High Speed 2 Compensation

Mike Kane Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke) on securing this important debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the time. I also thank the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Gavin Williamson) and the hon. Members for Chesham and Amersham (Sarah Green), for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan), for Buckingham (Greg Smith) and for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) for contributing to the debate.

The stories we have heard, and those that have been reported over the years, show the very real consequences of this Tory HS2 fiasco—[Interruption.] There is some muttering from Conservative MPs. If the civil service and the Department for Transport were not involved in the decision to cancel that was announced by the Prime Minister in Manchester—it was done on the back of a fag packet, which has been used today, all day—it is no wonder that we got this type of fiasco.

We have heard of people having to leave the family home that they worked hard for, businesses having to pack up and leave their premises, towns and villages seeing homes targeted after they were bought and later left to rot, and farmers being forced to move or unable to use their land for years because of more and more delays to HS2., We have heard of cash-strapped councils such as Cheshire East Council, which the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich told us paid out £11 million. I commend the Labour spokesman Connor Naismith on his campaign to have the council reimbursed for the money lost.

Communities have had their future put on pause for years and families have found getting compensation to be a painful and drawn-out experience. Lives and businesses have been disrupted for a decade, and for what? A staggering £65 billion high-speed train line that will now not even reach the communities that have been impacted—a train line that, according to the chair of HS2, will result in fewer seats and longer journeys for those travelling north of Birmingham. What a result for the people living in those communities and across the north.

All that is even before we consider how much taxpayers’ money has been spent on the compensation. According to reports, almost £423 million has been spent buying up 424 properties on the western leg from Birmingham to Manchester, and £164 million spent buying 530 “blighted” properties on the eastern leg to Leeds. Today comes the news that the Government are lifting safeguarding on the land; not content with cancelling high-speed rail to the north, the Prime Minister has now decided to salt the earth. If we were not aware already, that must be the final nail in the coffin for levelling-up.

[Sir Gavin Williamson]

Can the hon. Gentleman clarify whether, in the unfortunate and unlikely event of a Labour Government, they would reimpose safeguarding on phase 2a?

[Mike Kane]

Like Napoleon out of Moscow, it is routed through the poisoned-earth strategy with the lifting of the safeguarding today. We have to be responsible. We will have to see what the books tell us if we are to enter Government in the weeks or months to come.

We have seen 14 years of promises to the north and the midlands broken. In the Prime Minister’s desperate, failing attempt to rebrand himself as the change candidate at the next election, he decided to rush through an alternative plan at the party conference—a plan that mentions places such as Crewe, which, as the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich rightly said, would have greatly benefited, but a plan that the Prime Minister admitted was only “illustrative”. Illustrative? The Network North plan announced fantastic news for my Wythenshawe and Sale East constituency—a new Metrolink line to Manchester airport. It opened in 2016. That illustrates the chaos and the confusion of that announcement.

The now Foreign Secretary was not alone on the Conservative side in criticising the decision. Two former Chancellors warned the Prime Minister that his actions were “huge economic self-harm”, while the Tory Mayor of the West Midlands described it as “cancelling the future”—a great line, if I may say so to the hon. Member for Lichfield. In what is a consistent theme for this Government, this whole mess has been created by not consulting the communities affected, not speaking to our Metro Mayors and not listening to the businesses across the country that were depending on the project.

After 14 years, communities have had enough of the broken promises from this broken Government. Labour will not repeat those mistakes—mismanaging major projects, turning people’s lives upside down, taking their trust for granted, impacting their businesses and livelihoods and failing to deliver.

[Greg Smith]

I am listening carefully to the shadow Minister, who is telling us that a mythical future Labour Government would not disrupt people’s lives. Does he understand that building HS2 does devastate people’s lives? Big infrastructure devastates people’s lives and there is no way to do it without doing that.

[Mike Kane]

That is exactly why Labour would do it with the Mayors, with the communities and in consultation with those it would affect and impact. HS2 was going to go under my back garden—that was my interest.

[Theo Clarke]

The hon. Gentleman just said that Labour would do it. Just to be clear, can I confirm that Labour is now saying it will bring back HS2 if it wins the next election?

[Mike Kane]

I refer to the answer I gave to the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire; that remains our position. Labour has launched an independent expert review of transport infrastructure headed by industry leader Jürgen Maier, originally of Siemens, to learn the lessons from this shambles and to ensure that we deliver transport infrastructure faster and more effectively, so that communities are not taken for a ride with nothing to show for it, as has been the case here.

In this debate we have heard just a few of the many examples of people’s lives being impacted by this Conservative HS2 scandal. It is clear that communities are still paying the price for the delays of the past decade and the chaos of the past few months.

[Michael Fabricant]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous in giving way. Would he generously accept that, if it had not been for Lord Adonis changing the original plan, HS2 would have gone nowhere near areas such as the Chilterns? It would have gone up a completely different route and been a connected railway, and would probably have been quite worthwhile.

[Mike Kane]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention, but seriously, after 14 years, those types of excuses are wearing extraordinarily thin, if he does not mind my saying so.

I hope the Minister will outline what is being done to address this chaos—costs are still going up after the decision in October—to ensure that those impacted receive the compensation that they deserve, as Members have well underlined, and that the same mistakes are not made again and again in future. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s remarks. Once again, I thank the hon. Member for Stafford for securing the debate and all Members who have participated.