HS2: Economic and Environmental Impact

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by making it clear that I am speaking in a personal capacity from the Back Benches and that I am not speaking, as I often can do, from the Front Bench. That is to reassure my noble friend sitting in front of me because he might otherwise be a little concerned. I also need to declare an interest as a soon-to-be former resident of a house very close to the line, which is in a tunnel going past where I live. I am not going to address the main points made by the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, although I agree absolutely with much of what he said. The questions that he put to the Minister are ones that need to be answered. I shall look at a point that was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman.

Given that there are members here of the Lords Select Committee who toiled for a long time over the hot summer, I should say that some of what I am going to say bears on their work, which I salute and acknowledge as being fantastic and a great service to the House. I do this because I know from discussions outside this place that we are about to engage in a revision of the Standing Orders for hybrid Bills, which I think was called for by the chairman at the end of his period as chair of the Select Committee. The revision is to be done jointly with the other place. It is a long and cumbersome process to be done in two stages. The first stage is very much the low-hanging fruit and will result in some good changes that I will allude to, although more things will need to be done. In addition, both Houses need to think carefully about what we are doing when we get involved in this process.

When citizens or external organisations engage with a hybrid Bill, they are engaging with Parliament in a very unusual way. We do not do this very often, and it is important to bear that in mind. We have to make sure that our systems and processes, whether in writing or in person, are not archaic, devised as they were in Victorian times. The jargon and the procedures need to be thoroughly revised. The idea that someone who wishes to raise a point with the hybrid Bill Committee has to do so by praying in a strange way is the sort of thing I am talking about here. It is also important that the two Houses establish without any doubt that they have co-equal powers, as they do on everything else except, apparently, on hybrid Bills, in order that both Houses can act as they see fit in the pursuance of public issues. At the moment it is sort of assumed that the second House has lesser powers. That is unacceptable and we must look at it.

The primary purpose of having a hybrid Bill process has moved on from when it was invented in Victorian times, when largely it seemed to serve the interests and rights of the owners of large plots of land who were being affected by the railway revolution. Nowadays it is effectively a public planning inquiry, so we have to think hard about how we handle it. We should not be doing it as we currently do for all the reasons that everyone understands. I have suggested to the Bill team that is looking at how we deal with these Bills that the fact that this is a planning inquiry means that there is a good case for saying that it should be dealt with as if it were a planning inquiry, with all that means in terms of status, appearance, the right to representation and so on. It is very important that the system allows those who are affected by a project to be heard and that it is more accepting of the various modes of address that individuals who wish to be heard would use. We have to think electronically and digitally as well as people appearing in private.

It is up to the individual to propose how they make their representations. More effort should also be made to ensure there is equality of arms actually in the hearings themselves, should there be the need for public hearings in the form that we have had them in the past. I think that a lot could be done by correspondence and would not involve any public appearance. If there are to be appearances, they have to be grouped, marshalled and conducted in a way that brings out the key points without disadvantaging those who wish to make them in the form they choose. The corollary of that is that where a committee in either House finds that there is an issue that needs redress, the systems under which these redresses are documented, logged and approved must be looked at carefully.

Finally, there is a wider issue here about how we deal with what is called property blight. I do not think there is any doubt that the HS1 Bill team did as much as they could do within the existing law, but I wonder whether that is sufficient. We can all be affected by blight, in whatever form it comes, as can our infrastructure, whether it is gas pipelines, water, a road or a railway. There is merit in a case that was presented to me during the process of the Bill, but I was unable to get any address. I hope the Minister will take this away: if there was a thing called a property blight bond—attached to a property, not a person—it could build up a sort of mutual fund, like national insurance, which could be available to and drawn down by anybody affected by blight. That may sound like a very odd arrangement, but the proposal has come from the insurance industry, which thinks that there is some concern about how one might want to take that forward. I do not expect a positive response to this today from the Minister, although I raised it with her predecessor and did not get a response, so I know that it has been lodged in the department. That applies not only to the Department for Transport but to others as well. I hope that somebody will look at it and take it forward.