High Speed Rail (Crewe - Manchester) Bill (Instruction) (No. 3)

Mark Hendrick Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Huw Merriman]

I cannot give the hon. Gentleman an exact and firm date, but I am seeking to put the Bill Committee back on track, rather than restart the entire process—something that has been championed and supported by the Mayors of Manchester and Liverpool, and others. By its very definition we will be looking to deliver the Bill back, so that we can crack on and give the hon. Gentleman an earlier date than he may perhaps believe will be the case.

Since the Network North announcement, we have been engaging local leaders and MPs about the form the connection between Liverpool and Manchester will take, and we have held many discussions with local leaders to establish what their communities want from such a link. Alongside that, we must ensure that the options being considered represent the best possible use of the £12 billion funding available. On 25 March I was able to deposit a written statement in this place on the outcome of those discussions. We have heard clear support for a railway with stops at Liverpool, Warrington Bank Quay, Manchester airport and Manchester Piccadilly. Local leaders also supported the plan that the new railway should follow the broad alignment set out in the 2021 integrated rail plan.

The section of railway that we are discussing today is part of the plan’s larger Northern Powerhouse Rail network. We will improve connections on both sides of the Pennines, both by building new lines and by upgrading existing ones. Trains on this line will go past Manchester and on to York via Leeds. We will also upgrade the existing railway between Leeds and Bradford to reduce journey times and increase capacity between those destinations. Stations will also be upgraded and made more accessible. The environmental impact of the network will be reduced by further electrification.

With this plan, towns and cities across the whole of the north will benefit from direct services to Manchester airport. Passengers travelling to the airport from Liverpool could see their journeys slashed by almost an hour, while passengers from Leeds could benefit from a 41-minute reduction. The new station at Manchester airport will unlock the potential to further promote the international airport, acting as a catalyst for growth across the north-west.

That is just one of the benefits that Network North—our new long-term plan for transport—will deliver. We are refocusing on the journeys that really matter to people, connecting towns, cities and rural communities in all regions of the country. Every penny of the £19.8 billion committed to the northern leg of HS2 will be reinvested in the north. Every penny of the £9.6 billion committed to the midlands leg will be reinvested in the midlands. Bradford will get a brand-new station and connection, reducing journey times from Manchester from 56 minutes to 30 minutes.

[Sir Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

As the Minister knows, the commitment for Birmingham to Manchester was in three Conservative manifestos. What he is now announcing is controversial and breaks with the tradition of cross-party agreement that we have seen up to now. The offering in terms of east-west connectivity is laudable, but the fact that we cannot get a direct link and increased capacity—it is not just about speed—from Birmingham through to Manchester will affect the whole of the north-west and stop much of the wealth in the south from getting further north because of decreased business activity.

[Huw Merriman]

I take the hon. Member’s point. It comes down to choices, and the choice as led by the Prime Minister was to cancel the stages of HS2 north of Handsacre and dedicate those moneys to other parts of the north and midlands in particular to connect those cities, which would not have seen a direct benefit from HS2.

As an example, let us take Bradford, a city that felt sore that it had missed out from the integrated rail plan. That decision provides £2 billion for a new station for Bradford. The concern that Bradford would have had was that, as things had stood, it may have seen businesses relocate away to, say, Manchester, because not only was it not receiving anything, but Manchester was receiving a lot. Ultimately, it comes down to choices.

[Huw Merriman]

I will give way one last time.

[Sir Mark Hendrick]

I take the point that the Minister is making—it is an improvement for Bradford—but HS2 would also have gone on another spur up from Birmingham to Leeds. Improving connectivity between Leeds and Bradford, which is not far, plus the station improvements, would have been far more beneficial than what he is proposing.

[Huw Merriman]

We have committed to delivering a faster route between Leeds and Bradford that will bring the journey time down to 13 minutes; that commitment is there. Look, it comes down to choices, and we have been quite clear with our choice, which is to repurpose the moneys from HS2. I believe that Labour’s position is to do likewise, because the Leader of the Opposition went to Manchester and made the same point that the line would not be recommitted. The key point is this: is the Labour party committed to repurposing for those Bradford projects? I am sure that we will hear from its Front Bench spokesperson.

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[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I do not think I will detain the House long. I want to say two or three things. The first is that there is an element of unreality about this debate, as there has been about many debates on Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2 phase 2b. Mr Deputy Speaker, you may remember this as a northern MP—I am sure the Minister will remember it, too—but almost exactly 10 years ago, on 23 June, George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer went to the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester and announced Northern Powerhouse Rail.

Since that time, the rail system across the north of England has had three names: it has been HS3, Crossrail of the north, and Northern Powerhouse Rail. How much work has been done on it? There has been no design work, no land purchased and no money dedicated to it. Ten years later, we are here, and the Minister says, “We will crack on with it.” “Crack on”, if I may say, after 10 years of complete inactivity when it was a Government commitment, is a rum old phrase to use for Northern Powerhouse Rail, if the Minister does not mind me saying so. He has made a decent fist of a cackhanded decision by the Government on HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail.

At different times and for political reasons and for other reasons, people have counterpoised against each other the Crossrail of the north, or Northern Powerhouse Rail, or HS3, against HS2. That is a strange thing to do, because if we increase the capacity of the rail system with HS2, those passengers have to have somewhere to go. The same applies if we increase the capacity, as I hope we do, with Northern Powerhouse Rail. If we have a good system going from Manchester to Hull via Bradford and Leeds and York, those passengers have to go somewhere.

If we have a new station at Manchester airport, we want people to come through it in great numbers, not just east-west but from the south as well. So that is a mistake, as has been pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan). While I respect the hon. Members for Stone (Sir William Cash) and for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), they have been consistently opposed to HS2 for constituency reasons and how they see the impact of HS2 on Stafford, for example. Many of us on this side have seen the economic and transport benefits of HS2.

What I do not accept at all is the Prime Minister, unselected by his own party and unelected by the people of the United Kingdom, turning up after manifesto commitments from both parties—all three parties, in fact, if we go back to the original decision in 2009 when all three parties supported HS2—and saying, “We will stop it.” Whether we are talking about Northern Powerhouse Rail or HS2, the economic development of the north of England has, in effect, been abandoned by this Government. I do not know if the Prime Minister has ever driven up—or been driven up—the M6, but it is at full capacity. The decision to not go ahead with HS2 will reduce not only the capacity of the rail system but the speed because the trains will have to be split and they will not tilt. So the Government have isolated the north of England, and Manchester in particular.

Incidentally—this is not the main point of what I was going to say—I hear the Minister using the pork barrel politics of this Government by saying, “Well, Bradford can get this, so therefore it will not be supporting HS2.” When I chaired the board of Manchester airport, people in Yorkshire, the north-east and across the north of England knew the economic benefits of transport coming to Manchester. There was a North of England regional consortium that supported both Manchester airport and better links to it. So it is completely wrong to juxtapose investment in Bradford—which Bradford needs, as it has been neglected by most of the north of England—against investment in HS2 going to Manchester airport and to Manchester.

[Sir Mark Hendrick]

I declare an interest, in that I was a director of Manchester airport as well, some years back, as a Salford city councillor appointed to that position. Many in the House—although not the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton)—will remember phase 1of HS2, and I sat on that Committee for the best part of a year and a half. The whole process was very elongated—I will try not to make my intervention too elongated—but what it boiled down to was that when members of that Committee, particularly those on the Government side, had constituency interests, they tended to be far more accommodating, and the costs spiralled because there were tunnels going here, there and everywhere instead of going direct. That inflated the price. The reason we are in this mess now is that the Government have realised that we are close to an election and they want to spend £12 billion of the £37 billion that should have been spent on phase 2. They are now scattering it around certain places in the north of England in the hope that they can use that promise to get more—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. This is a very elongated intervention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)]

I am conscious of the time, and we have a number of Members to get through.

This debate is about fairness and scrutiny. For those living along the 24 km section of Northern Powerhouse Rail that is common with phase 2 and who will be blighted by this process, especially between Rostherne and Warrington, is it really fair that the route has not been defined? I do not think it is fair, because it will have a major impact on all the people in that area for an awful long time.

I think all of us in this House believe that it is right to be investing more in our railways and road networks, whether they are in Staffordshire and the wider midlands or in the north of England. I, like many Members in this House, find it crazy how much difficulty we have crossing from Yorkshire into Lancashire or vice versa and on infrastructure that has sadly been neglected over multiple generations. But we are not talking about small amounts of money here. We are talking, at the most conservative end of the spectrum, about £12 billion, and if one were to speak to less-involved individuals and rail experts, most of them would say that the current proposals on NPR are in region of £16.2 billion.

Surely on the basis of scrutiny and accountability, this House should be very interested and engaged in how such large amounts of money are going to be spent and properly purposed. Some of us across the House will have differing views, but we should be able to scrutinise the proposals properly and put arguments forward for our constituents and the communities we represent, as opposed to this just being shuffled off upstairs into a Committee. Though we are grateful to many members of that Committee and the former Committees there have been for the work they do, this issue involves significant amounts of public money and will not be properly debated.

Looking at this project in its purest form, we are giving permission for a railway that starts in a field in Cheshire and ends somewhere in the Pennines at a place called node 3. I am not quite sure where node 3 is, and I am not sure whether many constituents of mine or people in this House have expressed a particular desire to visit node 3. That is how ill-defined this all is. We are effectively giving a complete pass to a small group of—I am sure—well-meaning and well-intentioned Members of this House to determine so much, when there is much debate we need to have.

There may be a great amount of discord. There will be Conservative Members such as my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) and for Stone (Sir William Cash) and myself who have great concern about the HS2 project in its entirety and considerable concern as to whether what is being proposed will get the best value for money and deliver the best service for our constituents across the midlands and the north. There will be Members on the Opposition Benches, and perhaps those on the Government Benches, with contrasting views, but it is right that the project is properly debated and properly discussed. We are going to be blighting the lives of so many people across Cheshire and other parts of the north-west of England without having had a proper debate.

[Sir Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is the right hon. Gentleman not missing the point by talking, as he has done for however many minutes, about process rather than outcomes? When other countries around the world do major infrastructure projects, they look at the whole picture, decide what they want to do, they get on with it and they finish it. They do not have all the hurdles we have in this country. The French, German, Japanese and Chinese look at this country and laugh. They laugh because the nimbyism that exists on both sides of this House is stopping economic progress and impacting the standing of this country.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. We must ensure interventions are brief because the debate has to finish at 6.30pm. Four more Members wish to speak, possibly, before I have to call the Minister, so I ask colleagues to be conscious of that.