High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Lord Snape and Lord Adonis

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Lords & Report stage: House of Lords
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Snape]

I bow to my noble friend’s expertise on the geography of this stretch of railway line. I was aware that it was a single track; there was much mocking at the time because it was and it led to the North London line, with the consequential speed restrictions and additional traffic. There was concern that this was not an adequate link, but it is a link nevertheless. I am not blaming the Minister for having the line built—I might blame him for various other decisions he has taken—but perhaps he could tell us whether it is feasible to add signals to this line and give us some connection. Surely the Midlands, the north-west and north-east of England, and perhaps Scotland, deserve better for their taxes than to be told when they arrive in Euston, “Put your bags under your arm and catch the Northern line if you wish to proceed further towards Europe by train”. Surely the Minister and the country can do better than that.

[Lord Adonis (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the Secretary of State who started HS2, and as a member of HS2 Ltd. I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for missing the beginning of her remarks. I know the whole Committee will want to pay tribute to the Select Committee, which put an astonishing amount of work into the Bill. I cannot think of a more onerous duty that Members of your Lordships’ House take on than being members of hybrid Bill Committees. At the very least they require some kind of parliamentary medal for endurance, which I hope will give them some special form of extended life that ensures they will definitely see the opening of this line all the way through to Manchester and Leeds in 2033. That is the least they deserve.

There are two different issues here and it is important not to mix them up. The first is through trains from Paris to the great cities of the Midlands and the north, which my noble friends Lord Snape and Lord Berkeley rightly said was envisaged in the original scheme for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. The trains were built, but the services were never run. The second is the lamentable connections between Euston and St Pancras. The two issues are separate for this reason: with the best will in the world, the economic case for running through services from Paris and Brussels to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds is very weak indeed.

If I may detain the Committee with a story, when I was Secretary of State I tried to persuade Eurostar to run services to Birmingham once the upgrade of the west coast main line had been completed, which would have made it possible to run a service once that and the High Speed 1 line to St Pancras had been completed. It ought to have been possible to run a service from Paris to Birmingham in three and a half hours, which I thought would have been competitive with the plane and played a very big part in changing the whole mentality of people in respect of high-speed rail and connections with the continent. I simply could not persuade Eurostar to run even one service a day without public subsidy because the traffic projection figures were so low.

If noble Lords stop and think about what has happened on that line, it is not so difficult to fathom. Although HS1 has been a great success in engineering terms and has played a useful part in linking two of Europe’s great cities, it is way off all the projections of traffic between London and the continent. I do not think it is yet even at half the level of the projections of what the traffic should have been. There is still only one service an hour between London and Paris for most of the day. Often those services have quite light loads. The London to Brussels service, which is also about hourly, is often barely half-full. Eurostar told me that there was not enough traffic to fill even one train a day between London and Birmingham and it would do it only if I was prepared to give it a very large subsidy. I had so many other parts of the railway I was seeking to subsidise, including many of the parts that my noble friend Lord Snape has mentioned because the lines in the Midlands and the north require great subsidies to be maintained, that I simply could not justify a public subsidy to do it.

It is important to be frank about this because everybody pays lip service to the benefits of linking HS1 and HS2. On the face of it, it seems absurd that there is not a connection between the two but because the service would be so intermittent—with the best will in the world, only a few trains a day would run on that service—I very much doubt it would be taken up in any big way. While we have cheap airlines that offer very frequent services to Manchester and Birmingham—both are highly successful airports, which are expanding and have significant capacity that they can make available to flights to the continent—it is unlikely that such a line would be viable.

As a footnote, it is always the unexpected in life which changes the course of events, including in transportation. The big unexpected event of HS1 was the massive development of domestic services on the high-speed line—all those Javelin trains—which has made the whole thing much more viable than it would otherwise have been and was not expected on anything like that scale. The other great unexpected gain of HS1, which nobody projected at the time—and who knows what the unexpected gains of HS2 will be?—was the Olympic Games. When the decision was taken to give the Olympics to Stratford, a critical part of the decision was the connectivity that the Javelins provided going out of St Pancras. I am not criticising the decisions to build HS1 or the Channel Tunnel, which were visionary and historic decisions, but unfortunately a link between HS1 and HS2 would be hugely expensive —running into many billions because it would have to be tunnelled. The economic benefit would be limited without massive subsidies. Given the huge costs already in the HS2 scheme, it would be hard to justify those expenses.

My noble friend Lord Snape referred to the plan for a kind of patch-and-mend link between HS1 and HS2 using the North London line. There was a plan for that in the original HS1 scheme, linking to the conventional lines. There was also initially from HS2 Ltd a plan for it in respect of the HS2 line. It has to be said that nobody much liked this. It would have been a very slow connection, weaving its way up to the North London line, across and down, which would have made the line even less competitive with the airlines. When the trains were running, it would have used a lot of capacity on the North London line, which, as noble Lords will know, is now an integral part of the Overground service and a major freight artery. That would have been highly inconvenient. Even that required the building of a substantial single-bore tunnel at a cost of more than £1 billion. The view was taken that rather than expend a large sum of money on a very unsatisfactory patch-and-mend link between the two, which would barely be used in any event, it would be better to wait until some point in the future when our relations with Europe reach a new and glorious period, in which traffic between the major European cities flourishes on a scale never seen before and might then make it economically viable to construct a link between HS1 and HS2.

However, only a tiny fraction of those people who wanted to connect between Euston and St Pancras would have been using direct services to the continent in the first place so the issue of connectivity between Euston and St Pancras, which I think everyone will accept is still highly unsatisfactory, is there in any event. There is a long-term solution: Crossrail 2, which will have a single station serving Euston and King’s Cross St Pancras, and will connect the two underground. That will make it much easier to get to them; it will give big dispersal capacity at Euston when phase 2 of Crossrail is completed in 2033, which is hugely important; and, as I say, it will connect the stations because the entrance at one end will be at Euston and the entrance at the other will be at King’s Cross St Pancras.

Although this degree of work has not yet been done, my assumption with the planning of Crossrail 2 is always that it will be possible to use it also as a pedestrian tunnel with a travelator for getting from Euston to St Pancras. The transport planners are not wildly keen on that idea because it will add to the cost of Crossrail 2 and they want a more limited scheme that has access only for transport users. But it looks patently obvious that if you have a Crossrail 2 station serving the two stations, and you have this underground link, putting in a simple travelator and making it possible for people to connect between the two stations underground must be sensible.

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[Lord Snape]

I hope the noble Baroness will accept from me that I am not making that accusation. I am saying that I do not quite understand the agreement between my noble friend and her noble friend Lord Bradshaw on this group of amendments, but I am sure that they will explain it. I appreciate that there are genuine and legitimate concerns inherent in their amendments. My objection is to speeches that are meant to sabotage the whole project. We have had these debates on umpteen occasions. My noble friend mentioned the Economic Affairs Committee report, which was torn apart on the Floor of the House. I am not saying that my contribution made any difference, but the approach that was taken was enough for me. If we are going to judge every project on so-called value for money, no project would ever meet the criteria laid down by those who were against that project in the first place. Whatever you did, they would say, “This is not value for money”. As the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said, some of the objectors to Brunel’s railway were thought quite credible. They gave evidence to a House of Commons Committee saying that trains passing through Box Tunnel on the Great Western main line at faster than 60 miles an hour would asphyxiate those on board. They were not particularly credible then, although they were listened to, and some of the objections that we have heard to this project are not particularly credible now.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, we have had a wide-ranging Second Reading debate. I sympathise completely with the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, and all the communities that are affected. The golden rule of any construction project is that people would rather it happened somewhere else. The golden rule of high-speed rail is that people want the stations but they do not want the line, but the line unfortunately has to go somewhere. Every time that this has been looked at, still more of the line going through the Chilterns has gone into a tunnel to mitigate the impacts on the local community. None the less, the construction work will be a major inconvenience for local communities and I in no way underestimate that fact.

The House and successive Governments have had to address themselves to a particular issue. My noble friend referred to the Government to 2010, in which I led the work. I can tell her that it was absolutely not the case that this was generated as a vanity project. It was generated by looking at the options of further upgrades of the west coast main line. Noble Lords need to understand that the last upgrade of the west coast main line, which was completed in 2009, cost £10 billion —of course, inflation would make that figure much larger now. That was a modest upgrade to provide very limited additional capacity compared with what HS2 will provide. Unfortunately, there is no free lunch. We definitely need upgrades to parts of the Southern network —particularly the London to Brighton line, though if the trains were operating on that line at the moment most of the immediate concerns would be met. Upgrades are needed to most of the commuter lines coming into London. However, we are also going to need significant additional intercity capacity. My noble friend said that this is a line that very few people will use—these are the major conurbations of the country. Almost half the output of the entire country is generated between them by London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It is simply not conceivable that we will not need very significant additional transport capacity between those conurbations over the next generation. We will clearly not be flying lots of planes between them. We do not want to build new motorways: I know my noble friend will have views on the impact the M40 had on the Chilterns.

The only option is a significant increase in rail capacity and that can only come in one of two ways. It is not the case that this has not been examined; it was looked at exhaustively in the work that I and the subsequent coalition Government did. It can come from radically upgrading the existing lines. Options for this have been looked at, including four-tracking the Chiltern line—the impact of which on the Chilterns would be greater, out of all proportion, than HS2—and significant upgrades to the west coast main line. The sums required to conduct those upgrades would be approaching the levels we would spend on HS2. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, referred to Brunel. The London to Birmingham railway, linking the two major cities of the country, is not even a Victorian project; it is pre-Brunel. It was opened for the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838. There are only four miles of the entire line going to Manchester which are straight, because most of it was built to get around the estates of many Members of your Lordships’ House. Building significant additional capacity on that pre-Victorian railway, including the required resignalling of almost the entire line, the relaying of the junctions for longer trains, and the rebuilding of the stations—starting with Euston, which is operating at twice the capacity for which it was built in the 1960s—are vastly expensive projects.

The question to which Parliament must address itself, and have a consistency of purpose on, is not whether something needs to be done—there would be a massive betrayal of our national economic future, particularly post-Brexit, if we do not have sufficient transport capacity between the major cities and economic centres of the country—but what should be done. Taking a longer-term view of investments will produce a step change in capacity between these major cities, rather than more patch and mend. Producing incremental increases in capacity will not be sufficient, including on commuter lines because the building of high-speed lines releases significant capacity on existing commuter lines.

[Lord Snape]

The noble Lord is making a much better non-Second Reading speech than I did. Does he agree that any upgrade of the existing railway lines could not be done at the same time as running the present intensive service? The short-sighted nature of debates in this House and elsewhere means that alternative routes have long since been closed—since the 1960s—so we would paralyse the west coast main line for a decade or so ahead while not having the benefits of any diversionary routes.

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[Lord Adonis]

My Lords—

[Lord Snape]

I am replying to an intervention on my speech. I will of course give way to my noble friend in a moment, but first of all I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Berkeley. He was very clear indeed. I have become an expert now on mined tunnels. I give way to my noble friend now.

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[Lord Adonis]

I simply wished to make a point to the Minister. My understanding is that it is not correct to say that the Select Committee did not consider this issue of a mined tunnel at length. My understanding is that it spent a very considerable amount of time listening to the arguments. I find it inconceivable, with all the expertise my noble friend Lord Berkeley has been able to give us this afternoon, that we could substitute our judgments in the course of a debate of half an hour, or an hour, or an hour and a half for the huge attention that the Select Committee gave to this over many hours, as I understand it, seeking a very wide range of expertise. If it is the case that the Select Committee considered this and that my noble friend Lady Mallalieu was incorrect in suggesting that it was not considered, I cannot see that there is much point in us continuing this debate in the form that we are.

[Lord Snape]

I am rather sorry I got involved in this whole thing now. I make one plea on behalf of the train passengers, who will pay a substantial amount and a bit more besides as a premium. Part of the pleasure of taking a train journey is looking out of the windows. This obsession with tunnelling everywhere through the Chilterns means we will perhaps be denied the sight of my noble friend galloping across the rolling hills of the Chilterns in pursuit of the uneatable. Surely these are sights that people enjoy when travelling by train. Rather than confine train passengers in tunnels for miles on end, would not the noble Viscount be satisfied with some sort of noise barrier, rather than insisting that train passengers on this proposed high-speed line spend their lives in semi-darkness to avoid my noble friend and her colleagues?