High Speed Rail (Crewe - Manchester) Bill

Debate between Robert Largan and Peter Bone

2nd reading
Monday 20th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Largan (High Peak) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), who I have known for nearly 15 years. He is a great friend of mine and I know he is a fantastic champion for his constituents. He spoke passionately about how he is standing up for them and how this project has impacted them. On his wider points opposing HS2, what he said was almost entirely nonsensical and I look forward to demolishing it in a moment.

In the long run we are all dead, according to John Maynard Keynes, and that attitude has been wholeheartedly embraced by many politicians throughout the years. That is understandable, because it is all too easy and tempting to focus on short-term urgent political gains and it is always difficult to spend all our political and financial capital on long-term strategic decisions for which we will get no credit and whose benefit will not be felt for decades to come. We are seeing this short-termism hurt our country in many ways, most acutely through the failure of the Blair Government to renew our nuclear power stations, which we are really feeling now, so I think this Government deserve a lot of credit for going ahead with high-speed rail.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

There might be a contrary view that people in this place sometimes decide on these nice shiny things—for example, George Osborne and his super-duper high-speed trains—knowing full well that they will not have to be there to implement them. The Government might say that in 50 years’ time they want net zero or whatever it is, but they are not going to be there. That is what has happened in this case: it is a white elephant. Come on!

[Robert Largan]

Well, I am very glad I took that intervention. I would say that perhaps George Osborne did expect to be here, but that is beside the point.

As I was saying, I believe that the Government deserve significant credit for taking a very long-term decision that will be of huge benefit to the country, although they will not get any credit for it for a long time to come. Let us contrast that with the Leader of the Opposition, who spent his first four years in Parliament focusing on two objectives. The first was to block High Speed 2 and the billions of investment in the north of England. The second was to try to make the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) Prime Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Largan]

Yes, capacity is the key point.

[Mr Bone]

As my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) obviously knows more about Wellingborough than I do, she might mention that the cattle trucks they are now using, as we cannot spend proper money because it is being wasted on HS2, are of great detriment to my constituents. By the way, a person cannot get on at Wellingborough and go north. It is a total waste, totally wrong. If there was any argument not to pass this nonsense tonight, she should come to Wellingborough and then she would be on my side. Does my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Robert Largan) agree?

[Robert Largan]

It gives me great pleasure to facilitate that tête-à-tête between my hon. Friends the Members for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) and for Wellingborough (Mr Bone).

One of the most frequent tropes used by opponents of HS2 is, “We don’t need to invest in rail because we have high-speed broadband. Everyone will be working from home and having remote meetings, so it is not a problem at all.” How would we deliver freight via Zoom? It is not possible to deliver millions of tonnes of freight a year over the internet, and those who argue otherwise are completely missing the point. We desperately need to move away from road haulage and on to rail freight, which is one of the big benefits of HS2. It opens up capacity not only for passengers but for rail freight, too. I am very proud to represent a large number of quarries, and I chair the all-party group on mining and quarrying. One big challenge is getting all the aggregate out of our quarries and on to site. At the moment, a huge volume of that is done by road, by HGVs, which causes huge problems across the Peak district. Being able to increase that capacity is a big benefit of high-speed rail.

I next come on to address the point about cost, which has always been mentioned. People say that the cost of high-speed rail is “astronomical” and “completely ridiculous”, and that this is “a white elephant”. Let us consider the opponents of HS2’s worst-case-scenario cost figures—I think they are massively inflated, but let us take them at their word. How much would that actually cost when we spread it out over the lifetime of the project, which is decades? Even on the worst-case scenario, we are looking at about £5 billion a year, which is half of what we spend on overseas aid every year. When we are talking about a huge investment to upgrade the most important railway line in the country, spending 0.25% of our GDP a year over several decades does not seem to be a disproportionate amount of money.

Another of my favourite myths is, “HS2 is bad for the environment.” I recall that in the last one of these debates the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) referred to HS2 as “environmental annihilation”. I am not sure whether she has ever been to Kent, where HS1 exists; it is still the garden of England. One wonders whether some of the opponents of HS2 have ever seen a railway line. We are not talking about eight-lane superhighways; we are talking about a relatively narrow footprint and about beautiful pieces of infrastructure. I would happily take all those people to places such as New Mills and Chapel Milton, where stunning viaducts criss-cross a national park, no less, and are beloved parts of the landscape.

Next, people say, “It’s a false choice. We should be investing in local lines, not spending billions on this big infrastructure project.” That is just a completely false narrative. A big part of opening up this capacity is that it helps existing commuter lines, with High Peak being the perfect example of that. Commuters on the Buxton line heading into Manchester from places such as Whaley Bridge, New Mills, Chapel-en-le-Frith and Buxton are on a really poor service. Why is that? It is because it has to go through the Stockport-Piccadilly corridor, which is one of the most congested lines anywhere in the country. There is not enough space on that line to get a more frequent or more reliable service into Manchester. HS2 opens up the Stockport corridor and will allow for a more reliable and more frequent service for my constituents.

We are also doing all the investment in the local lines too. The £137 million upgrade of the Hope Valley line in my constituency is under construction already; the HS2 Minister recently came with me to see the construction progress. That is also going to have a huge positive impact on commuters in my constituency and, again, it is going to open up freight capacity to help get goods out of the quarries in the Peak District and through into market.

Yes, I would like us to go even further. I would love to see us upgrade the Glossop line as well, as there are interesting proposals to go for a double track beyond Broadbottom to Glossop and to improve signalling on the way into Manchester Piccadilly, which could open up even more improvements on one of the fastest growing and busiest commuter lines anywhere in the country. That would be fantastic too.

Having gone through a number of the myths in relatively quick fashion, let us have a look at what we are talking about tonight, which is this Crewe to Manchester Piccadilly leg. It is really important that we get this right. A number of Opposition Members have talked about Manchester Piccadilly station, and I agree that it is essential that we get this right. Huge sums of money will be involved and this is an opportunity to dramatically improve one of the key stations not just for Manchester or for people in High Peak who commute in there, but for people across the entire north of England. This needs fixing and it is important that we explore all the options, including an underground line.