HS2 Cancellation and Network North

William Cash Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jack Brereton]

My hon. Friend has been a long advocate of restoring the important cross-city line. I very much hope that such local considerations will be taken on board and that funding will be directed locally to make a difference. I am sure the Minister will clarify the position and expand on what my hon. Friend said.

When we can see the wood for the trees, the important point is this: there are localised projects that will help knit together our national transport network for the benefit of a far wider range of people than the elite who want to get in and out of London on business expenses as quickly as possible regardless of the consequences for local communities in Staffordshire, like those in Yarnfield and Swynnerton in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). We have already experienced that in north Staffordshire, even before HS2 phase 2a. I am not just talking about the Beeching axe, which was bad enough and of course did not exclusively affect the Potteries; I am talking about the last Labour Government’s decision to make it quicker to get between Manchester and London via the west coast mainline Potteries arc by annihilating three local stations that had survived the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend aware that we led a massive campaign to reopen Stone station, and that the footfall there has been absolutely phenomenal since it was opened, which demonstrates the need to get these stations back in line?

[Jack Brereton]

Absolutely. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Stone station was a victim of the west coast upgrade changes, but thanks to his work and that of those who campaigned for its reopening, it has reopened and been extremely successful. I hope we continue to see those types of station reopen.

The west coast upgrade meant that in Stoke-on-Trent, for marginal time gains between Manchester and London, Etruria station—the very place where the fist sod was cut for the North Staffordshire railway in September 1846—was closed by the Labour Government in September 2005. To the south of the city, Wedgwood and Barlaston stations were suspended in 2004 and neither has subsequently reopened or been maintained in a good state of repair. I understand from Network Rail that neither can now be reopened to passenger services without significant investment and potentially being completely rebuilt, which means that there is now no intermediate local station between Stoke-on-Trent and Stone.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Stone illustrated, the same happened with Stone station, but thanks to his efforts and those of the community, it was reopened in December 2008 and now has some services for that town. So much for Labour’s Strategic Rail Authority! That experience has made us determined that HS2 would either have to work for Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, or we would have to drop it entirely. Unfortunately, it had become clearer and clearer that HS2 would not bring benefits to Staffordshire, certainly not the net benefit that we would need to see to justify the horrendous disruption, painful compulsory purchases and the disruption of ancient woodland.

A constituent attended my surgery recently whose business has been and continues to be affected. Unbelievably, he has recently been asked by HS2 Ltd to commission further thousands of pounds of costly reports to prove the value of his business, despite the 2a route no longer even going ahead. He is not alone: many businesses and property owners throughout Staffordshire continue to be hounded by HS2 Ltd and forced to give up their businesses or sell their land, despite phase 2a being cancelled. A line must be drawn under the compulsory purchase order process. I am sure we will hear more about that tomorrow in the Backbench Business debate on HS2 compensation that is being led by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Theo Clarke). Ultimately, however, it is essential that the Government keep to their word and urgently lift the safeguards on the 2a route, and that efforts are made to rapidly extricate HS2 from the lives of people in those communities and elsewhere in Staffordshire.

Every day that goes by costs the public purse considerably in extortionate security costs and wasteful legal processes for sites that are no longer even needed. If further clarity were needed that HS2 would not bring benefits to Staffordshire or indeed nationally, it was striking to hear from Trevor Parkin and Trevor Gould from the Stone Railway Campaign Group at the oral evidence session of the Transport Committee in Birmingham on 30 November last year. Trevor Gould said:

“I was a great advocate of the HS2 project. I fully support the idea in principle and I still think that it is important that high-speed trains are segregated from freight and slower passenger trains, but unfortunately this HS2 is not the way to do it; it does not do what it says on the tin. It does not release capacity north of Birmingham, it does not improve connectivity because of that”.

As we know, the three fast trains an hour currently serving Staffordshire—one via Stafford and two via Stoke-on-Trent—were set to be replaced by one HS2 service calling at both, which would have terminated at Macclesfield. That is a major reduction on what we currently enjoy, so it is not at all clear that there would have been extra capacity or connectivity, which is what HS2 was supposed to address. In fact, according to HS2 Ltd’s updated 2022 strategic outline business case, the only places north of Birmingham that would have received a higher number of services than they do today would have been Runcorn and Liverpool.

In the meantime, there is a pressing list of other projects that need to be delivered to ensure local services and connectivity into the hub stations are maximised. The reason for that is the major constraints at Crewe, particularly Crewe North junction, which were made worse post phase 2. HS2 had no plans to increase the number of platforms or address the constraints at Crewe North junction, which means the only possible way to run HS2 services would have been to take out what already exists, removing local and regional connectivity. I am not even convinced that HS2 intended to run any meaningful service to Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield.

On 10 January, the executive chair of HS2 Ltd, Sir Jon Thompson, appeared before the Transport Committee and I asked him to clarify some striking comments that he had made to the Public Accounts Committee on 16 November. I put it to him that he had said to the PAC that if HS2 phase 2a had indeed been built,

“HS2 trains would never have gone on to the west coast main line”

at Handsacre and that “they would have joined” the west coast main line only “north of Manchester.” To that he replied: “Yes.” Of course, I pressed him on that because it would mean that the proposed services to Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield were never actually going to materialise, even on completion of phase 2a. Sir Jon said that

“if 2a had been constructed, the advice to me, which I have got written down here, is that we would not have used that junction.”

That is Handsacre junction. I await further clarity in writing, but that does, at face value, confirm my worst fears about what HS2 Ltd was actually planning at Handsacre, which is a fait accompli of connections that would not have carried HS2 trains up the Potteries arc—and it would have all been too late by then to do anything about it.

Macclesfield—always a very odd choice of terminus, fine though that market town undoubtedly is—appears to have been a fig leaf to quieten Staffordshire down during the construction phase. Originally, under the hybrid Bill of 2013, it was proposed to create a full connection at Handsacre for HS2 by connecting the new track into the existing fast lines, enabling HS2 services to join on to the west coast main line. Then, in 2019—Trevor Parkin of the Stone Railway Campaign Group made this point very well at the Transport Committee on 30 November—HS2 redrew its intentions at Handsacre in order to join the slow lines of the west coast main line and not the fast lines. The options analysis for that extraordinary move has never been published, and we still do not know why that bizarre decision was taken.

With the cancellation of phase 2, it is clearly essential that we now revert to the original design for the Handsacre junction, to enable a proper connection with the fast lines to maximise capacity and allow services to run beyond. As I said, we await further clarification in writing about the reasons behind the changes, which are unlikely to be to do with cost, as people have attempted to claim. It seems unlikely that HS2 had intended any real, meaningful Stafford-Stoke-Macclesfield services to run at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

Having voted against this and argued against it for the best part of a decade, I was delighted by the Prime Minister’s decision and by the Minister’s engagement. I have had many, many meetings with Ministers and so forth about the issue over a very long time.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) on his extremely powerful speech and on using his experience as a member of the Transport Committee to amplify the issue. That is in addition to the work of Trevor Parkin in my constituency, who has done the most remarkable work on this area.

The line was due to pass straight through my constituency, from top to bottom, and we are thoroughly relieved that it has been stopped after all this time. It is still causing misery for many of my constituents, however, and we are in the midst of negotiations with HS2 over the sale of their property and land. Communication has been slow or non-existent and, in the meantime, the works and the spending of public money have continued. I urge the Government to closely monitor the winding-up of HS2, intervening when necessary, and to make sure that compensation is paid. We will debate this issue in Westminster Hall again tomorrow.

Finally, I will simply add that, along with the money that is earmarked for improvements in transport projects, I agree with everything that has been said in this debate about how regional, national and east-west networks must be improved. Levelling-up has been a tremendous opportunity, but that has to be delivered. I am grateful to my constituents for the support that they have given to me and to the Minister for the meetings that we have had and for coming to the right decision.