High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, I doubt very much that he will reflect that he might be mistaken on the basis of the arguments that I will put forward. On two things, he ought to reflect on whether he might have got them wrong. I shall begin with his phrase “a small island”. Actually, that is the argument for railways, compared to larger countries. It is undoubtedly the case that as the economy grows, there is a propensity for the coefficient describing how fast passenger miles grow to increase. People have more discretionary expenditure which, as family dispersion proceeds, produces more family passenger miles as well as more business passenger miles, so these extra passenger miles will be generated. There is a positive coefficient in relation to economic growth. No one now flies between Heathrow and Manchester as they used to some time ago, and so the alternatives are much greater congestion on the roads or more capacity on the railways.

Higher speed attracts and is part of the equation. So is the fact that the size of the country is shrinking, if we think of economic geography in terms of how long it takes to get somewhere. We see as a cluster the whole city region of Manchester—where I was born—West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, East Midlands and West Midlands. It is less than an hour all the way round. I ask the Minister whether the department ought to produce a study of a regional cluster compared with some European and other ideas, because this is a way in which we can learn from each other. I think that the answer will be that we are talking about an economic transformation.

I remember when Alastair Morton, the visionary chief executive of Eurotunnel, described economic geography as the basis of economic development. I am an economist myself. That is what I did for my first few years, and I think that the Channel Tunnel has produced a very interesting answer; namely, that it is very easy now to jump on a train in Paris and be in London or Brussels in two hours, and this is transforming so many things in terms of an economic growth model. So is the regeneration of Kings Cross. Even the Shard is on London Bridge station. Whether we have stations on the edge of cities or not, there will be different patterns of demand which fit.

Heathrow is not in the centre of London, but on the Surrey-Hampshire border where I live, we are part of the Heathrow economy. The noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, has got things 180 degrees wrong. There is no contradiction in talking about the need to deal very quickly with 98% of Heathrow’s capacity already being full—national scandal that that is—and getting on with HS2. The scandal of not doing HS2 would be very similar to the scandal of not building the two extra runways, which should probably be to the west of the two runways at Heathrow.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that we can learn from the experience of Kent in another way. My noble friend Lord Adonis, who is not in his place at the moment, knows that I convened a meeting about four years ago because I happened to know some of the people in Kent who had been in consultations there. I got the National Association of Local Councils to bring together all the local councils in the Chilterns at a meeting here in the House of Lords to find out about all the stages of the consultation that had been gone through in Kent. The people from Kent confirmed what I think the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and others have said, that they had been very satisfied with the experience of the consultation. Although they never became what one might call protagonists, they all agreed that the noise envelope from HS1 is nothing like the noise envelope from the M2 and the M20. Those are the alternatives that we have to look at.

The noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, tried to ridicule the idea that £50 billion should be spent on a project of this kind. I do not know what goes on in his mind when he talks about £50 billion being spent on this, as if it is spent on social welfare in some sense, but it is value added in the supply chain in the west Midlands and other parts of Britain. It may well be that we have to look to our laurels to make sure that the tunnel boring machines are not all from ThyssenKrupp or whatever in Germany, but that is a slightly different question, about our industrial capacity. I put a second question to the Minister: has the Business Department joined up in Whitehall, as on Crossrail, to make sure that British industry gets the great share—the lion’s share if I may call it that—of the £50 billion that we are looking at? That is the wages, salaries, profits and engineering progress that are entailed.

I can only echo what the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, of whom I have always been a fan on these matters, said:

“It is 120 years since we built a new railway north of London”.

It is a bit of a shock when you say it like that. Why should we not have built another railway north of London for 120 years? It is not as if railways, à la Beeching, are now a thing of the past. Ending—in due course—where I began, the argument is precisely that we are a small island. We should not be frightened of this because we are a small island.

We seem to have the idea that the Victorian era was some sort of golden age. I think Wordsworth wrote a poem about the Ribblehead viaduct or something—these exact arguments took place during Victorian times, even though we now all talk about the Victorian railways. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, whom I greatly admire, is exactly the sort of person who probably has a society for the admiration and better understanding of the Ribblehead viaduct. I would not be at all surprised, and the noble Lord is nodding his head. He probably is the president because he is the president of everything like that. But it was not exactly top of the pops at that particular time.

I am also reminded of when, exactly 20 years ago, in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen, President Mitterrand said, with a straight face: “Having travelled at 300 kilometres per hour across the plains of northern France, we came through the Channel Tunnel and reduced our speed to 100 kilometres per hour, to better admire the beauty of the Kent countryside”. I did not know that the French were up to that sense of humour, but President Mitterrand somehow put his finger on a fallacy of our national psyche at that time.

In conclusion, I believe that we could be running the risk of another procrastination by having endless procedures which, in other circumstances, I could only call red tape. The Government are very committed to a bonfire of red tape—apart from when it comes to tying up the trade unions in red tape, although that is not the question we are discussing this evening. I suggest that, side by side with a statement about when we are going to see the next stages of legislation, we have a clear timetable, like the Olympic timetable, so that the thing does not slip and so that the people who are looking at the new patterns of economic geography can have some confidence. Many of the stations will not be in the middle of cities—I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing but more work can be done in the city clusters study that I recommend to look at the consequences of some of the stations not being in the centre of the cities and the connectivity there. That may have the upside of what I call the Heathrow Airport type of economic geography, as well as what you might call the downside, given that we all want to arrive at Kings Cross. There is a lot of very exciting work to be done and I have very little doubt that the Government and the Opposition are, on this issue, speaking for the nation’s future and, also, for the environment on the small island on which we live.