Christmas Adjournment

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Thursday 21st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

As is customary, I wish everyone in the House a happy Christmas.

I want to raise an unseasonal tale of big infrastructure and small business, which affects the Park Royal chunk of my constituency. Park Royal was once Europe’s largest industrial estate. They built things such as planes for both world wars and munitions; the Heinz factory was there, and Guinness emanated from Park Royal, but now Park Royal finds itself on the receiving end of the heavy-handed High Speed 2—that is the big infrastructure. In Ealing Central and Acton, we are blessed: we have a lot of these big infrastructure projects. The planes going to Heathrow fly over us—we are on the flight path. Crossrail is coming to link east and west to our part of the world, and there is also HS2.

However, in this season of good will and good faith—I voted in good faith for the HS2 project, and I like the idea of high-speed rail, connectivity and all those things—a bunch of small businesses in the Park Royal industrial estate feel that they have been shafted. Sorry, that is perhaps unparliamentary language; these businesses have been ill treated by HS2—at this time of year—and they wanted me to raise their plight.

I am doing that in this forum because, talking of good will, Robert Goodwill—sorry, I cannot remember his constituency.

[Hon. Members]

Scarborough.

[Dr Huq]

That’s it. He’s a good Yorkshireman, isn’t he?

I remember raising HS2 issues with the hon. Gentleman in the House, and it worked for a time, so I want to see whether it will work again. In 2016, when he was the Minister for rail—he is now the children’s Minister—he came to Park Royal. I asked him to see for himself what was going on.

Park Royal used to be a place of big businesses; now, the businesses are much smaller. We have Mediterranean food manufacturers, prop hire, laundries and all sorts of small family businesses, so families, livelihoods and that sort of thing depend on the area. Park Royal has been named in The Independent as a sort of mini-Beirut, which sounds quite scary, but a lot of middle eastern food manufacturers come from the area. If Members have baklava in a west end restaurant, it is likely to have been made in my constituency.

A number of these small companies were initially told that when the HS2 project happened, they would be given six months to relocate. There was no assurance about when that would happen, and these companies are having compulsory purchase orders put on them. So the Minister came with me, and we saw that assurances were received that people would have a relocation grant and be given good time in which to get their businesses up and running again. One of the companies is a prop hire business—probably no one in this House has ever been to one of those. It covers acres and acres, and has vintage telephones, whalebone corsets, ’70s cereal packets and all sorts of things, and it is not easy to relocate those things. Superhire props is the business I am thinking of.

The Minister said there would be a £250,000 disturbance payment, which is a strange phrase describing what happens when someone is forcibly moved elsewhere. However, these payments have not been forthcoming. The thing is that HS2 is very clever: it can operate within the letter of the law, and we are talking about assurances, not legally binding guarantees.

Three hundred employees and their families have written to me. They are facing Christmas with a very uncertain future, because they are about to be CPO’d on 10 January. Some of them have two premises now, so they are paying for two lots of rent, leases and staff. One of them was on BBC London recently. The workers have downed tools and gone because they are not being paid since the advance payment from HS2 has not been forthcoming. When the ghost of Christmas past—the Minister—came to visit and saw what was happening, he gave those promises in good faith, I believe.

Something has gone wrong with HS2. It seems to be haemorrhaging CEOs, and the project has run over time and over budget. Hon. Friends whose constituencies are further into London—my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) and my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq)—opposed it. I did not, but I am losing patience with HS2.

There is also what HS2 does to residents. Three roads in my constituency—Shaftesbury Gardens, Midland Terrace and Wells House Road—face 10 years of works 24/7. Imagine a child born now getting to its 10th birthday and only knowing living on a building site! The only assurance that these residents have been given is for secondary glazing on one side of one of those roads. That is just not good enough.

When I raised this with the Secretary of State for Transport, he said, “My door is always open.” I have written letters and submitted written questions, but I feel a bit like I am banging my head against a brick wall. When we had the initial chink of light after I raised this with the Minister, I saw that it worked to raise these matters in this House, so that is why I am trying again.

It seems as though people are negotiating a Kafkaesque web of bureaucracy in order to get these payments. For a big business with a turnover in the millions, £250,000 is a drop in the ocean. The relocation costs will be much more than that. They feel that the number of hoops they have had to jump through is insupportable.

Old Oak, which Park Royal feeds into, has been identified by the Mayor of London as a super-development opportunity area. There will be 26,000 new dwellings and two tube stations, as well as Crossrail and HS2. There is a lot of promise there. The marketing spiel says that it will be an incubator for new business, but the old businesses that have been built up over years—family businesses—are facing a very bleak Christmas this year.

HS2’s mission statement says that it will give

“sufficient liquidity…to be able to make satisfactory arrangements for relocation”.

That is not the approach that is being taken. This is undermining public confidence in the project. I have been voting for it and trying to defend it, but my local residents and businesses have had enough of HS2.

It is very disappointing that this has come at this time of year. As I say, assurances are only assurances—they are not legally enforceable. They are not worth the paper they are written on, quite frankly. As for Christmas future, I hope that in the new year, which is only next week, we will have better news for the businesses and residents who feel that they have been done over by HS2.