High Speed Rail (West Midlands-Crewe) Bill

Debate between Lord Liddle and Lord Snape

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 2nd sitting : House of Lords & Committee: 2nd sitting
Thursday 12th November 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Liddle (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, that was a very powerful speech by my noble friend Lord Adonis, and I have very little to add to it. I support this amendment. I think it is sensible that Parliament look regularly at how the HS2 scheme is being used to promote greater connectivity at local and regional levels, and of course I agree with my noble friend’s concerns about the eastern leg of the HS2 plan. The only other point to add concerns the work of the Select Committee. I have sympathy with the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Rosser, on the capacity of the county councils to deal with the consequences of the HS2 plan. The Select Committee felt that in one or two cases where we had petitioners making perfectly reasonable points, the county council had not responded to them in the way we would have hoped. There should be a strong message—although I doubt an amendment would be appropriate—that the councils need to gear up to cope with this major project.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, while I support everything that has just been said on this amendment, I do not want to repeat anything. There is a connectivity problem with HS2. If it were decided—wrongly, as has been amply outlined by my noble friend Lord Adonis—to truncate the eastern leg of HS2 somewhere in the east Midlands and, presumably, electrify the existing line so that HS2 trains will join the existing main line at some unspecified point in the east Midlands, there would be an immediate connectivity problem.

In the days when I worked for the railway, on the operating side, the regulation of trains was a fairly simple matter. Trains were broken down into various classifications: A, B, C, et cetera. Class A was an express passenger train, and signallers would normally give priority to such a train, regardless of circumstances —late running, bad weather, et cetera. Since privatisation, of course, things are somewhat different. It never ceases to amaze me sometimes, standing at Birmingham New Street station, to watch a late-running Pendolino train for London Euston being held in the station while a local train booked to leave behind it leaves on time and therefore in front of it, delaying the express passenger train even further. When I ask signallers and people responsible for operating the railway these days why these incidents take place, I am told, “Well, the lawyers will say that that was its booked path and if we delayed it further, there would, of necessity, be compensation payments”.

I raise that technical side for this reason, as far as this amendment is concerned: in Clause 34, “Objectives of Office of Rail and Road”, there are details about railway matters. If we are to have high-speed trains mixed in with existing passenger and freight trains, I just remind noble Lords on both sides that this will happen regardless of the completion of the Y-shaped layout planned for HS2. There will be another regulation problem thrown up by the addition of such trains to the existing traffic. Without going into any great detail, the Select Committee discussed the provision of an altered junction on a short stretch of the west coast main line that would have meant that high-speed trains, instead of joining the “down” fast line on their way to Crewe, actually joined the “down” slow line—again, as the result of the understandable desire to reduce expenditure—cutting over to the “down” fast line some small distance further north. That adds another complication so far as train regulation is concerned, on, as we have already discussed, an already crowded west coast main line. That situation, of course, would be repeated and worsened if the Y-shaped east Midlands leg of HS2 were truncated, as my noble friend Lord Adonis fears.

I have a question for the Minister, going back to Clause 34. I quote from the Explanatory Memorandum:

“The Railways Act 1993 imposes on the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) a duty to address certain objectives in the execution of its non-safety functions. These objectives do not currently contain any explicit requirement for the ORR to facilitate the construction of Phase 2a of High Speed 2. Subsection (1) adds such a requirement and thereby clarifies the ORR’s role for the benefit of the ORR and rail operators.”


My question to the Minister is, what role will the ORR have as far as connectivity and train regulation is concerned? I do not expect her to have the answer off the cuff, and I would be grateful if she would write to me. It is an appropriate matter, I hope she agrees, to raise in connection with this amendment and I hope we can find some way of answering this particular problem concerning the role of the ORR in future.