High Speed Rail (London - West Midlands) Bill

Natascha Engel Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Lady share my regret that MPs were shut out from representing their constituents by petitioning the Lords Select Committee? There are constraints at the various stages of a Bill’s consideration in this House, and the Lords Select Committee was an opportunity for our points to be made in detail on behalf of those we represent.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. Before the right hon. Lady answers that question, I remind the House that the amendments are very, very narrow. The amendments are really quite typographical, and they have nothing to do with what happened over there.

[Mrs Gillan]

Thank you very much for reminding me of the rules, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am trying to stick very closely to the amendments. Of course, I am referring to the Lords proceedings and to these amendments. I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) that it is extraordinary that Ministers who represent constituencies along the route, and who were therefore unable to speak in this House, were prohibited from speaking to the Lords Select Committee because the locus standi was challenged by the very organisation set up by the Department for Transport—in collusion, in other words. MPs were shut up on this issue, as they have been in many instances since the project was first thought of.

With your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will now pay tribute to people such as Hilary Wharf and her husband Bruce Weston. They helped to lead the brave HS2 Action Alliance, which still gives advice to beleaguered people and tries to stop or improve this project. My county council, ably led by Councillor Martin Tett, has put an enormous amount of work into the Bill, as has my district council, Chiltern District Council, led by the formidable Councillor Isobel Darby. I particularly mention my parish council, which is struggling to find the resources, alongside the larger councils, to carry out the work necessary to protect and inform its residents.

An additional burden runs from the amendments on traffic regulations, for example, and those costs will fall on our local councils. The amendments covering flood risk, possession of land and changing traffic flows, for example, will lie at the feet of our financially challenged councils, and there is little chance of the full costs being restored to those councils for all the extra work that has been forced on them, unless the Minister tells me different at the Dispatch Box today. In other words, our constituents are paying not once but two or three times over for this project.

Will HS2 be a success? I am still not convinced. Will these amendments make it a success? We learned from last weekend’s newspapers that the Department is so concerned that HS2 may be overtaken by new technology, such as driverless cars, that it is trying to encourage technology companies such as Google and the ever-popular Uber to take a financial stake in the recently announced combined franchise for the west coast main line and HS2 in order to offset the risk that HS2 is, in fact, old technology.

This is my last opportunity to speak on the Bill, and I want to acknowledge, as did the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman, a couple of other people who tried to help those affected by HS2. I think particularly of Neil Caulfield, who tried so hard to help people through an obscure and often frightening process. He was a credit to this House and to the Clerks Department. He was scrupulously fair, and nothing was too much trouble for him. Quite frankly, he went above and beyond the call of duty to try to deal with an arcane process that really should be banished from our procedures in this House.

I also want to mention an amazing constituent, Mr Ray Challinor. He was chairman of the Hyde Heath village society, and his commitment to our community and social action was second to none. Sadly, his family laid him to rest this afternoon. I would have liked to attend his funeral to pay my tribute to him, but I pay my tribute on the Floor of the House because he was not a man who supported HS2. He was a man who was fiercely protective of our local community.

Lastly, I should mention all those individuals who have supported the campaign to either stop or radically change HS2. These are people who often could not afford to donate but did so because they could not believe that the state could ride in such a roughshod fashion over the very people who put it in charge.

The Government will get their way—Royal Assent will be given—but this Bill and this project are tainted by the way in which their people have gone about their business. In a democracy, there should not be a process that is so unequal, giving the state such powers over its citizens without the balance that we would expect from a fair society. I hope that at some stage we will be able to consign this hybrid Bill process to the history books. I wish I could say the same about HS2.