High Speed Rail (London - West Midlands) Bill: Select Committee

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Goodwill]

I am saying that if the hybrid Bill Committee proposed changes that the Government agreed to, there would be a further opportunity for people who are directly affected by those changes to petition. The Bill cannot be changed in a way that affects people without their getting a second bite of the cherry, because they may not have considered petitioning in the first place.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is getting himself back on to my Christmas card list, from which he was rejected last night. Are the Government completely closed to the idea of a different, better HS1-HS2 link than the one we rightly rejected last night?

[Mr Goodwill]

Any link between HS1 and HS2 is not part of the Bill that was before us last night or the provisions we are considering today, and we as a Government are certainly not planning to look at it in the near future. This project will be in operation for many centuries, we hope, and who knows what might happen in future? At the moment, the Government’s position is absolutely clear: we have abandoned the link—we voted on that in the House last night—and we do not wish to revisit it. We will be looking into making it easier to get across from Euston to St Pancras. Although it is not a long walk and there is an underground train service, there may be better ways of dealing with the situation, and HS2 is looking into that.

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[Frank Dobson]

I welcome that reassurance.

I am particularly concerned, too, about the statutory and non-statutory provisions for compensation. Outside London, some people whose homes will not be demolished but whose property and general lifestyle will be adversely affected by a railway perhaps 50 yards away will be compensated, which I think is right. The situation in my constituency, however, is that people whose homes are 5 yards away from the line or 5 yards away from 10 years of engineering works will get no compensation. I hope that the Minister, the Department and HS2 Ltd are aware that the immediately preceding Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Keir Starmer, has given us an opinion that the procedure followed in respect of my constituency is actually in breach of the law. I therefore hope that at least the House will have an opportunity to review it, even if the Committee cannot. I view it as strange that we are talking about a Committee supposedly looking at mitigation and compensation that is apparently not allowed to look at compensation. That needs to be revised.

My last but one point is that I very much support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee. I hope that the Government, as well as our Front-Bench team, will go along at least with the spirit of it.

My final point is about the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston. I believe that if we are to have a High Speed 2, it is ludicrous for it not to be connected to High Speed 1. That does not mean that it makes any sense whatever to have the HS2-HS1 link that was originally proposed, which was crackers in practically every aspect and certainly does not go to the right place. I agree with those who believe that there needs to be a connection—and the best place to receive that connection, if that is the right word for it, is Stratford.

[Lyn Brown]

Hear, hear.

[Frank Dobson]

I hear my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). It has just occurred to me that if HS2 did that and it went to Stratford, the most famous Englishman of all time might have ended up in a different Stratford from the one in which he was born and brought up. I think that would be a welcome move. I would ask anyone who thinks that we are going to see successful use of a travelator between Euston and St Pancras quite where this “covered way” is to be constructed. The proposal has been suggested about 25 times in the past and it has always been rejected as absolutely loopy.

Going back to the original proposition for the channel tunnel to come into King’s Cross, I remember moving an amendment to the effect that provision should be made to go from King’s Cross to the west midlands, but it was duly voted down. I have always been in favour of having proper connections. When the preposterous idea of placing a travelator along Euston road was proposed, it was received with mockery and derision then and it is still being received with mockery and derision now. The only way to avoid using Euston road would be to demolish even more houses in my constituency or to drill a hole through the British Library or through the Francis Crick Institute that is currently being constructed. I find it most extraordinary that some people think that a satisfactory link can be constructed.

I have noticed that the great hero of the hour is Sir David Higgins, so we are told that because he suggested the proposal, it must be a good idea. He suggested that the delay would be no more than that we experience when we have to go from one terminal building at Heathrow to another one. They are not quite the same. Not much rain falls on people when they travel from terminal 4 to terminal 1 at Heathrow, but Euston road really can get pretty wet. I thus very much support the spirit of the amendment proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston, but I could not bear to support it in full because it still includes the possibility of facilitating

“the provision at a later date of the spur”,

which has rightly been abandoned.

On all these issues, I urge the new Minister to bear in mind that every time local people—and me in trying to represent them—criticised the link and every time we criticised the design for Euston, we were treated, frankly, with contempt. Now the contemptibles have turned out to be right, yet the people who treated us with contempt are being asked to come up with alternatives to meet the requirements that everyone thinks are needed. The Minister needs to keep an eye on them: if they are the same people, the chances of them getting it right now are no better than the chances of them getting it right before.

My final point is this. The original proposal for Euston was to cost £1.2 billion. Eight months later, before anybody had done a trial bore or anything, the project came up with a revised costing of £2 billion. That is why the Minister needs to be very careful in entrusting the future of this project to people who can get a costing for a station £0.8 billion wrong and have to correct themselves within eight months. I offer friendly advice to a fellow Yorkshireman: “Have a good look at ’em, mate; have a good look at ’em.”

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[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I will not speak for long and I apologise for not being here at the very beginning of the debate. I was a member of the Crossrail Committee for two years and, contrary to what some have speculated, the Whips put me and some of my colleagues on it as a punishment. We had voted against some civil liberties legislation and one of my colleagues, who is no longer in the House, remonstrated with our Whips and was told, “You’re staying on—get on with it.” It was definitely seen as a punishment. However, the Whips did not appreciate that I am a railway enthusiast. I know a lot about railways. I do not want to seem immodest, but I also know a lot about the engineering of railways, and I receive advice from a series of friends, colleagues and acquaintances who are skilled in engineering and running railways. I therefore had something to offer that Select Committee and I enjoyed my two years on it. It was quite onerous—two solid days a week and so on—but it was a nice experience, and I like to think that I made some positive contributions.

That brings me to the important point about skills. It is important for Committee members to have engineering advice at their disposal so that they know what they are talking about and what other people are talking about. Barristers will appear before the Committee, and other people will give evidence, but it is important to develop the expertise of Committee members. They are fine Members, but as there are six of them, they will have a hard job for quite a long time. If they are not interested in railways and do not receive skilled advice, they will find it even harder. I hope that that point will be taken care of.

I think that the House has become more democratic in the way in which it appoints people to Select Committees. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) talked about the modernisation of the House and the Wright Committee. I served on the Select Committee on Public Administration under the chairmanship of Tony Wright for several years. I still serve on that Committee—it is an interesting Committee, now chaired by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), and I really enjoy that work. We are constantly looking at the way in which government operates and the way in which the House interrelates with government, and we try to raise the status and effect of the House in holding the Government to account. That is what we are about.

Previous Governments, both Tory and Labour, have not paid sufficient heed to the House of Commons, and have adopted a rather high-handed manner. I was kept off Select Committees for a long time, perhaps because I was regarded as a radical person of the left. For five years, I tried to serve on every Select Committee, but the Whips would not hear of it. Now, the process is much more open, and anyone with any particular view in the House can become a member of a Select Committee, provided that there is a vacancy. That is a great advance. Two Members made that advance: Tony Wright and, before him, Robin Cook, who should be praised for his work in trying to improve Parliament’s control over the Executive. I want that process to continue and become more significant.

A number of points have been made about the project by hon. Members, particularly my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson). My view is that the Euston terminus is complete nonsense. It would be horrendously expensive, and it is in the wrong place. If the railway stopped at Paddington or even Old Oak Common, and linked directly to Crossrail, people would use Crossrail to go straight through to the City and Canary Wharf. There is a lot of talk about business links between the centre of Birmingham, our second city, and the City of London, and being able to make an easy trip from Birmingham to the City, particularly Canary Wharf, is a sensible way forward. Going to Euston would be expensive, and it would require at least two tube journeys to get to Canary Wharf. All the time that might be saved by a slightly faster train to Euston would be lost, given the time taken for those journeys from Euston to Canary Wharf.

The Euston terminus is nonsense, and it is my belief—and people have said this to me—that it is really about property development and making money out of such a development at Euston. It is not really about transport needs. I have criticisms and reservations about the whole project, as my vote indicated last night. Unfortunately, I was unable to speak in the debate yesterday; otherwise I would have made some serious points. If Old Oak Common or Paddington were the terminus, that would save billions and would immediately—

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

What about Stratford?

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[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is an absolute pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman); I agree with much of what she says. I hope that she has more purchase with her own Front Benchers than I might, and that they have listened very carefully to her speech and to those of others who have talked about the HS1-HS2 link. I rise in support of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart).

I want to reflect on the link between the existing route for High Speed 1 from St Pancras to the channel tunnel and the proposed High Speed 2 link. I am a supporter of HS2, but the proposed link, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) rightly stated, would not have provided an adequate service. I was therefore happy to support its deletion from the Bill yesterday. It was to be a single track shared between international, freight and domestic passenger services, with limited potential to maximise the growth and regeneration benefits that high-speed rail could bring to the UK. It was not adequate to address anticipated demand. It would have allowed for just a small number of international services and created a conflict between those, freight and London orbital services, with limited potential for further inter-regional and intra-regional ones.

Recognising the shortcomings of that link route and removing it and its safeguarding from the Bill does not, of course, remove the strong arguments in favour of a good-quality link between the UK’s two high-speed lines and between the UK and the European high-speed rail network. Indeed, as I said yesterday, Richard Threlfall, head of infrastructure at KPMG, is quoted in the engineering press as saying that it is a “great tragedy” to scrap the link and “complete nonsense” not to have the two lines connected. I absolutely concur with his judgment. Clearly, at some time in the future we are going to need a much-enhanced capacity such as a dedicated twin-track line capable of working as a dual-purpose line for international and domestic services. We therefore need to look at the physical alternatives to the proposed and now rejected link, including the possibility of tunnelling to provide a connection with the west coast main line and HS2. We need to start that discussion and evaluation now.

I really urge the Minister to reconsider his position, because such a link also opens up the possibility of inter-regional and intra-regional services, as well as international links. We know there is demand for direct rail services from the midlands, the north-west and Yorkshire to east London, Essex and Kent without having to go through central London.

I reiterate the tribute I paid yesterday to colleagues across the political spectrum from Kent and Essex county councils who have collaborated with my own borough of Newham to demonstrate that demand through research published in the 2013 report, “Travel market demand and the HS1-HS2 link”. It concluded that potential increases in domestic demand enabled by an HS2-HS1 link of adequate capacity would bring significant benefits and, therefore, strengthen the business case for HS2 overall. Consultants commissioned by Greengauge 21 research highlighted an historic lack of long-distance, cross-London connectivity, only some of which will be addressed by the additions from Thameslink and Crossrail. The net effect is that many journeys end up being made by car, making use of the busy M25 simply to avoid the difficulty of cross-London transfers. I have to admit that I am guilty of making such journeys.

The report discerned in particular seven inter-regional domestic service markets that would benefit from a transfer to rail from other modes—especially car journeys on the M25—if there were an HS2-HS1 link. It concluded:

“The increase in rail share is between 7% and 23%, which is a remarkably high transfer”,

such that a

“new geography would get direct benefit from HS2 services: Essex, East/South East London, Kent, parts of Suffolk and East Sussex”.

Five of the seven inter-regional services include a focus on Stratford and enable connections to the west midlands and the north-west, the west of England and south Wales, the east midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside, and north-west London and Milton Keynes. The report aggregates that increase in domestic inter-regional demand as equating to 45% of demand emanating from central London, or 25% of the whole demand from Greater London. Along with increases in international demand from the link, those benefits will justify investment in the HS2-HS1 link and add significantly to the core business case for HS2. It will be seen that Stratford would play a key role in such substantial service development.

It strikes me as a great pity that there has not yet been any work to give a financial value to the opportunities to run those inter-regional services, even though the demand is clearly there. The Government must surely take note of that: the interconnectivity cannot be denied and the common sense of the link is obvious. The time to act is now and I seek an assurance today from the Government that they will commission a further examination of the demand, assess the economic benefit and put that into the mix when reviewing the potential for a future link between HS1 and HS2.

Although I am conscious of and totally support the need to contain the costs of HS2, I am also conscious of the old maxim, “penny wise, pound foolish”. We must take care not to take decisions now—indeed, we should avoid them—that would create obstacles down the line to securing maximum growth in the economy, particularly in regions to the north of London and in the midlands, as well as in east London.

The current approach also fails to recognise the environmental advantages, including reducing car travel on crucial networks such as the M25 and relieving pressure on central London interchanges and termini. We know that connectivity and capacity are far and away the most important issues for travellers—more important even than speed. Stratford International has both in spades, and I make no apology for reminding the House of that fact yet again.

We are discussing investment for a high-speed railway network designed to last until the next century. We must be strategic in our approach, squeeze value from every pound of spending and not overlook the opportunity to strengthen the business case for the entire network. Dragging our suitcases along streets in London, however desirable those streets may be, is not a 21st-century solution to the issue of connectivity.

[Frank Dobson]

Does my hon. Friend accept that the proposed walk is along Euston road, which has the worst air pollution in London, and for which the Government are being prosecuted under European air quality legislation?

[Lyn Brown]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for supporting my case in his speech and in that intervention. Frankly, the Stratford option would help us enormously with the difficulties in his own area, which he has raised.

Above all, we need to consider how we can, in the not-too-distant future, secure an improved, fully integrated, robust link between HS1 and HS2. The link should be available for international and domestic services routed through Stratford at the heart of the growing east London economy, and benefiting economies in the midlands, in the north and indeed across the whole country.

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[Mr Goodwill]

The hon. Lady’s amendment was about the link. I made the point that it would be possible to petition to ensure that a link was not obviated, but the link itself, whichever route it might take, was not covered. Therefore, in the same way that we have provision for the Heathrow spur in phase 1, it would be possible to petition to ensure that the construction of phase 1 would not rule out any future link. I thought that was one of the very first points I made—if the hon. Lady was paying attention then.

[Lyn Brown]

I have paid great attention to everything the Minister has said, both today and yesterday, and I cannot remember hearing the word “Stratford” come from him at the Dispatch Box. Given that I have listened to every word he has said, I am hoping I will be able to add him to my Christmas card list, as he now gives Stratford some confidence.

[Mr Goodwill]

I am certainly happy to mention Stratford, but Stratford is not within the scope of the Bill at this stage. I made it clear in my opening remarks that this is about constructing a railway from Euston to Birmingham, with the intervening stations and other works, and not, at this stage, about including Stratford. In fact, the Bill does not include Stratford, so perhaps she should get to work on her policy people in the Labour party. I am sure they will be beavering away, busy writing their manifesto, and she might be able to be slightly more persuasive.

It is interesting, because people in Sheffield were keen to make the point to me that they wanted phase 2, which is not within the scope of this Bill, to go into Sheffield city centre, because a station was needed there. I am now being told that stations are needed way out. The idea that we could be served by Stratford and Old Oak Common, without the need for a city centre station, is the exact opposite of what I heard in Sheffield.

[Lyn Brown]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the Olympic games were held in Stratford in 2012? The idea that Stratford is “way out” shows that he is himself a little distanced from the reality of what London is. Stratford offers interconnectivity through the rail networks in the east of England and to the north. It also offers economic opportunity. The idea that we will be wandering down roads with our suitcases in the rain shows the limit of his imagination. I would ask him gently—because I like him very much—whether he would reconsider his position.

[Mr Goodwill]

The hon. Lady makes some very good points, I am sure. I would merely make the point that the distance from Meadowhall station, outside Sheffield, to the centre of Sheffield is less than the distance between Stratford and the centre of London. It is interesting that when we talk to cities such as Nottingham, Sheffield and others that are served by parkway stations rather than city centre stations, they see the importance of having a station in the city centre. However, I understand the point she makes about Stratford.

Should the House approve the motions, the matter will move to the Select Committee to start hearing the petitions of those affected by the scheme. This is a crucial moment in the process and one that many have waited many years for. I therefore believe that the House has an obligation to ensure that we swiftly progress to that point. I believe that the motions as drafted provide a fair and reasonable framework for both petitioners and the Committee. As I have said, I do not believe that the proposed amendments would add to the Committee’s ability to hear petitioners or progress its work effectively. Indeed, in some cases the amendments seem to work against the interests of the petitioners and should be rejected. Indeed, as I read them, many of the amendments gave me the impression that they were designed to frustrate the Committee’s work, rather than facilitate it, but maybe that was one of the objectives.