International Travel

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 20th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I pay tribute to the excellent work that my hon. Friend does as trade envoy to Kenya. I am delighted that Kenya has come off the red list. As I mentioned, we will provide details for how countries can onboard themselves to meet our requirements, and I look forward to adding to the list of 50 countries where people who are fully vaccinated will be able to come and go very much more easily. I look forward to working with her on that plan.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

We all hope that our vaccines will prove effective against any new variants so that we can all get back fully to normal, but we also have to be incredibly vigilant against any possible new variant that develops and that is resistant to our vaccines. The Secretary of State will know that in previous waves—at the beginning or with the delta variant—we have not had either sufficient surveillance or a fast enough response from Government to prevent those variants from spreading. What can he say about his new surveillance regime, both in terms of testing and response, that will prevent those problems from happening again, especially when it looks as though the testing and genomic sequencing is being downgraded?

[Grant Shapps]

I thank the right hon. Lady, who approaches this from a very wise perspective. The first thing I would say is that of course everybody will appreciate that we now have over nine out of 10 adults with at least one jab and over eight out of 10—83%, I think—of adults fully vaccinated. Of course, as that picture has been replicated around the world, that makes it easier to allow and open up international travel, and it is part of the balance.

The second thing to say is that using lateral flow tests, which provide virtually instant results, means that people may not be out and about for an extra day or perhaps more before they get their results. That of course has to be factored against the fact that a lateral flow test is known to be less observant—with different specificity and sensitivity rates—than a PCR test. The scientists have taken all of that into account in providing ideas for this regime. Of course, it is critically important that a lateral flow test is then backed up by a PCR. It will be, and we will also be talking more about requirements for ensuring that the lateral flow test has been properly taken.

HS2

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Stephenson]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. I will talk about the benefit-cost ratio if I get there in time. The last benefit-cost ratio for the scheme was of course published when the last full business case was published in April 2020. It is worth saying that this is a long-term investment in the future of our country, and we should not base long-term investment decisions on what has been happening over 18 months.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I am one of those who are deeply sceptical about the value for money of this project. I can think of considerable other ways to invest that money that would have a much stronger economic benefit. On the impact of the covid pandemic, has the Minister considered the long-term impact of the growing use of Zoom, electronic communications and so on? Surely any sensible Government would look at the impact of that on business travel, commuter travel and so on as part of this project.

[Andrew Stephenson]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her point. Of course, the Government are looking at this in a cross-Government way. We are looking at changing working patterns, which have impacts not only on transport investment but on regeneration and a whole range of things. We will say more about our thinking in the coming months. As we said in the Queen’s Speech, we intend to bring forward a western leg Bill. Obviously, it would have to be accompanied by projections for the whole network, not just the western leg, so I hope we will publish more information on that in the very near future.

International Travel

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Businesses across the travel industry have been drawing on the £350 billion-worth of grants and loans, VAT deferrals, the furlough scheme and much else besides. The best thing we can do is get the country flying again and get people moving again. Our exemplary progress with the vaccination roll-out gives us the best opportunity of that happening sooner rather than later.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

As the vaccine rolls out and as international travel increases, if we are to prevent new variants from sending us back to square one, there needs to be an effective surveillance system with transparent analysis built in so that there can be swift action. We do not have that effective system at the moment, as we have seen from the fact that the delta variant has whipped around the country and is now closing schools and preventing UK residents from travelling abroad because people do not want it to spread. We must improve that system and not be in a situation whereby so many cases can arrive in a country before preventive measures are taken. Will the Secretary of State agree, as part of improving that system, to finally start publishing the Joint Biosecurity Centre’s analyses—not just the arrivals data, but the analyses of what is happening in other countries? The Scientific Group for Emergencies papers are published. We have been calling for the Joint Biosecurity Centre’s papers to be published for almost a year. Please publish them now. What has the Secretary of State got to hide?

[Grant Shapps]

The right hon. Lady is absolutely right about the need to prevent the variants. Our surveillance system, which involves our sequencing the genome more than any other country in the world, as I know she appreciates, is a big part of that. We frequently find that we know about overseas variants before the host country and consequently we often tell them about it first.

I want to ensure that the record of the House is entirely accurate. I talked about the risk assessment methodology that is already published online. The methodology includes variant assessment, triage, risk assessment and outcomes, which inform ministerial decisions. Under each heading, there is tremendous detail. For example, triage includes testing rates per 100,000, weekly instances, test positivity, evidence of overseas variants under investigation and much else. Then we publish the data on both the Public Health England and the JBC websites. I invite the right hon. Lady to look at that data. I think she will also appreciate that there are times when, for diplomatic reasons, it would be difficult to publish other countries’ data before they have done so. However, she will find a wealth of information, which we are already publishing, on the JBC and PHE websites.

Britain’s Railways

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Angela Crawley appears still not to be here, so we will go to Yvette Cooper.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab) [V]]

The current system has been failing my constituency for far too long, so I urge the Secretary of State to make sure that this plan improves things and is a step forward. The five towns are less than 20 miles from the centre of Leeds. If we were that close to the centre of London, we would have many trains an hour into the city, yet Normanton has only one train an hour into Leeds; Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley are all underserved; and we need more trains to Sheffield, York and Hull. I have met Transport Ministers repeatedly on this, so will the Transport Secretary now guarantee that this new plan will mean more local trains for the five towns?

[Grant Shapps]

I certainly welcome the right hon. Lady’s partial welcome, at least, for the White Paper. I completely agree with her about the necessity to join up northern towns. As the northern powerhouse Minister in Cabinet, I spend a huge amount of my time looking at the way that the railway service that I now get to run, Northern, operates through the operator of last resort. The service at the moment is just not good enough. She is right to say that if it was in the south the connectivity would be vastly better. That is why this Government are obsessed—obsessed, I say—with levelling up, and why I hope that her discussions with the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), are very fruitful. Great British Railways will, I think, be of great assistance to her constituents.

Income tax (charge)

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the principle should be that, as far as we can make it work, people—individuals and companies—are in the same position when we come out of this situation. I feel that we will be in a somewhat changed world and changed environment on the other side of it, but good organisations should not be going bust. It will be hugely challenging. We will require a lot of different responses and mechanisms to get there, including, on occasion, organisations being run by the public sector, which we have already seen in the case of trains for a completely different reason.

Turning to trains, it makes no sense for us to run empty trains. As fewer people will be travelling following last night’s advice and guidance from the Government and the Prime Minister, timetables may be altered in the short to medium term to ensure that we do not effectively run ghost trains. We are also determined to ensure that companies are left in as strong a position as possible so that they can continue to operate afterwards. Despite the immensely challenging situation in which we find ourselves, we will work in partnership with the transport industry to keep essential services running for the public and for those who need to get to work, who have essential business and who will therefore still be travelling.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

On the proposal to reduce the number of trains, buses and tubes that are running, given that so many of them are so crowded at the moment, would it not make sense to keep many more of them running so that those essential workers who still have to get to work have more space?

[Grant Shapps]

The right hon. Lady makes an excellent point, as ever. The reality is that, because of social distancing, it might well be desirable to have more space between people so that they can keep some distance. Yes, that absolutely needs to be taken into account as we consider the timetabling.

We will get through this crisis together as a nation. Working in this great national effort, we will ensure that we come through on the other side and provide hope for all our citizens. The Budget shows that we are serious about the pledges we have made and about the trust that the electorate put in us only three months ago. We intend to deliver on those infrastructure pledges.

The Department for Transport has already been working hard to deliver on those pledges. For example, in recent weeks we have taken decisive action to improve journeys for millions of Northern rail commuters by putting the franchise into the operator of last resort. We have announced plans to extend discounted train travel to more than 830,000 veterans. The Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), has kickstarted work on reversing the Beeching cuts, which have so blighted the nation in decades past and prevented people from being interconnected. In January we announced the preferred route for the east-west rail link that will connect Oxford and Cambridge, which will increase access to jobs and make it easier and cheaper to travel, creating a region that has been dubbed the UK’s silicon valley. We are not only making journeys more efficient and easier; we are also making them cleaner. We are consulting on bringing forward the end of fossil fuel cars and vans to 2035, or earlier if practical. We are taking enormous steps forward.

The Chancellor has delivered a Budget that includes some of the most ambitious infrastructure programmes seen since the 1950s. It will help to level up this country. Infrastructure that is unreliable, overcrowded and no longer fit for purpose acts as a drag anchor on our entire economy. When it is efficient and gets people where they need to be, it can turn around the fortunes of our towns and cities. With interest rates at an historic low, now is the time to get Britain building.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

We have seen nothing like this in our lifetimes. We are in a situation where six days after hearing the Budget, it is already out of date. We are at a time when, across the world, aeroplanes are being grounded, borders are being closed, people are staying at home, health services are gearing up, and workplaces are being frozen down. Just two months ago, we had barely heard of covid-19, and since then 6,500 people across the world have died from it.

In China, hundreds of millions of children are being educated at home—some online. In Italy, people are building makeshift hospitals, even tents, to treat the sick. France has imposed a two-week lockdown, and Ireland has closed all its schools. The scale of the action that countries are having to take to deal with this global crisis feels overwhelming, and we are just at the start. Nothing will be normal for very many months, and all of us will have to face up to that in our communities, in our workplaces, and in families across the country. That means that, right now, many people are feeling very worried. Parents are worried about whether to send their kids to school. Pensioners are worried about whether they should be going to the shops. Their sons and daughters are worried about whether they should be visiting them. Cinema and pub staff are just worried about whether they are about to lose their jobs, and many will be facing exactly that fear this week. Self-employed contractors are at a loss because their business is drying up and small businesses fear that their life’s work and savings are about to be lost. Commuters are worried about travelling by bus, train or tube. Doctors, nurses and NHS staff and social care staff are in distress about the life-and-death decisions they know they may have to make on our behalf.

The immediate challenge for Government in the face of this is to provide some urgent answers, urgent interventions, and urgent reassurances so that we can stop the anxiety, the panic and the hardship growing, and so that we can stop a national crisis becoming millions of separate family crises across the country. We can rise to that challenge, but we need to do so now. That means answering some very practical questions. For example, people have contacted me following the advice that was given yesterday, asking, “What should people do if someone in the family has serious health conditions, but they are doing a job that cannot be done from home?” Those jobs may be in distribution, in retail, in education, or working in schools. They may be in policing, or they may be doing countless important jobs across the country. Should they go to work? Should they send their kids to school?

I have been contacted by one mum who is suffering from cancer and who wants to be able to keep her daughter at home. She and others need support and advice. What are the plans to deliver care, food and supplies for those who are going to be at home? Crucially, we will need urgent assurances that no one will lose their home, and that everyone will be able to pay their bills to feed their kids and to keep their families going. We look forward to the response from the Chancellor later today so that we can know that, whatever the changes in our lives that are going to be needed, we can strain every sinew to keep important services going. That means getting some immediate commitments for substantial financial support for families. We all know that the current system of universal credit, of statutory sick pay or of any of those tinkering measures just will not cut it. If the Government try to use them, all they will do is expose even further the weaknesses and failings in our welfare system and our social insurance system that are already causing huge hardship. Quite simply, those systems will not be able to take the strain. There needs to be substantial, unconditional support, so that people can pay their rents, their mortgages and their bills, because food banks will not be able to fill those gaps.

Those urgent assurances and interventions are essential if we are to address people’s anxieties and concerns, particularly in relation to family finances and family health. There is a much bigger task, which is to shift our shared mindset from anxiety to action to ensure that we are not just all overwhelmed by alarm when we have practical tasks ahead of us, and when we need to focus on the practical things that can be done and must be done to come through this together. There is little time for any of us to absorb or assimilate the scale of the changes that will be made in all of our lives this year, so that we can get through this, but we have to get on with it.

Incredible work is already under way. People have already paid tribute to NHS staff who are preparing for the task ahead. We should also pay tribute to emergency planners in our local councils, in social care services, in businesses, in food distribution systems and in voluntary groups across the country. They are already preparing and planning for the challenges that we face and those huge changes that we will need to make. It will need calm leadership, clear communication, frankness about how difficult some things are going to be, but firmness about our ability to come through this, about our resilience and strength, and about our ability to work together in extraordinary ways. In the end, we may be grateful that we are also the generation that now communicates so much online, and that has different ways to hold our families together, to communicate and to work. Some of those new technologies will make it easier to address new challenges than perhaps would have been the case 10 or 20 years ago. It also means that the Government must address the scale of the task, and it does not feel as if they are doing so yet. I do not blame Ministers for struggling to keep up with this, because in the early stages of the financial crisis it took time—often precious time—to realise the magnitude of what was happening and the scale of previously unthinkable things that had to be done to turn it round. We do not have that time now.

It is good that the Government seem to have shifted strategy in the light of evidence from Imperial College, which confirms what the WHO, epidemiologists and public health experts from other countries have been saying for some time, and which shows that the objective should be suppression of the virus, because the number of lives that would be lost by pursuing a mitigation or herd immunity strategy would be far too great. Again, it feels as if the Government still have to do more to shift to that new strategy in practice. For example, we are still only being advised to go to the pub—advised not to go to the pub. [Interruption.] If only! It feels as if we are only being advised, and it feels as if Ministers are being a little too squeamish to tell us what they need us to do, and to tell the pubs what they need to do. My message to Ministers is, frankly, “Get over it,” because there are an awful lot more things that they are going to have to tell us to do before the crisis is over.

It does not feel as if there is a proper strategy for testing yet—a proper plan massively to gear up the number of tests that we need. The chief scientific adviser has said that that is what he wants to see, but we need the same kind of national effort for which the Prime Minister has rightly called to produce ventilators across the country. We need a massive scaling up of testing. The World Health Organisation has said, “test, test, test” and

“You cannot fight a fire blindfolded”.

That is what we need. I have heard from consultants who say that in some hospitals three quarters of elderly care consultants are self-isolating and cannot gain access to tests to find out whether in fact they are fine and can get back to work, where they are urgently needed. If we rely on the information from hospitals to tell us what is happening on the scale of the spread we will be two weeks behind the curve. We cannot afford to do that. We need to learn from what South Korea did, with a massive mobilisation effort.

If the spread is accelerating, keeping schools running as normal is going to become impossible and seriously unwise. Given the reports from London hospitals about rising numbers of covid-19 cases coming in through A&E, and reports that we are three weeks behind Italy, we should ask ourselves what would Italy have done three weeks ago if it had known? That is what we have to face, and it means that we need urgent plans to be in place now on how to close or scale down schools while keeping parents and vital services in work; while stopping grandparents being drawn into childcare and being exposed to the virus; and while supporting families who depend on free school meals as well as those who have safeguarding risks. This is urgent.

The Budget was designed around the old strategy of mitigate and manage, or tinkering with sick pay and staff absence. We are way past that point. Entire sectors such as travel, leisure and hospitality cannot function at a social distance. There are 1.9 million jobs in catering, restaurants, pubs and coffee shops. There are more than half a million jobs in hotels and holiday accommodation. Those sectors are not sustainable, given the way in which we are going to have to operate and live our lives for at least the next few months. How we support those sectors and people who work in them is crucial.

Other sectors such as social care and food distribution need to grow and change to meet community needs. Communities will have to support one another, but we cannot just stand back and hope that the free market will solve the systemic challenges that we face. Emergency planning will be needed, as well as intervention and funding on a scale that the Government would never normally contemplate. I hope that as well as talking more about emergency funding for the NHS, the Chancellor will announce a big injection of emergency investment for local authorities so that they can support public health, emergency planning, housing, family support, social care and children’s services, which are now our crucial community actors, and which urgently need to take on more staff to deliver the changes needed. We need sectoral plans, to make sure that we still have something as simple as community pubs, which can open again when the crisis is over.

This will be a challenge. We all know and fear that those who are on the lowest incomes will be hardest hit, which will be a challenge for all of us. But we can do this, and we have the strength, resilience, ingenuity and ideas. We will have to pull everyone together, not push people apart. We will have to do things in new ways, including doing politics in different ways—pulling people together and facing up to the sheer scale of what needs to change. Politics has to stop being the art of the possible and become the art of the apparently impossible, so that we can come through this together.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Oral Answers to Questions

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I welcome my hon. Friend to his seat. As a strong representative of Heywood and Middleton, he will be pleased to hear that we are very supportive of measures to improve public transport in large urban areas such as Greater Manchester, which is why we have provided £312.5 million to the Mayor through the transforming cities fund and agreed, through the mayoral devolution deal, an earn-back mechanism that supported the construction of the latest Metrolink extension to Trafford. We will continue to do further work in that field and hopefully extend Metrolink towards my hon. Friend’s constituency.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

From Castlefield to Castleford. In West Yorkshire we are grateful that the Government have finally sacked Northern Rail, but we do need investment in our northern infrastructure as well. Will the Minister push for the Department’s plans to include definitive plans for tackling disabled access? I have been raising for a long time the serious lack of disabled access at Pontefract Monkhill and Knottingley. It causes huge problems for parents with buggies, as well as for those in wheelchairs, and they cannot even get on the delayed or cancelled trains.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

There is a fund for improving these things, but the right hon. Lady is absolutely right that accessibility on our railways is nowhere near as good as it should be in this day and age. We are trying to do much more with the train operating companies and Network Rail. I think she will be pleased to see what is said about accessibility in the Williams review White Paper when it comes forward.

Transport

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2019 Ministerial Corrections

The following is an extract from an Urgent Question to the Secretary of State for Transport on 5 September 2019.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Will the Government widen this review not just to their complete lack of grip on the HS2 project, but to the continued failure of the Department to remember that there are towns as well as cities in this country? It is continually locking billions of pounds into ever-delayed, ever-escalating projects for cities, while towns such as Castleford and Pontefract have inadequate trains—overcrowded, old Pacer trains, with no disabled access to our trains—and, once again, we are just expected to accept a trickle-down of benefits many decades into the future. It is not good enough. When will we actually get a fair deal for our towns?

[Grant Shapps]

As the representative of two towns—one, Welwyn Garden, calls itself a city, but it is actually a town—I absolutely agree with the idea that towns have a significant part to play in the economic and social life of our country. One good piece of news: those Pacers are finally going by the end of this year.

[Official Report, 5 September 2019, Vol. 664, c. 357-8.]

Letter of correction from the Secretary of State for Transport:

An error has been identified in the answer I gave to the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper).

The correct answer should have been:

HS2

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

Absolutely. Travelling on a train can be a fantastic way to chomp through constituency work or anything else that people are doing on business or for pleasure. It is one of the most civilised ways to work—when we have our trains running on time, which is another related priority.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Will the Government widen this review not just to their complete lack of grip on the HS2 project, but to the continued failure of the Department to remember that there are towns as well as cities in this country? It is continually locking billions of pounds into ever-delayed, ever-escalating projects for cities, while towns such as Castleford and Pontefract have inadequate trains—overcrowded, old Pacer trains, with no disabled access to our trains—and, once again, we are just expected to accept a trickle-down of benefits many decades into the future. It is not good enough. When will we actually get a fair deal for our towns?

[Grant Shapps]

As the representative of two towns—one, Welwyn Garden, calls itself a city, but it is actually a town—I absolutely agree with the idea that towns have a significant part to play in the economic and social life of our country. One good piece of news: those Pacers are finally going by the end of this year.[Official Report, 9 September 2019, Vol. 664, c. 5MC.]

High Speed Rail (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 15th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Antoinette Sandbach]

I am glad to be giving voice, because I sound a bit croaky—I am losing my voice.

I agree that there are potential benefits, but the question is whether those benefits are worth the cost and whether the business case stacks up. I would much rather see the east-west Northern Powerhouse Rail connection happen as a priority.

When a rolling stock depot is moved from another constituency to mine and put next to a school, thereby requiring the whole school to move, there seems to be either a level of incompetence or staggering complacency in the management of the project. I have been at events where my constituents have asked questions and not received answers.

There have been ministerial orders to provide mock-ups of the rolling stock depot so that we can understand the scale and impact, and HS2 has just ignored them and said that it will not provide the mock-ups. Then there has been a change of Minister, who has taken a different approach.

My concern is that, unless this protection is in the legislation, we will potentially see a change of Secretary of State, and that we will then not have the protections in relation to this kind of infrastructure project that all our constituents deserve.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I rise briefly to support new clause 4 and the call for a full peer review of this project. I will also call for the review to go wider, particularly to look at the geographical impact of the HS2 investment and the impact on cities and towns. I raise this because, like most Members of this House, I strongly support the need for substantial investment in our transport infrastructure. I think it needs to increase; we should be spending more capital investment on transport, particularly on our railways, especially given the climate change challenges we face.

The more we look, however, at the current Government’s transport infrastructure budget, the more doubts we should have about the continued focus on cities, rather than towns, and about the continued concentration of the capital budget on cities, rather than towns. HS2 and its plans raise those serious questions, which is why serious issues need to be reviewed about whether or not HS2 is the right priority now, given the need for investment in our towns. According to the National Infrastructure Commission, the Government propose to spend £4.5 billion a year on HS2 between now and 2025, but only £200 million a year on Northern Powerhouse Rail. We must bear in mind that Northern Powerhouse Rail is also predominantly focused on cities.

I want to set out the impact on my constituency, but the towns there could reflect many across the country. It is not clear that HS2 will have any benefit for Normanton, although Ministers say that it will mean faster trains to Leeds. Normanton used to be at the heart of the rail network. We used to have 700 jobs on the railways alone in Normanton and 700,000 passengers used to go through it. Normanton used to be a central railway town, but now there is only one train an hour to Leeds, even though it is less than half an hour away. Therefore, any benefits from speeding up journey times for anyone in my constituency just disappear, because the connections into Leeds are so rubbish. From Castleford, Pontefract and Knottingley, there are a few more trains, but they are often cancelled or late, or there are just too few carriages and so people cannot get on.

After the May timetable changes, things got worse. One constituent told me that on his regular trains the seating capacity was reduced by between 58 and 130 seats, making it impossible for many passengers to get on, so they were just stuck on the platform. Some trains currently run to London from Pontefract Monkhill, but it has no disabled access. So I have had constituents with wheelchairs who have been stranded on the platform as a result or who, in one case, have had to crawl over the bridge. Yet there is no sign of the investment in our station just to get basic disabled access. This is the capital investment we need in our towns.

We are told in other parts of our area that the regular trains cannot go any faster because the lines need upgrading, but there is no sign of it ever happening. Time and again we are told that HS2 will mean better connections for our country and for our towns, but we never see it—we never see any credible plan. My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), who spoke from the Front Bench, has rightly talked about boosting the connectivity between Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. I strongly support that, because I believe that it will hugely benefit the north. Indeed, I think the House of Lords report was right when it said that investment in improving the rail links in the north of England would deliver greater economic benefit for every pound than HS2 would.

Having those connections between our northern cities would be substantial, but the economic benefits from better connecting our northern towns with neighbouring cities would be huge. That would boost our towns; give employers in our towns and our cities a far bigger catchment area, for staff and for customers; and build the size of local markets. Those town connections should be done first, before any of this, but we do not see it ever happening. We do not see it ever coming. As a result, we do not believe it is ever going to come. We get all these promises from these massive national infrastructure projects, which always concentrate on our cities, but we do not believe this is ever going to benefit our towns.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I am just a little worried: we are obviously talking about new clauses to the Bill, and as much as we have all suffered with Northern rail, I want to try to keep the debate where it should be.

[Yvette Cooper]

Mr Deputy Speaker is completely right: we could go on for a very long time about the problems with Northern rail. My hon. Friend is also right. The review in new clause 4 should focus on the geographic impact and the impact for towns, because time and again we just see our town services go backwards and our chances of getting any capital investment in towns disappear, while the Government always talk about these huge billions of pounds going into connections for the cities. The compact between different parts of the country, particularly between our cities and towns, has now broken. I do not think anybody quite recognises the seriousness of that. This debate about HS2 is carrying on while we ignore that serious and growing divide.

[Dame Cheryl Gillan]

Does the right hon. Lady agree that the Department for Transport needs to update its national rail travel overview survey report, on which so much of its planning is dependent? It has not been updated since 2010. I received a written answer that said the Government are

“currently considering updating the National Rail Travel Survey”.

Does the right hon. Lady think that that needs to be done as a matter of urgency, so that the survey reflects the exact points she is making?

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

If there has simply been no updated assessment, that might explain why so many of my constituents get stuck on platforms in Leeds, trying to get back to Castleford, or on platforms in Castleford, trying to get into Leeds. So many more people are commuting for work, yet the commuter infrastructure for them is just not there. It is continually our towns that are being let down.

[John Redwood]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Yvette Cooper]

I am conscious of the time and see Mr Deputy Speaker looking at me, so I shall give way only briefly.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

I am very relaxed.

[John Redwood]

How would a review help, given that the right hon. Lady’s Front-Bench colleagues and the current Government are united behind the current scheme, which does nothing to help our towns?

[Yvette Cooper]

Nobody has done a proper assessment of where transport infrastructure investment is going and what the impact is on cities and towns. Some assessment has been made of the impact on different regions of the country, and that is important. Actually, it is significant, because I think the New Economics Foundation cites HS2’s own figures showing that 40% of the benefits from HS2 will go to London, whereas only 10% of the benefits will go to Yorkshire. I want to see a broader assessment of the impact on cities and towns.

Job growth is twice as fast in cities as in towns. New digital jobs, service jobs, university-related jobs and cultural jobs are all being concentrated in cities, but manufacturing, distribution and retail jobs are disappearing from towns. That is a result of automation or changes to our economy, but public sector investment decisions, including on transport priorities, are making that worse. Public services are shrinking back from towns into cities, and the new infrastructure investment is always concentrated on cities rather than towns.

[Jim McMahon]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way, even though I said that the previous time was the last.

[Jim McMahon]

I took the hint from Mr Deputy Speaker that he was relaxed about interventions.

I thank my right hon. Friend for her work to give a voice to towns, which is important. Does she accept that the capital focus of HS2 is one thing, but it is revenue spend that has massively affected towns? In Greater Manchester, we have lost 30 million bus miles because of central Government revenue cuts. One thing we could do today is reinvest the revenue that has been lost.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. Certainly, for bus services, which are crucial for our towns, the loss of revenue has been particularly crucial and devastating. This debate is about towns getting their fair share of both revenue and capital investment. Currently, I do not think we are getting either.

The campaign to power up the north led by some of our regional newspapers is immensely important, and I strongly back it, but I also think that it is time to power up our towns, as they have immense potential and are not getting their fair share of investment. Time and again, whether through HS2 or Crossrail 2, too much money—the big billions—is still going into the cities rather than the towns. That is why I support this review, but ask for it to be broadened.

I urge the Minister to broaden it as well, because the truth is that Members from our towns have been respectful, we have asked sensible questions, we have been patient, and we have waited and waited and, frankly, we have got nothing. We see no sign of anything improving for our transport infrastructure. We see no sign of anything other than warm words about promises in the future. We need that review of the geographic benefits and we need a proper towns plan—a proper plan for major infrastructure investment. Until we have that, the Government’s transport infrastructure plan is simply not in the national interest.

[John Redwood]

My worry about the Labour new clauses is that they will not achieve the objective that Labour seems to think they will achieve. The truth is that, with the legislation already in place and the likely passage this evening of the High Speed Rail (West Midlands - Crewe) Bill, all the legal powers are there to proceed with the scheme as originally designed. As the contracts are settled, the scope for any fundamental changes arising from a review is either limited or non-existent. As the project develops, there is less and less scope to make any changes to it.

I speak as someone who, when we were first faced with the decision about HS2, decided that it was not the right project. I fully share the ambition of practically everybody in this House that we need an even more successful northern powerhouse and better transport and connectivity throughout those northern cities and towns. As someone who represents a very fast-growing and hard-pressed area of the country, just outside London, I would love to see an even more effective counter-magnet to London elsewhere in the country to pick up some of that growth and some of that prosperity, because we have the difficulties of managing so many people coming in and so many people moving around on transport systems that are woefully inadequate for the task. I share the ambition for the northern powerhouse, but I accept that a decision has already been made in principle, that a lot of money has now been committed and that various works have been undertaken in the name of the project, so it would become more and more difficult to make fundamental change or to think about cancellation.

As it happens, I think that there will be another decision taken quite shortly about this mighty project, because the very likely next Prime Minister has said that he wishes to review it and to think about it again, and I wish him every success with that. It would be a very difficult task, and it would need to be done with reasonable speed. Given that we have committed so much and that there is some reasonable merit in the project, he may conclude that he wishes to go on with it. If he were to make a more fundamental decision, all that we are talking about this afternoon in this House is a waste of time, because, clearly, the project will be cancelled and everything else will lapse.

I work on the assumption that, after review, the new Prime Minister may continue with the project, and that we are in the business of trying to mitigate the difficulties and damages. My colleagues who represent constituencies who are very badly affected by this project deserve special treatment over how it can be ameliorated and improved and how compensation can be paid and businesses dealt with.

Certainly, we need transparency. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) for raising the issue. I want to hear from the Minister about what is going to be done on transparency, so that those who are most adversely affected, should the project go ahead in full, are able to see why the decisions are being made and also have access to the information that they need to get proper compensation.

I myself will not be voting for the Labour amendments, because they simply do not bring any advantage either to those who support the project in full or those who have the problems of handling the disadvantages of the project in their constituencies. I do not see how a further review suddenly will make this a better run project. If the project goes forward, this Minister and any future Minister will have to deal with how the costs will be controlled, how the works will be carried out in a speedy manner and to a high quality with safe standards for the workforce, and how the impact of those works can be minimised on those most affected by them as they go ahead. These remain continuing management problems. An additional independent review is not going to solve any of that. We are now getting to the point where it needs individual management solutions. It is about managers on the ground, how contracts are handled on the ground, and the extent to which Ministers can and should have proper oversight of those contracts, given their commercial nature and given the technical expertise of those actually running the project.

I do not see how an independent review can help at all. I do not believe that any serious change could result from it, because the contracts will be let, and we will be told that the contractors have to get on with it. There does remain the issue of whether a new Prime Minister wishes to reopen the whole question, but assuming that he does not we will need proper answers from Ministers about what action they have taken to control the costs, improve the quality and deal with safety, and about how much power they will have in future, given the commercial nature of the operation.

HS2 Update

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I know that my hon. Friend also feels strongly about this project, but I remind him that HS2’s purpose is to deliver additional capacity in our transport system. It will create the opportunity to double the number of peak-time seats into Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham, and there will be a huge increase into London Euston. It will provide the opportunity for more freight to move off the roads and on to rail. That is what this is all about.

I have heard a lot over the past 24 hours about numbers. The project has a budget of £55.7 billion. This country has a decent track record of late of delivering projects on time and on budget, and I am confident that that is what will happen this time. As far as I can see, those who appear to be telling a different story have no involvement in the project and little direct knowledge of it.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State confirm that he has once again dismissed proposals for cut and over or other adjustments to the route around Normanton? For all the effort and energy that he has put into looking at alternatives for south Yorkshire, he has not looked at alternatives for West Yorkshire. We have no station between Sheffield and Leeds, and many people will see the costs of the development, but not the benefits. In Normanton, for example, despite being less than 20 minutes from Leeds, we have only one train an hour and will not benefit from any of the shift in capacity that he has talked about. Is he not concerned that his approach to HS2, because of its focus on cities, not on any of the links to towns, will only widen the serious gap between cities and towns in this country, which is becoming even more serious than the divide between north and south?

[Chris Grayling]

The first thing to say is that we have taken a lot of care to try to put mitigation measures in place, and the movement of the depot from Crofton is a case in point. I have looked to try to change the configuration of the route around Barnburgh, and I have been up there myself to look at the locations. I am sure that the right hon. Lady will make further representations to the Committee that considers the Bill. If she looks at the challenges facing the rail network in the north, she will see that it is not about the lines that have lots of stations; it is about the fact that the links between our major cities are caught up by slow trains. A fast train from Leeds to Manchester across the Pennines is not possible because of all the stations in between, and councils and representatives in the north have been calling for better, faster links between our northern cities, and this project will do that job between Sheffield and Leeds. One reason why I am attracted to the link between Sheffield city centre and Leeds city centre is to provide fast connections between the two.