability—is this: this lack of accountability, secrecy and duplicity have led to the creation of an infrastructural Frankenstein’s monster. It has taken on a life of its own. It cannot possibly succeed because there is nothing for it to succeed with—neither speed nor capacity; nothing. They have all been seriously questioned. Nothing lies ahead but mounting debt, appalling headlines of incompetency and a damaged landscape. Unless it is stopped now, it will become an ever-increasing millstone around the Prime Minister’s neck. There will be no relief from the despair that it will create on a daily basis for as long as he is in office.

To abandon the scheme may seem at this moment a monumental decision, but if it is not taken, it will become a monument to our inability to take the most difficult decisions, however obvious they may be, and will lead to prolonged financial misery. Obviously, some people will be disappointed, particularly those with vested interests, some of them well-intentioned; but most people, particularly those who fully understand the ramifications of the project, will be happy and mightily relieved.

The Prime Minister has been told that HS2 is shovel-ready. That is simply not true and I would be grateful if, in her reply, the Minister would commit to telling him the truth: that it has not yet been decided whether to stop HS2 at Old Oak Common or continue to Euston. That is a major decision. Also, the plans for Euston are currently being taken to judicial review. I gather that problems around the Delta area in Birmingham are still to be resolved, and the question of the speed of the trains is under review, so it is hardly shovel-ready. The Prime Minister should be told the truth.

The most difficult thing that I have found is getting the truth to the people at the top who take the decisions. I had to get into Downing Street and knock on the door of No. 10 to get the information to the last Prime Minister. I have given my dossier on this to every Cabinet Minister by hand, with instructions not to give it to their civil servants, so that we can get some truth on the matter.

If you want to travel ridiculously fast in a very small country, you have to go in a straight line and you cannot stop very often. Thus, HS2 will result in the sidelining of stations and a much-reduced service to places including Coventry, Sandwell, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Macclesfield, Stockport, Wilmslow, Doncaster, Wakefield, Leicester, Nottingham and Peterborough, and of course many cross-country services will be affected as well.

What must be remembered when a very difficult but entirely correct decision is taken is that it is only afterwards that the benefits become apparent. In this case, on scrapping HS2 two huge bonuses will immediately appear: money will be available for sensible railway projects and the English landscape will be granted a massive reprieve.

Last year, the TaxPayers’ Alliance ran a competition to find worthy, viable railway schemes. I was privileged to be involved. It brought forth a huge number of excellent schemes that would bring massive benefits country-wide for a fraction of the cost of HS2. Of course, we are all aware—it has been spelled out again today—of the need for modern rail links from Liverpool to Hull, across the Pennines and in other regions,

What a tragedy HS2 has been for our landscape, our trees and our irreplaceable ancient woodlands. One hundred and eight ancient woodlands are under threat; what a cheer will go up and what a boost to the Government’s green credentials it will be if they are reprieved.

The choice is simple: fudge the decision and let Frankenstein’s monster fester on with financial, human and environmental consequences that will be dire; or face the facts and the truth, and be honest with ourselves, and scrap the scheme and start at once to spend the money on sensible, practical schemes in the north, the Midlands and the regions. That would not only more rapidly improve the currently appalling travel conditions but would give a great boost to both jobs and businesses.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, as a former member of the Economic Affairs Committee, I continue to appreciate its work. It has been a forensic and challenging commentator on HS2 in recent years. This report, like its predecessor, shines a pretty sharp light on the many questions that continue to dog the HS2 project. To emphasise the point that the chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, made, it does not call for the abolition of the project; it calls for a reassessment of certain aspects of it. That is an important distinction that may have got lost in some of the debate recently.

From my point of view, we are where we are. HS2 has started: the first phase is under way and 9,000 jobs are supported by the project. Early works are under way at the London terminals and elsewhere on the HS2 line to Birmingham. Billions have been spent and more are committed, so to scrap it now, as many are arguing, would represent a failure of epic proportions. This is not a white-elephant project, as some have suggested; it is not Concorde, or something relevant to only a tiny proportion of the population. This is a great north-south railway that could last 100 years or more, just as the Victorian railway network has done, and be a great national asset. To look just at what the project is costing now without looking at its lifespan seems very foolish.

It is not an alternative to investment in northern and Midland rail links. We have heard some interesting remarks about their limitations. As a Mancunian, I am only too well aware of the bottleneck at the Oxford Road/Piccadilly station. But, as the four metropolitan mayors said in the Sunday Times last week:

“Modern railways such as HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail are the single biggest means to transform jobs and opportunities for people in the Midlands and the north.”


The danger is that the reviews and debates will go on and on, and that the political will is going to fade, which in time will lead to the cancellation of the project. That is a real danger as we undertake this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, is right in one respect: he senses that the political wind may be blowing his way at present.

Can we do major infrastructure projects in this country or can we not? HS2 is a test of whether we can—and, like the committee, I am very concerned about spiralling costs. I can well understand that this is eating into public support for the project.

[Lord Framlingham]

I want to dispel the idea that I am in any way against large infrastructure projects. I am just against nonsenses.

[Lord Monks]

That is where we disagree. We are all against nonsenses, by the way—on that we agree—but a railway open to all, going from the north of England to the south, seems to me anything but nonsense. It is a great national asset and I would have thought that the noble Lord would recognise that.

When we look at costs, I know that France is a larger and less populous country than us, with less opposition. But the advocates of HS2 have a real question to answer: why can France do these things so much more cheaply than we can? One thing I wonder about is the labour market that surrounds these projects. It is populated by armies of consultants and self-employed workers. The main contractors have very few directly employed people working for them for years, in a loyal and determined way. It seems that when we undertake these kinds of projects, it is well worth looking at the labour force and how it is organised.

I want to emphasise, however, that people in the northern sections should not be treated as second-class citizens. If there is an idea, as is rumoured in the current review, that we will get away with a cheaper, mixed, existing mainline hybrid scheme north of Birmingham, that would be very much resented in the northern parts of this country. They would feel it very strongly.

As I mentioned, the UK’s record on large-scale infrastructure management is not good. The Olympics were a conspicuous exception; on the other hand, Crossrail is a nightmarish example of the kind of problems that we have. But if we do not attempt these things, and if we do not seek to improve and learn from the way others do them, we will never do better—and we will not do better by cancellation or dithering or perpetual review. We must get away from that.

It is important to emphasise to those who have raised environmental concerns that the new line would be, on balance, a great environmental advantage over the years. I know that there are problems with the route and woodlands, but taking things off the roads and away from the air seems to me to be important. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has reminded us previously that HS2 would free up the existing lines to run more local and freight services. The Government have made many promises to the north about fresh infrastructure investment. If HS2 is collapsed, who in the north or Midlands is going to believe any of these promises? The Government need to keep their word, hold their nerve and complete HS2—all of it—as soon as possible.