High-Speed Rail

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) on securing this important debate, with the specific title and terms of reference that he spelled out. I also congratulate him on his powerful description and analysis of many issues involved; I agree with a great deal of what he said, although not with every full stop and comma.

I want to make a few points about the project and how it relates to the north-west of England and the north of the country beyond Birmingham. I would like to draw an analogy with trams. At the moment, Manchester is trebling the size of its tram network, while Liverpool, Southampton and Leeds do not have trams. The important point that I draw from that is not that Manchester’s case, which is good for the tram network, was much better than the case of the other cities, but that the 10 districts of Greater Manchester and the three political parties were united. To cite the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth), the politics in Merseyside were dysfunctional when it came to trams. Having all-party support and as much backing as possible for a project is almost as important—in some ways more important—than different economic cases, a cost-benefit analysis and an economic impact analysis.

It is important to keep such an all-party group together. This country has too little infrastructure, which damages the whole economy. One of the reasons why we have too little transport infrastructure is that we have not always been able to build an alliance between the parties. I could give example after example of where we should have had motorways, railways, trams and runways where we do not have them. Therefore I welcome a detailed debate, whether it comes from the Front Benches, the Back Benches or people with constituency involvement. The high-speed rail system is a major piece of infrastructure, which, whatever its impact to the north and the south, will help the country as a whole, and it is important to understand that.

I have read many cost-benefit analyses over the years, and while it is important to prepare them, the way in which the Treasury, the Department for Transport and other Departments look at them means that they contain so many variables that one can make them say anything one likes.

The important thing about the project is that it has been justified on two grounds. The first is that there is an immediate issue with capacity between Birmingham and the south, and the second, which comes along later, is that it will help rebalance the country, and the country certainly needs rebalancing.

On the second justification, I have spent my political life trying to get investment into the north of England and into Manchester in particular. If we want to use the project to rebalance the country, it is odd to start building it from the south to the north and not put a spade in the ground in the north of England for potentially 15 or 16 years. The reason for that is the reason that we always get from the Department for Transport: the capacity problem. Such an analysis of why we invest in infrastructure is one of the reasons why 95% of our capital expenditure on transport in England goes into London and the south-east—it is crowded there. If we use that as a basis for our investment decisions, we will always put it there and increase crowdedness, effectively subsidising congestion. I would argue that if we want to make an impact on the north-south divide, we need to start in the north and look at all the projects that are determined by congestion and overcrowding as economically transformative. I know that the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys will object to my use of that term; I rarely use it, but it is important in the context of getting as many bangs for our bucks economically, as well as dealing with the immediate transport problem. I ask the Department to look at the issue generally.

I think that the claims for the impact on the north of England from High Speed 2 are ambiguous. I did not go on the trips—I was not serving on the Transport Committee at the time—but there is certainly a case that Cordoba, Turin, Lille and Lyon have benefited. One could also make the case that high-speed rail has sometimes had a negative impact on those cities. The same is true with roads, or with any transport infrastructure, because roads go both ways: they can take economic activity away from or into an area.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

I represent Stoke-on-Trent, where there are fears that High Speed 2 could reduce connectivity if the line passes the city and does not stop there, while the capacity on the west coast main line—the Manchester-London route—is diminished. While Stoke-on-Trent might benefit from the growth of Manchester or Birmingham, there are fears in the city about its own connectivity with HS2.

[Graham Stringer]

There is a fear. There are genuine worries in Stoke, and potentially Coventry and south Wales, that there could be a negative impact. I would ask those areas please not to have a dog-in-a-manger attitude and say, “Let us not have this excellent new piece of transport infrastructure.” Let us work out how we can get investment in those areas, using either high-speed rail or something else. If people end up just opposing the project, they will damage the economic and transport base of the whole country.