High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill

Lord Smith of Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Leigh (Lab)]

My Lords, I should declare some interests, in view of the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. I am a member of the National Trust, but it does not speak in my name. I am also the leader of Wigan Council, as most Members know, and chairman of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. I confirm to the Minister that all the local authorities in Greater Manchester, whatever their political control, are supportive of High Speed 2 coming to Manchester. Indeed, it has the support of the business community in Greater Manchester. We have great support and are getting very positive comments from the consultation for Greater Manchester as a whole and, I am sure, for each and every one of the local authorities.

We support the strategic case that the Minister and other noble Lords have made. It is about capacity. Let us get this clear: it is about capacity on the railways in order for people to continue to travel. The growth that noble Lords have talked about, in both numbers of passengers and freight, means that we cannot cope with the existing infrastructure and we have to invest in new.

One of the alternatives, which noble Lords have talked about, is to try to improve capacity. That has been well established, but I can remember the misery of being a passenger on the west coast main line during its refurbishment. It was not much fun; I even missed an appointment with the Garter King of Arms to come into this place because the train was late, as was every train on the west coast main line at that time. Therefore, that is not really an option.

I am a former director of Manchester airport so one might think that the idea of increasing air transport would appeal to me. But we cannot possibly have the capacity at our airports to handle intercity transport within Britain; we want that capacity to be used for international connections and not for too many internal connections. We could not do it; it is not a possibility. Of course, in order to get to airports, infrastructure needs to be designed. Although I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, is normally correct, we actually built a new railway into Manchester airport to enable better connectivity.

Another option is to do something with the motorways. They are already congested and if we do not do anything to the rail system or to the motorways, we will just end up in gridlock. The impact of an increased capacity on the motorways, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, is going to be far greater than anything that High Speed 2 would create. Therefore, High Speed 2 is really our only alternative.

We support the economic case even more strongly because of the benefits that we believe High Speed 2 will bring to cities such as Manchester. I am willing to take the gamble that it will not suck business out of Manchester; rather, it will create more activity in our city region. We think that the benefits of HS2 alone will be about £1.3 billion but, of course, the additional facility in Greater Manchester of the airport station will probably add to that by a further half a billion pounds. Therefore, HS2 could result in an increase in activity in Greater Manchester of almost £2 billion.

Piccadilly station is bang in the heart of Manchester and will help to regenerate more of the city centre. There will be additional benefits resulting from that and the regeneration will be important for Manchester. As the project is being constructed, as noble Lords have said, jobs will be created. We are already working locally to see what skills will need to be developed so that we can maximise the benefits of construction in Greater Manchester.

In Manchester we benefit from this national connectivity. As noble Lords have said, it is not just connections from Manchester to London—although that is clearly important—but Manchester to Birmingham, Leeds and other cities that will be greatly improved. We also recognise that we need to improve local connectivity and through the Greater Manchester Community Transport Forum, we are already investing considerable amounts of money into improving the tram system and the bus network so that people will be able to get access from across the conurbation into the new station at Piccadilly. The airport will provide us with international connectivity that will mean more jobs.

If we are serious about rebalancing the economy in this country, then High Speed 2 is really important. Otherwise, the south-east will tend to dominate, as it has done in the past. I particularly welcome the creation of the growth taskforce, which will concentrate minds on how we can best engineer that growth, and I am sure that the Minister is aware that we have two members of that taskforce from Greater Manchester who are, I am sure, making a contribution.

Noble Lords have hinted that in the early part of the 19th century, this country had a phenomenal period of building railways. In a period of 20 years we built about 6,000 miles of railways in this country, providing the basis of the network that we have today. We did it because we had the confidence and engineering skills, and we did it without the cost-benefit analysis; no Victorian asked “What will be the benefit?”. They just had the confidence that this thing would work—it did, and it produced the benefits for the Victorian economy that we can see.

On the whole, during that period, Parliament was supportive of railway developments. The only hiccup was when the first Manchester to Liverpool railway was mooted and turned down, and they had to reroute it so that it did not go across too much of the Marquis of Stafford’s land. George Stephenson’s ingenuity meant that he managed to get it to go across an impossible area of Chat Moss and to float the railway as he did, meaning that that railway could be built. Other than that, Parliament supported the building of railways during the Victorian period and I hope that we can do the same in this particular Bill.

I want to briefly mention, as noble Lords have done, this odd contradiction between what Britain thinks about high-speed rail and what other countries, particularly in Europe, think about it. Spain has already got 3,000 kilometres of high-speed line, carrying 29 million passengers. The Germans are planning a network of about 2,500 kilometres and they have about 78 million passengers. We are planning to get about 317 kilometres and we currently have 9 million passengers—somewhat behind Belgium. Then, as noble Lords have mentioned, there is France. France was the leader in high-speed rail, planning for nearly 5,000 kilometres. It has with well over 100 million passengers currently on the TGV system.

On holiday in France last summer, I was delayed by some construction work near Tours for a new TGV line. When I came home, I checked what was going on, and it was a new extension of the TGV from Tours to Bordeaux, eventually on to Toulouse and the Spanish frontier. They announced this on roughly the same day that my noble friend Lord Adonis was planning to talk about HS2. It will open in 2017. We are now at the stage of a paving Bill and the lines in the north will not be completed until 2033. The French seem to be able to do these things somewhat faster than we can.

My only criticism of the Bill and the Government’s plans—not just this Government but both Governments —is not that we are building it but that we are building it too slowly. Actually, we ought to be building the two phases together. I accept that the congestion on the southern bit of the west coast main line is causing the greatest pinch points and needs to be tackled, but the economic benefits are greatly needed in the north and should be considered. If the Minister wants to examine the relative spending on rail by region, she will find that in the south-east they are spending roughly £2,700 per head of population; in the north-west it is £178, so there is quite some way to go.

There are two visions of Britain in the future. One is a vision where we try to make do and mend with the current system; we accept that Britain will be a second-class country with a second-class economy and a clapped-out transport system. The other is a vision for the future, a vision for our children, a vision of a Britain that can compete in the modern world, and for that we need high-speed rail.