Economic Case for HS2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Select Committee for its excellent report. Over time, I have come to accept, if not to love, the need for additional capacity on the railway network, but it is always important to test public policy proposals and I think that it is generally accepted around your Lordships’ House that HS2 has not been properly examined. This is an exemplary report. It must have been great fun watching economics in action. It was a joy to read the forensic demolition of the Government’s economic case, as it was to hear it distilled in my noble friend Lord Hollick’s excellent speech. As many people have said, the Government’s response was tokenistic and not appropriate in the circumstances.

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, for raising the question of the Chilterns AONB. I declare an interest in that I and my family live in Little Missenden, which lies very close to the line of HS2 phase 1. I want today to raise the concern that, for reasons which are still not clear, the HS2 Bill Committee has effectively ruled out extending the deep tunnel which at the moment goes part of the way through the Chilterns AONB—a decision which might seem to be rather discourteous, to say the least, as it was taken at the very start of the petitioning process for this area, effectively denying some 800 applicants in person the chance to give their evidence to be considered by the committee.

It is obvious that at the heart of a decision to allow a long Chiltern tunnel is a cost versus value decision, which is familiar territory for economists. There has to be a trade-off. There are additional costs that a longer tunnel would bear, but there are significant savings from reduced compensation payments and reduced land take. However, such a trade-off cannot ignore the benefits which accrue to the nation from preserving a special part of our countryside. After all, the whole business case for HS2 is based on a much disputed calculation of the benefit that business men and women get from saving time by faster travel. If that can be done, why can we not value the countryside? There are ways of quantifying these benefits, and a methodology is available that is already used by government. So far, though, the department and the Bill Select Committee have been highly resistant to engaging in this debate. Why is this?

Large infrastructure projects going through relatively unspoiled countryside effectively urbanise it. It is proposed to have 18 trains an hour each way, which cause noise and vibration. Maintenance activity will take place all night. The trains cause light pollution, and parts of the route have to have fixed lighting. There will be vent shafts where there are tunnels; access points; security fencing and sound proofing baffles; maintenance roads; balancing ponds; power lines and gantries; earthworks, planting and huge earthwork bunds to mitigate what is built; and soil from cuttings deposited right across the Chilterns. The materials are not natural, the scale is grotesque and the impact is to introduce alien cityscape elements into a predominantly rural environment.

The attempt by the promoter and the department to minimise the impact of these intrusions into the AONB—for example, by arguing, as they did recently to the Bill Committee, that:

“It’s really only a very, very small percentage impact, less than 1% impact, that we’re having on some particular feature of the AONB, whether it’s ancient woodland or woodland area”,

is as demeaning as it is misleading. The clue is in the title: it is an area of outstanding natural beauty, and the value placed on it has to be on the whole area, not by extracting fractions or percentages. It is an irreplaceable resource. You can put the earth back on a cut-and-cover tunnel, you can grass it and you can grow some new trees, but you do not have what age and interaction with people and their dwellings over centuries have produced in the rich patina of a landscape that is largely unchanged since pre-Saxon times, which is the key reason why it has merited an AONB designation.

As the Bill Committee has heard in evidence, designation as an AONB brings with it a requirement on Ministers and statutory bodies to do what they can to conserve and enhance our higher-quality English landscapes and protect their scenic beauty. What evidence is there that Ministers have taken this responsibility seriously? The National Planning Policy Framework says that major development should not take place in AONBs except in exceptional circumstances after appropriate tests have been made. What evidence is there that these tests were done properly?

The statutory framework also lays down that a relevant authority shall have regard to the purpose of conserving and enhancing the natural beauty of the AONB. A relevant person is any Minister of the Crown, public body or statutory undertaker. Given that requirement, why would a rational promoter—or a rational Secretary of State, for that matter, if that is not a tautology—not wish to see the AONB protected, first by considering routes other than through the AONB but, failing that, by considering a deep tunnel through the Chilterns?

HS2 itself has recently accepted that there is no rational basis for rejecting a tunnel. In its recent report, applying its criteria and using its consultants and its judgment, it says:

“It is clear that a Chiltern Long Tunnel would provide overall environmental benefits compared to the HS2 Proposed Scheme during operation and construction”.

It also confirms that such a tunnel would not adversely affect the programme.

Faced with over 800 petitions from individual organisations and local councils calling for a long tunnel through the Chilterns, recommendations from the statutory bodies concerned with the Chilterns that a deep, long tunnel is the only possible mitigation, and the requirement under the statutory framework and the national planning framework to conserve and enhance the natural beauty of the AONB, the HS2 Bill Select Committee takes the view that the tunnel is too expensive. We do not know what persuaded the committee to take this view, and it has not published any evidence in the form of a calculation that demonstrates that the benefits from preserving the Chiltern AONB do not outweigh the additional costs of a long tunnel.

The missing ingredient at the moment is a sense of what we will lose if the scheme goes ahead in its current form. People might be much more willing to support HS2 if they knew that the only AONB on the line had been preserved by a Government who knew not only the cost of the project but the value of what was affected.