HS2

Rob Butler Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I am very grateful to the Petitions Committee for securing this debate, because HS2 is undoubtedly the single biggest issue in my constituency of Aylesbury. Indeed, 2,999 petitioners are from my constituency—it is second only to Chesham and Amersham—and I have received more than 400 emails asking me to speak today.

I completely share the views of the vast majority of residents across the Aylesbury constituency that HS2 should be scrapped. As I stated at the beginning of my own election campaign, I do not believe that we need this railway. It makes no sense economically, owing to a weak business case and dramatically escalating construction costs. It makes no sense environmentally, with more than 100 ancient woodlands being destroyed for a line that will never be carbon neutral over its 120-year lifespan. I remain absolutely convinced that the scheme will do enormous damage to our area with zero benefit for the people of Aylesbury and the nearby villages.

Let us take some examples. The residents of Stoke Mandeville and Fairford Leys are already impacted by the construction work that is under way. Aylesbury itself is at risk of flooding owing to some of the methods that HS2 Ltd insists on using, despite repeated pleas to do more to alleviate the peril. Indeed, a recent FOI inquiry revealed an alarming lack of detailed knowledge of the impact on the aquifer of HS2’s construction.

The popular and beautiful village of Wendover

“will be more directly affected by the first phase of the HS2 project than any rural settlement of comparable size.”

Those are not my words. That is a direct quote from the House of Lords Select Committee. One key way to mitigate the horrendous consequences of HS2 for Wendover would be the construction of bored, mined tunnel. Time and again, local residents have provided compelling evidence of the case for such a tunnel, but time and again they have been told they cannot have it, so they have asked for a full, thorough and independent analysis of their proposal versus the one in the consented scheme. Even for that, they have again been told no. It is hardly surprising that they are up in arms.

Of course, we should not need a tunnel in Wendover because we should not have HS2 at all. There are so many things the HS2 budget could be better spent on. I have three suggestions. Local train lines—across the north of England and indeed in my constituency, notably the Aylesbury link of East West Rail, which has a better business case than HS2—would dramatically cut traffic congestion on the roads and reduce environmental harm, but we are still waiting for funding approval.

We could use the money for high-speed broadband, which would enable the new ways of working that are now becoming embedded following the pandemic. Parts of my constituency still struggle to get wi-fi despite being less than 50 miles from central London. Indeed, we could just save some of the huge bill, given the hundreds of billions of pounds we have had to borrow in the past 18 months. Any of those options would be much better for my constituency and for the country than this painful, lumbering white-elephant project.