High Speed Rail (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill

Lord McLoughlin Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Allocation of time motion: House of Commons & Carry-over motion: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & 2nd reading & Allocation of time motion & Carry-over motion & Money resolution
Tuesday 30th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is right, and I am delighted that Siemens has been shortlisted for that work. I want as much of the work as possible to be done in the United Kingdom, so that we can develop that skills footprint, developing those young apprentices and developing the engineering skills that we need for the future. That must happen throughout the United Kingdom: south-west, north-east, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, south-east, midlands, the north and East Anglia. I want to see jobs and opportunities for British businesses, and businesses based in Britain.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that we have Crossrail as a model? It is being finalised this year, and will be operating next year. That project was built on the use of suppliers in the United Kingdom, and the spread of its supply network throughout the UK. Although it was a London project, many parts of the country have benefited from it. What HS2 is doing is the natural follow-through from what Crossrail did.

[Chris Grayling]

Absolutely. Crossrail may be a project for transport in London, but it is also a project for engineering and industry in the United Kingdom as a whole. It brings benefits to all parts of the United Kingdom, and HS2 will bring benefits to all parts of the United Kingdom. Northern Powerhouse Rail, when it is built, will bring benefits in southern as well as northern England, and, indeed, throughout the United Kingdom. The more that we invest in these projects, the more economic benefits we will deliver across the UK.

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[Sir Patrick McLoughlin (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on bringing forward this Bill. I also congratulate all those people in the Department for Transport and in HS2 who are working to finalise these proposals. It is a pleasure to follow the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), although I think he slightly spoiled his speech by going off piste and talking about electrification. We will take no lessons from Labour on electrification, given its record between 1997 and 2010, during which time it electrified 10 miles of railway. I would like to say that that was a snail’s pace, but I think that a snail would have travelled further in 13 years than Labour did with its electrification.

[Andy McDonald]

The former Secretary of State seems to have totally forgotten the 67 miles of HS1 that were electrified then. Those 67 plus 10 miles add up to a lot more than this Government have ever electrified.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

I think that HS1 was operating before Labour came into government.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

rose—

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will make some progress.

It is right to say that we have seen a renaissance on our railways since privatisation, and that renaissance continued under the last Labour Government. Indeed, in their 13 years in government, they did not seek to change the franchising at all. They felt that that was the best way to operate the railways. We had the private sector and the public sector involved, and we saw our railways improve tremendously. If we get to a situation—I hope we do not—of the railways going back to a fully nationalised body, what happened in the ’60s and ’70s will happen again. Rail was always at the back of the queue for investment. Hospitals and education took priority; the railways were left without any priority whatsoever. There is no doubt in my mind that privatisation has led to the rejuvenation of the rail industry, and so much so that passenger numbers have increased from something like 700 million to some 1.6 billion, which speaks for itself.

I am pleased that the Bill has been introduced. David Higgins recommended that we should try to bring the investment and benefits of HS2 more quickly to the north. Should this Bill get its Second Reading today, it is worth remembering that we will see high-speed services to Crewe by 2027. In infrastructure terms, and given the necessary planning, that is not that far away, so I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on bringing the Bill forward.

I know that the Government are well aware of this, but I want to talk about the importance of continuing to develop skills in engineering. The National College for High Speed Rail, which is based in Doncaster and Birmingham, will enable people to get the engineering skills that are so important. All that follows on from the remarkable Crossrail project, which will start to open to the public later this year. We saw such skills in the television programmes covering its development across London.

This important Bill is about capacity. There are those who say that the Department for Transport and its Secretaries of State have changed their mind and that they talk about capacity more than speed, but the very first HS2 document that was published referred to capacity, too. The west coast main line is one of the busiest lines in Europe, if not the busiest. We need a massive injection of infrastructure, and this Bill is the answer

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

The right hon. Gentleman is quite right that we want to speed things up and that the west coast main line is very busy, but to go back to the point that I made to my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), what are we going to do about the bottlenecks? There were cancellations yesterday, and there only has to be one incident for everything to stop. That affects freight as much as anything else.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

I completely accept that, but the simple fact is that that is one of the reasons for the new line. We want resilience, alternatives and something that is much more modern. We have spent a fortune on upgrading the west coast main line from Birmingham up to Manchester, although I understand that we did not carry out any upgrade south of Rugby. The upgrade was essential, and if the then Government had been a bit more forward thinking, they could have built a new high-speed line then rather than doing an upgrade.

An upgrade has been undertaken, however, and it is very visible near Lichfield, for example, where the bridge has been changed as the line goes through Armitage to accommodate four tracks instead of two. There has been a huge amount of investment in the west coast main line, and that answers the question asked by the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) with regard to the need for greater capacity, more alternatives, and the modern engineering that we will get from HS2. I cannot remember the exact year, but there was a time a few years ago when every single railway line in the country had problems because of weather disruption apart from HS1, which was built to a high specification with modern engineering.

[Anna Soubry]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way and for his excellent speech. Does he agree that capacity and speed are not mutually exclusive? Not only will we get a world-class new line to deliver new capacity, but we are improving our existing lines. With that in mind, will he confirm how much is about to be invested in the new signalling programme in Derby, a place he knows very well?

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[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

More than £200 million is being spent in Derby on re-signalling and a new platform to ensure that London trains no longer have to cross the lines going to other parts of the country, thereby enabling those trains to go straight through on the main line. That is the kind of investment that is already happening in our railways up and down the country. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has been successful in securing extra investment not just for HS2, but for all the other railway lines that so badly need the kind of upgrades that we will see in Derby. We will no doubt complain when the station has to be closed for a period over the summer, but such a thing is inevitable if we are to achieve such overall benefit. We saw something similar just a few years ago at Nottingham station.

[Mr Seely]

My right hon. Friend speaks eloquently about busyness, capacity and bottlenecks on the west coast main line. Does he have anything to say about the south and south-west rail routes into London? Those routes are busier and have more capacity problems than many northern routes, but they will be unaffected by HS2 and might have their funding skewed because of it.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

I do not think that that is the case, but there is nobody better than the Secretary of State to answer those points. The tremendous investment at Reading station has improved the whole network to the south-west. The investment at that station alone was in the region of £800 million or £900 million. Extra flyovers were put in to improve capacity down to the south-west.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

The improvement in overall capacity is brilliant for the people we represent in towns such as Redditch that are outside the major conurbations. The improved capacity will create an opportunity for more services from Redditch to Birmingham for commuting and jobs.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

My hon. Friend is right that HS2 will free up a lot of capacity that is currently used not for local services, but for services from London to Birmingham and on to Manchester. That is one of the answers provided by HS2.

[Gareth Snell]

rose—

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

I give way for the last time.

[Gareth Snell]

I thank the former Secretary of State for giving way. What does he think will be the extra capacity for commuter services around Staffordshire? There are no additional plans for commuter services under the proposals. There is no additional infrastructure, other than the HS2 route itself, so there is no immediate benefit.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman wants us to have a detailed timetable for 10 years’ time, but extra capacity will become available for new services. I believe that Stoke-on-Trent will benefit greatly from HS2 because of its link, its service and its closeness to Crewe. We then have to improve some of the road structures in and around Stoke-on-Trent so that people can receive the benefit. That will represent far more investment than Stoke-on-Trent saw in any year under a Labour Government, so we can be rightly proud of what we are doing.

I fully accept—my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State addressed this—that any big infrastructure project will always lead to certain people being inconvenienced. If there were a way of ensuring that people would not be inconvenienced, we would all move for it. I am afraid that inconvenience is inevitable. It is worth remembering that the first time a railway was proposed between Birmingham and London, the idea was defeated in the House of Commons because everybody said that the canals were perfectly adequate. That was part of the problem with the west coast main line, and it is why certain diversions were built into it.

The line from the west midlands to Crewe will be of significant benefit to transport infrastructure in this country, the United Kingdom as a whole and our cities outside London by creating connectivity not just between London and our cities, but between those cities. The line is important, and it is moving in the right direction. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on this proposal.

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[Andrew Jones]

Well, the hon. Gentleman suggests that even more public money should go in, so I am not sure where his argument takes him, apart from round in a circle. We are seeing long-overdue public investment in the rail industry.

[Sir Patrick McLoughlin]

We do not want to spend too much time on this issue, but the simple fact is that in the past, when the nationalised railway had to rely solely on the Government, the Government cut off its funding. With privatisation, it has attracted funding. The truth of the matter is that that has seen growth in the rail industry that has made something like HS2 absolutely necessary.

[Andrew Jones]

My right hon. Friend is as wise as ever. Not only do we have public money going into our railways, but we are seeing private investment attracted into our railways and therefore more investment in aggregate. We have this urgent need for capacity within our network to cater for the growth both in passengers and in freight.

After years of decline, this decision has been taken to go for growth. The next question that successive Governments have faced is what form that should take. Should it be investment in the classic rail network, or should we be embracing new technology? Well, we should of course be embracing new technology. Perhaps it is again worth remembering that that has not always been the case under nationalised industries. The UK built its last steam engine in 1960, and it was only in 1964 that the Japanese introduced the bullet train. The Government are buying investment not in phone boxes, but in fibre broadband. Technology should of course be at the heart of our investment decisions.

High Speed Rail (West Midlands–Crewe) Bill

Lord McLoughlin Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 30th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am very pleased to lend my support to my noble friend Lord Adonis and his well-crafted amendment, and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Curry, and—yes—the noble Lord, Lord Scriven. On a number of occasions this year, he and I have found ourselves in agreement: I am not sure whether that is bad for him or bad for me, but on this occasion we are wholeheartedly as one. That is because we have seen what has happened over the years. He mentioned electrification of the Midland main line. Christopher Grayling promised it, and within months he withdrew that promise. It is similar to the picture painted by George Orwell of promising, withdrawing and promising again until people were completely bamboozled and befuddled as to what they had been promised and what had been taken away. I counsel my noble friend Lord Adonis to be very careful in hearing, as I am sure that he will be, the words of the Minister, for whom we have the greatest respect but who has been given a government brief. If the brief is not to say, “Yes, of course we intend to go ahead with this and we will, therefore, be quite happy to publish our legislation,” then I hope we will move this to a Division.

There are three sets of people who helped the Government. One set are those who were against HS2 from the start. I understand why: they believe that the money should be redeployed elsewhere. There is a second set who say: “We do not mind you doing the north-west, but we are quite happy for you to give us the money for infrastructure work and other investment in Yorkshire and the north-east.” The third set says, “Do not rock the boat, because we do not want to be seen to be undermining phase 2a and the subsequent leg to Manchester because it would be grossly unfair.” All three are just so naive that it is breath-taking. It is breath-taking to suggest that money that would not be spent on HS2 would, in any way, be spent on other forms of infrastructure in the two decades to come. It is naive to believe that, if you give a fair wind to someone else, they will back you when they got what they wanted and you failed to get what you needed. It is naive to believe that a Government who will not commit to what they originally promised have somehow just mislaid the necessary words and are not intent on changing policy or their programme.

My great fear—and I have had it all along—is that we will, of course, get Crewe to Manchester, and we will get the fast HS2 line from Manchester to Leeds, so that the Leeds leg will be an extremely rapid cross-Pennine addition, but it will not be from Birmingham through the east Midlands and Yorkshire with the spur to the east coast main line and to the north-east. I worry about MPs from the north-east—many of them very new, and this is true of the east Midlands as well—who seem to live in a parallel universe where they believe that words do not say what they actually say, as Alice would have said in Wonderland. Unless you get it on paper and it is absolutely unequivocal, it is not going to happen. The east Midlands, Yorkshire and the north-east will lose out all over again.

The briefing notes sent out were very interesting. The noble Lord, Lord Curry, talked about people from London and the south thinking that the world stopped at Sheffield. I wish that they did believe that, but they think it stops at Watford. When they use terms, as were included in this briefing note, such as “the north” or “the northern powerhouse,” what they clearly mean is the north-west or Greater Manchester and the surrounding areas. That is what George Osborne believed, which was understandable from his point of view because at the time he represented a seat in the north-west.

It is time for the leaders of councils, the elected mayors and the Members of Parliament of every party from the east Midlands, Yorkshire and the north-east to start collaborating in order to have their voice heard; otherwise, they will find themselves conned. Once again, they will be seen as losers and I am sick of us being losers on the east of the Pennines: I want the north and the northern powerhouse to be right across what is the north of England. I want that promise of 30 million people benefiting to be not some sort of artificial myth: I want it to be a reality. It can be a reality only if we actually get this additional leg, promised from the beginning, through the east Midlands, which has a high density of passenger usage, which will then be accommodated by freeing up the existing services. That is the argument in Stoke and Macclesfield in the north-west; it works just as well for the east Midlands and Yorkshire, where there is high-density passenger mileage in this particular corridor. Let us unite in wanting to do something that at last will put the nation in better balance—not only the levelling up that is so often talked about but levelling up between the north-west and north-east of the Pennines as well.

[Lord McLoughlin (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to address the House on what I believe is a very important infrastructure project, one of the biggest undertaken by any Government in recent years. I have a slight worry about the amendment as tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, which is that it would put too much of a straitjacket on the Government regarding the future proposals that need to be ironed out. However, I find myself with a lot of sympathy for it.

I myself as Secretary of State for Transport made many changes to the plans put forward by the noble Lord when he did his initial scoping project, which was then carried on. Not the least of those changes is in the Bill before us. This part of the Bill came about as a result of the review done for me by David Higgins about how we could get it to the north faster, because there was a lot of concern that we would build up to Birmingham and then it would stop there. So I am delighted to be able to partake in these proceedings in this House on this section of the project that I think I started off.

I was fascinated to hear the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, talk about the end of the Pacer trains. It reminded me of my time as Secretary of State: it was I who issued the instruction to the Permanent Secretary to override the advice of the department, which said that we could not possibly get rid of the Pacer trains as there was no financial case. I am very pleased that that has been done. It has been delayed slightly, but these things take a bit of time. Still, at long last those trains, which were brought in 40 years ago on a temporary basis, will cease to exist. I have to say I was surprised that there was no “Save the Pacer train” movement, because the rail industry can sometimes become very nostalgic, keeping everything in the past. As far as I know, there has been no such movement.

I did not get the exact wording of the Minister’s answer to the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, but she said it was time to get on with the Bill and not accept any more delays. I reinforce that to her: it is time to get on with the whole project in so far as it goes at the moment, because even the line up to Leeds and Manchester is not really the full project. It is only the start of the project of modernising our railway network. I find it ironic that I can get a high-speed train from London to Paris or Brussels, but not to Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh or Glasgow. That is the dream; we have to ensure that future generations get their own high-speed rail.

I regret the words “high-speed rail”. It is not about high speed, but about high capacity. One of the things that this railway does is release a lot of the capacity on other railway lines to fulfil some of the more desirable things that areas want. We have seen a modern revolution in rail travel in this country. At the time of privatisation, 700 million people a year were using our railways. Last year, before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, the figure was something like 1.8 billion people. Railways have become a much more important part of our nation and of our cities. I believe that the Bill and the Government committing to going as far as Crewe is essential, but there is more about it that is essential. The line was always planned to be a Y shape. The most expensive part of the railway was actually building it from London to Birmingham and then its costs fall away a little, although I fully accept that it is still a very expensive project.