High Speed 2

Lord Snape Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for pointing out the enormous benefits that Birmingham is currently seeing. All across the route of phase 1, there are shovels in the ground, with 350 active construction sites and 29,500 workers. The focus is on delivering high-speed rail services between London and Birmingham.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Minister go further in acknowledging the common-sense view expressed by the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin? Will she also reflect on the fact that, so far, almost a third of the around 140-mile line between London and Birmingham is either through tunnels or on viaducts? We are spending a vast amount of money trying to please people who oppose the project and who have opposed it right from the start. Is it not about time we took a leaf out of the book of the French railways? At the time they built their high-speed line across France, they said: “When we are draining the swamp, we do not consult the frogs”?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a very interesting point. It is right—and this is not only for High Speed 2 but for many major infra- structure projects—that local interests can sometimes cause the cost of projects to increase. I need only mention, for example, Chesham and Amersham, where I think there is a Liberal Democrat Member—and they are deeply behind HS2, apart from any candidate who wins a by-election. Sometimes, to please certain groups of people, additional expense must be had, and sometimes that is absolutely valid. That is the difficulty with building major infrastructure. But the planning permission that goes into it and the DCO process—or in this case the hybrid Bills—have to reach the right balance, and sometimes one has to question whether it is in the right place.