High Speed Rail (Crewe - Manchester) Bill

Debate between Chris Clarkson and Tom Hunt

2nd reading
Monday 20th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Clarkson]

I paint a wonderful picture because there are so many wonderful things to work with, but I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s point. Accessibility to public transport is hugely important. I have the same problem with the stations in my constituency. I only have two and one of them is completely inaccessible for those with even the slightest of mobility issues, so we have a lot more to do. Investment in local services will be driven by the fact that there will be more demand for them once we free up capacity, but I absolutely take the hon. Gentleman’s point. I know his part of the world very well and for somewhere so well located it is surprisingly poorly connected.

I hope that providing connectivity from east to west will be a vital part of our long-term competitiveness as a region. I strongly urge Ministers to keep up the pressure on that part of the project. East-west will be as important, if not more so, than north-south in the long run.

I am pleased that Ministers from the Department for Transport have been engaging with local government to make sure they can build on the opportunities of HS2 and spread the benefits of this public investment in levelling up across the region. It will not just be the centre of Manchester that will benefit. Those on the outskirts will also see the rewards. It will bring more investment into our area and into other areas of the north-west, too. It will spread the good around.

That is not to say there are not some sticking points. My hon. Friend the Minister, Department for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) will have heard from most Greater Manchester MPs at one point or another. Obviously, there will be some snagging issues, but I am pleased to say that in the round when I have had questions or concerns, I have been able to have a frank and open conversation with him and have received honest answers, even if they are not always the ones I wanted.

I understand that the Greater Manchester Combined Authority has a number of concerns about the Bill in its current form, the largest of which is how Manchester Piccadilly will be developed and configured to accommodate HS2. Its preference is for an underground through-station, rather than the proposed new six-platform overground station next to the existing one. I am pretty agnostic about that—I can see arguments for both—but I took the time to do a bit of homework on the underground option. My concerns, essentially, are that the project calls for a huge tunnel to be built under the station which is larger than anything that has ever been drilled before. We would end up with the same situation as Euston, where we have to build a giant box underground. That, in turn, means it cannot be situated under the existing station, so it needs to be either alongside it, as is the case with the overground station anyway, or somewhere else altogether, which is largely pointless.

As the GMCA wants a through station, we will need to have very bendy tunnels, which will slow down the trains on their approach and increase journey time, or we will have to build the station at a right angle to the existing station, which will mean it will be an absolute nightmare for people to get from A to B, again negating its value. Added to that is the fact that we will have a hole in the ground for a period of about seven years, which will basically be an opencast mine, with trucks making thousands of movements a year to take spoil through the centre of Manchester.

[Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)]

I am reminded of a session we had yesterday about protestors tunnelling to prevent HS2. Does my hon. Friend think that Opposition Members who support HS2 should rethink their opposition to the Public Order Bill, which HS2 Ltd says is necessary to prevent protestors holding back HS2?

[Chris Clarkson]

My hon. Friend knows that I am an enthusiastic supporter of the Public Order Bill. To be fair, if we could get the protesters to do the tunnelling for us, it might save us 5 billion quid. That might be a way of doing it—get a few Swampy types in and get the job done.

We have regenerated the centre of Manchester many times, certainly in my adult lifetime, but this is not the kind of regeneration that we particularly want. It will undo a huge amount of good. Digging up a square mile of the city centre will certainly not deliver the value for money that we want. Having said that, may I encourage the Minister to publish in the Library the cost-benefit analysis of both versions of the station? That would enable a fuller debate, especially when the Bill comes before the Select Committee. The subject needs to be discussed further.