High Speed 2
Geoffrey Robinson Excerpts(12 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)
The purpose of asking yet again for a debate in the Chamber on high-speed rail was that, having had two very successful earlier debates in Westminster Hall, we knew that there was a great deal of interest throughout the House among Members representing virtually all the constituencies that have an interest in it. I am very pleased to see the remarkable attendance we have this afternoon, and to follow the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), who has just opened the debate.
Those who attended the demonstration in Old Palace Yard this morning will have seen that there was a good turnout and a lively response from lorry drivers and others in relation to what we still call HS2. I am pleased to say that one lot from your constituency, Mr Speaker, remarked that they were anxious to speak to your good self about it, and I carry their best wishes and thanks to you. I said that you would almost certainly be in the Chair for the debate today, so I am pleased to see that you are indeed there.
The various points that have consistently been made against this project remain, but they have not been answered in debate or by the Government. The hon. Lady covered virtually all those points in her opening remarks. I am limited for time, and I intend to stay well within the 10 minutes because I know that a lot of Members wish to speak, but let me say that although the point about people being local or nimbyish about this issue is fair, I do not think that any MP who sticks up for his constituency should be at all apologetic about it. That is what we are sent here for, and if we do not do it, why are we here?
We have to take into account the national dimension, but I am prepared to say that I, and my Labour colleagues from Stoke and Coventry, certainly will not benefit from this project at all. I can see the arguments for Manchester, York, Leeds and other areas, which are well represented on the Opposition side, but it seems to me that we are doing things the wrong way around. I can see some benefits—although not the regional benefits that the Government claim—for Manchester, Leeds in particular, and York of being connected to a high-speed link to Birmingham and from there to London, but I think we should start the whole “Y” the other way around. We should start the line where it is most needed and most appreciated—from the north to the south. What is very clear, if we are honest about this, is that we do not desperately need the line from London to Birmingham. We are well served with trains every 20 minutes, and we are only going to get 30 minutes off the journey at best.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr Robinson
I will in a moment if my hon. Friend will hang on just a tick. I have only got 10 minutes, and time taken now will shorten someone else’s time.
We really do not need this project. What we need is for the pinch points to be relieved and some of the capacity bottlenecks to be relieved, and we could get the whole capacity increase we need on that line. Centro, which is responsible for the west midlands portion of the line, has said that it desperately needs that to be done now. That is the way to do it, not to wait until—
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr Robinson
I will give way in a moment, but I know what my hon. Friend is going to say because he represents a Birmingham constituency. I take those points too, but on the argument about this being a regional policy, let me say that any remotely sensible study that has been done on it says that 75% of the jobs are going to be created in the south-east, so we should forget the idea that it is a regional policy: that does not stack up. It is a convenience for certain metropolitan centres in the north, and the idea is that if ever it gets up to Edinburgh and Glasgow it could be a spinal cord that unites the country despite the tensions we feel at present—so why not start it up there? Why not start it from Leeds or York? That is what needs doing—and urgently—but of course they will not do that, because everyone knows that the subsidy for that area would be enormous and could not be justified. It can be justified only for the small London-Birmingham stretch where the subsidy will be highest, and it will not benefit ordinary travellers in any sense. It will be subsidised to a massive extent by the taxpayer and, by those businessmen, and others—
Mr Robinson
I know that my hon. Friend has been trying to get in, so I will give way just this once and then I will make progress.
Mark Lazarowicz
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. Some of his points about where the benefits would flow with high-speed rail are important, but surely what he is assuming is that people would just build the line and there would be stations but nothing else would happen. The whole point is that high-speed rail offers opportunity for much more comprehensive economic planning built around a high-speed rail network. It is not just a high-speed railway and stations on their own; it is part of a much wider approach that is required.
Mr Robinson
I am delighted to hear my hon. Friend talk about economic planning. I think that, sadly, that went out in 1966, when the Labour Government ditched the national plan. Let us be hard-headed and realistic about this. HS2 will have some benefits, and certainly it will help businesses to travel more quickly to London, but that is about all we can say. If I were a Manchester MP I am sure I would be supporting it, but below there it does not make any sense at all.
Julie Hilling
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, because I want to challenge his view that there is no benefit for Birmingham. I would much prefer the track to start in the north, but the reality is that the capacity issue is on the bottom part of the line and that if we do not do something to free up capacity there—and the bodged bits that people are talking about doing would not be adequate in the future—we will not have local trains running either.
Mr Robinson
I do not accept that at all, and the hon. Lady should look at what Centro and others have said. There is a capacity problem. The Government’s capacity projections are way over the top, just as they were for HS1, which was the biggest flop ever. Their capacity projections said that the minimum would be a fifth of the maximum, but they could not even get the capacity up to that level. It lost money from day one, and it was flogged off recently to someone in Canada who has no interest in it at all, at a whopping loss of £2 billion or £3 billion. That is the truth.
Mr Robinson
I just mention in passing that when I was being selected—those few years ago—
Mr Robinson
I will give way in a moment—no, I will not give way, sorry.
As a prospective Coventry candidate, I was told, “You’ve got to remember one thing, Geoffrey: the only good thing that comes out of Birmingham is the Coventry road”—but I will leave that there.
In all seriousness, with £33 billion of capital expenditure, this is the largest capital project that this country will ever have engaged in. That money could be better spent elsewhere. Dealing with the capacity problems between London and Birmingham and increasing capacity by 47% can be done now. The plans are there; they are shovel ready.
Mr Robinson
It will. Taking a realistic view of capacity, of course it will solve the problem, particularly if we are set back by a 16% output gap, thanks to the recession. Even the Government have had to revise their plans. Does my hon. Friend really believe that we will have more than a 50% increase in capacity in the next 10 years before the project comes in? We need an increase now. We can get 50% by lengthening platforms, without the huge tear-up in London and elsewhere, or the cost that HS2 would involve.
I will mention a few other points that I think are relevant. I happen to agree with those who feel that HS2 would involve the unnecessary tearing up of some of the most beautiful country that we have. This morning, Mr Speaker, your constituents were waxing lyrical about their village. I feel for those who will have their houses smashed and repossessed—all for no good. If we were at war and had to move ammunition, as we probably did in those days, there would be a case for HS2. There is no case now. As I have said, it is not the best way to increase capacity. That could be done in the shorter term and much more cheaply. It will not benefit ordinary people, and it will not help the north-south divide.
Above all—I say this in all seriousness to my colleagues from Manchester, Leeds, York and others who are here today—I fear that the real danger is that the line will not get built up there. They will find that the cost of getting the line to Birmingham will be blown up beyond all the estimates. Everyone will heave a sigh of relief and say, “We don’t have to go on. This is the profitable part.” In all likelihood, that is what will happen.
As for the environment, the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire made it quite clear that even the Government, and now Greengauge and the other lobby action groups in favour—paid by the Government, of course, or by the company itself—have admitted that HS2 will not do anything for the environment. One is at a loss to know why the Government are doing this. The whole cover was blown by the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray), who said that the Government reached a deal to oppose the third runway at Heathrow and have HS2 instead. It was a £30 billion election bribe. Whether or not it won them any seats I do not know, but the cover was blown earlier, in that intervention on the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire.
I put it to the House that I do not think that many hon. Members are in the mood to listen the arguments today. It is perfectly legitimate for them to seek to push their constituency interests, but let us go from legitimate constituency interests to a sane, objective assessment of the problems of the capital project, and the hon. Lady exposed the myths that lie behind that project.
High-Speed Rail
Geoffrey Robinson Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom). This is, indeed, a most important debate, and I would like to thank the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), who is a member of the Backbench Business Committee, for giving it to us. As he made clear, we had wished for a debate on the Floor of the House, and he almost promised us one once we are further into the consultation period. I am pleased to see such a good cross-party alliance forming here against HS2, and I hope briefly to follow the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire in setting out some of the reasons why it is a monumental waste of money and diversion of scarce resources.
I assure my hon. Friends who represent certain London and home counties constituencies, and others such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth), that those who oppose HS2 absolutely recognise the need for more capacity. We recognise that greater connectivity would be of great benefit, but we believe—I agree here with the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire—that Rail Package 2, which was worked out by Atkins, as the Minister knows, offers a much better prospect for being able to do that in a shorter time and on a much more cost-effective basis than HS2. I will say a few more things about that in a moment, if I may.
Those who represent Manchester and Leeds will naturally have an interest in seeing their constituents and businesses able to come down to London much more quickly than they can at present. I urge them to read about and get into the alternatives in RP2. It does most of what they could reasonably expect, given the scarcity of resources for capital projects, and all other areas of revenue expenditure as well, that this country faces in this difficult period.
The project mysteriously appeared at the tail end of the previous Government’s tenure of office, and was somehow or other—remarkably quickly—brought to the fore by Lord Adonis. One has to congratulate him on his coup in that respect. To many people, it came out of the blue, and provided the preponderant Tory part of the present Government with a marvellous reason for being able to cover their strange decision against the Heathrow extension—I know that many people had an interest in it. They managed to cover it by being able to say that they would replace it with HS2 going up to Birmingham and on to the north. It does not really do that at all. It is a great pity that the coalition Government missed the opportunity at least to subject this huge expenditure to a proper review. Instead, they jumped on the bandwagon to justify their stance over Heathrow.
As for the justification for HS2, I pay tribute to the work done by the HS2 Action Alliance against the project and I recommend its papers to everyone in the debate—I am sure some of them will be available, and Members should study them. For those of us who are against the project, it is a relief not to have to fix the numbers or to choose the numbers that suit our case best, as all Governments and Oppositions do, because every time we look at the Government’s numbers, they collapse. The Department for Transport brought some numbers out last March, and they brought some more out this year. Every time they bring numbers out and we examine them—there is no party political point in this—they are downgraded, just like current Government forecasts. At the end of my speech I will return to the point about what the Government should do in the present situation.
If one adopts some realistic assumptions on demand for HS1 and on the time benefit, the net benefit ratio is now down to 50p per pound spent. No time currently spent travelling by rail is counted at all, but the entire time spent on HS1 is counted at an annual rate of £70,000 a year, and every minute is brought into the so-called net benefit ratio. That is a monstrous distortion. One does not have to calculate other figures; one simply has to expose what the Government and the Department are up to.
Another point that has been made is that there is no alternative. I will deal with the subsidiary points in a moment. As I said, there is an alternative: it is called Rail Package 2, and it is in the Atkins alternatives. Before the Department published the revised forecast earlier this month, we urged it to study RP2. Instead, it bundled it together with two or three inadequate alternatives and tried to tar them all with the same brush. What we need the Government to do—they have made a useful start in this respect—is to set up an office to objectively and independently consider major infrastructure projects, in the same way that they set up the Office for Budget Responsibility. We do not have such an office, and nobody has looked at this issue other than the Government and the Department, whose minds are set in favour of HS2. What we are embarking on is not consultation; those who are against the project and those who are in favour of it can put their points, and ne’er the twain shall meet. The outcome, of course, will be a Division in the House in due course.
The Government are not listening; their mind is made up. Instead of just putting forward the same old flawed figures, why do they not look at the situation again, study RP2 objectively, try to develop it and see what alternatives emerge? They should do that productively and positively, not so that they can dismiss RP2 before they have made a decent analysis of it.
Mrs Villiers
I am sure I am not going to convince the hon. Gentleman on everything, but I hope that I can convince him that the Government have an open mind on this issue. We are listening to the concerns that are being expressed now and that will be expressed during the consultation. That is one reason why about half the route we inherited from our predecessors has been altered with a view to mitigating its local environmental impact.
Mr Robinson
I am grateful to the Minister. I hope that we can take that assurance at face value, as we are meant to. The test will be whether the Department is prepared objectively to get into the detail of RP2, because it has not done so yet. The Government should just study the papers produced by the HS2 Action Alliance and look at where they have tried to conflate a whole set of different alternatives. The Government and the Department—not the Minister, of course—should look at where they have tried to obfuscate the obvious advantages of RP2. From being 25% of the capital cost of HS2, RP2 has suddenly become 50%. That is all about the sudden increase in the cost of the rolling stock for RP2. Why has that happened? Can the Minister answer that basic question? After all, the Government say that they have studied this objectively.
Mrs Villiers
There are two different ways to analyse RP2, one of which involves purchasing rolling stock and one of which involves leasing it. That may be the source of the hon. Gentleman’s confusion.
Mr Robinson
We have suddenly gone from finding rolling stock available to having to purchase it. The change is not justified; it is not even spelled out. People will have their houses razed and they will suffer enormously. Every taxpayer will have to pay well over £1,000 towards HS2, but there is no real justification for this project yet.
If the Department is serious, if it wants to get back some credibility with those who look at these issues and if it wants to justify a real national case to people, including some in my constituency, as well as citizens elsewhere in Coventry and in Stoke, who will simply be bypassed and have a much worse service from HS2—businesses in Coventry will be adamantly against it, and those in Leeds and Manchester can no doubt be brought to say that they are, too—the least it can do is set up a proper inquiry into the business case for HS2 and explain why RP2 would not be a far better alternative or, at the very minimum, a valid alternative.
Conversations with Centro have made it clear that we need the added capacity, and no one in the debate has any doubt that HS2 would provide it, but at what cost? It will cost £18 billion to Birmingham and £30 billion to Manchester and Leeds. The cost per job created will be £600,000, which is monstrous. It has been said that that is about four times more than a normal job, for which the cost is £150,000, but even that figure is a gross exaggeration, and infrastructure projects can create jobs elsewhere in the economy at a much lower cost. The figure of £600,000 is mind-blowing.
Incidentally, I cannot imagine where the Treasury is on this. It has never been known to be terribly favourable to transport projects—on the contrary. It is also notorious for cutting waste and stopping projects that do not have a proper financial justification. How has the Department managed to convince the Prime Minister and now the Chancellor that it is in favour of the project? I cannot imagine why the Treasury has not stopped it. The only reason can be that the Government need something to explain why they have come out—this was purely for electoral reasons—against the development of Heathrow.
Graham Evans
Perhaps the fact that the Chancellor is a northern MP has something to do with that. However, on the previous point, Lord Adonis said that the likes of Rail Package 2 would be a classic British compromise and a mistake.
Mr Robinson
We have these generalisations, and people talk about a classic British compromise. We have all these platitudinous, stupid arguments, with people saying, “The Germans have one”, “We’ve got one” and “My dad’s bigger than your dad.” I have never heard anything so daft. We should look at the facts and figures and study these things objectively. If the hon. Gentleman cannot, the people in the Department can.
One Government Member has said that the terms of reference mean that the whole process has been hijacked by the pro-HS2 lobby, and there it has stayed. Nothing else has been analysed objectively. The OBR was set up to make sure that the Government’s general finances, economic policy and investments at the national level that are unrelated to infrastructure are properly evaluated, and the case for doing the same for infrastructure projects is stronger still. The Government should introduce such a body, and I would commend them if they did.
The green case has also collapsed. There is no net benefit in terms of the reduction in carbon from the scheme. The movement from air traffic constitutes only 7% of the eventual traffic to be carried on HS2, which is terribly small. Most importantly, this project is so long term that all the forecasts are meaningless; they have to be. Many of us will have heard Robert Chote on the “Tonight” programme saying that forecasts are very difficult. Robert Chote has all the power of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and all the stuff that he has brought into the new OBR, but the OBR has not got a forecast right from the Budget last June, to last November’s pre-Budget report, to the Budget this month. In about 10 months, it has changed its mind three times. To justify their demand forecasts, the Government have pushed them out 35 years; they have added 10 years on to get the volume increase they need to justify the project. What they are doing is so obvious, and that sort of stupidity is invalidating their case and making all of us who will be affected by this project, including those whose homes will be torn up, increasingly angry.
John Stevenson (Carlisle) (Con)
The same could apply to the hon. Gentleman’s forecasts. They could be underestimates as well. The economic benefits could be far greater than any of us anticipate.
Mr Robinson
That is a very fair point. It is difficult when one looks at such wildly different forecasts. One has to look at the history. Let us take demand forecasts for the rail industry. Nine out of 10 have been grossly exaggerated by at least twice. That is roughly the proportion we have between the conservative forecast and the Department for Transport’s forecast today. In the case of HS1, it has only just now, after nearly a decade of some sort of operation, reached the lowest level of forecast we ever thought remotely possible. As we know, HS1 has just been sold off as a dead loss, at a loss of £3 billion.
John Stevenson
On the west coast line the increase in traffic has been far beyond the forecasts made originally.
Mr Robinson
I do not think I can talk to that point. We come back to the fact that it can be done much more cheaply—I hope the Minister is listening. RP2 should be analysed and developed properly. It can also be done much earlier. In this period of difficult recovery, we need projects that generate growth and employment now. This is not going to come in—on the best of cases—until 2026 to Birmingham, and then it goes another 20 years beyond that. That is far too late. I was speaking to Geoff Inskip, managing director of Centro the other day, and he said we cannot wait so long, we need the increasing capacity now, as soon as possible. He is convinced that four-tracking between Coventry and Birmingham should be proceeded with forthwith. That is the first step towards RP2 and it should be taken now; we should not wait until 2026. That is an absurd proposition for meeting the country’s capacity needs for rail transport.
Mr Ainsworth
By raising the historical context, my hon. Friend is making a good case against every major infrastructure project that has ever been built. All the Victorian railway lines went broke; the channel tunnel never made any money; HS1 has just been exposed by my hon. Friend. Is he suggesting that we should never have built any railways, we should not have built the channel tunnel and we should not have built HS1? He appears to be saying that we can squeeze yet more—and there is a law of diminishing returns—out of the existing infrastructure. We have had years of disruption on the west coast main line for an upgrade. He is saying that huge benefit can be gained by yet more disruption to the existing lines.
Mr Robinson
That point was made earlier. My right hon. Friend asserts one thing that leads me to assert another. I believe it can be developed in that way. I believe it because the Atkins report, which also made a projection for the HS2 line, said it and worked it out in detail. It very clearly dealt with pinch points, length of trains, length of carriages, and calculated the number of problems it would create in disturbance on the line. We want it worked out and properly investigated by an independent body. That is what we need. Nobody is against it; we all want to extend the rail line. We all want to extend rail capacity and increase speeds.
Mr Robinson
I will give way to the Minister in a second. RP2 will take us up to 136 mph, which many people think adequate.
Tony Baldry
In fact, I am a humble Back Bencher, and proud to be so. I do not wish to intrude in family grief in Coventry, but I think that the hon. Gentleman is failing to make his best point. His best point on behalf of Coventry should be a concern that HS2—which quite rightly, if it goes ahead, will connect certain cities in the country—is likely to be to the disadvantage of other cities, such as Coventry. He has not made that point in terms, and I am sure it is one he would wish to.
Mr Robinson
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I was trying not to participate in nimbyism. I have been sworn not to do that. I make no apology: I am here to represent Coventry’s interest. Call me a nimby or whatever. I can find nothing in the proposal that brings any benefit to Coventry. I think that if my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) were here he would agree with that point. I can see that many others have a different point of view. We want capacity, we want modernisation, we believe we can get it, there is an alternative, and we want it evaluated. I cannot see what is wrong with that proposition. I cannot see how anyone could oppose it when, looking at capital costs on present forecasts, it would cost half of what HS1 cost.
Mr Robinson
We have taken up a bit of time. The hon. Gentleman will have better use of his time if I curtail mine.
Welcome as a public consultation is, it is no more than an opportunity for the pros and cons to be stated on a large project on which the Government have already made up their mind. Opening up the mind is very good, and I appreciate what the Minister has said on that point. I have to warn all those who for personal and national reasons are joining us in opposition to HS2 that it is going to require a sustained, strong exercise in parliamentary and people power to get the Government to change their mind. Do not underestimate the difficulties we all face in that respect.
Mrs Villiers
The right hon. Gentleman puts the case very well. Coventry stands to benefit hugely from the plans under consideration this afternoon. Journey time savings matter. For example, the Y network would enable people living in Manchester and Leeds to get to Canary Wharf in roughly one hour and 40 minutes, and Heathrow in 75 minutes or less. I assure the shadow Minister that the plans for phase 2 include the direct link to Heathrow that we called for in opposition.
I believe that bringing the capital within 49 minutes of Birmingham and 80 minutes of Manchester and Leeds would spread the massive benefits of London’s global pull. It would do more to bridge the north-south divide than virtually all previous efforts to address a problem that has defied solution for decades, which is probably one reason why so many people north of Birmingham support the project so strongly.
Mr Robinson
The Minister spoke about regional benefits, and we increasingly see the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister emphasising in person the north-south divide. First, how does she explain the fact that of the jobs created—about 30,000—seven in 10 will be in London, not the regions? Secondly, does she really believe that £600,000 a job is good regional investment policy?
Mrs Villiers
The project will create jobs throughout the country. The suggestion that all the cities that are calling for high-speed rail will see their economic growth sucked away by London just does not hold water. Look around Europe, where cities such as Lille and Lyons have been transformed. In Europe and Asia, cities are fighting hard to be on the high-speed rail networks that other countries have the courage and determination to deliver.
Rail Investment
Geoffrey Robinson Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Hammond
When we contract for, or enter into arrangements to support the contracting of, rolling stock, we will look to see that there are effective penalty arrangements to make it extremely costly for anybody to fail to deliver on time what they are supposed to deliver.
Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)
The Secretary of State has made it clear that he has drilled down hard on the numbers and taken an objective and exigent view of the returns that he expects from the investment. Can we expect a similar approach to HS 2? In the consultation, about which he was very open on the “Today” programme this morning, but has been less so with the House so far, will it be possible to look at alternative routes, not just geographically but in order to run HS 2 down existing lines?
Mr Hammond
I am delighted to hear from the hon. Gentleman. Not many people who have addressed me on HS 2 have asked me to alter the line so that it runs through their constituency, as I think he has. I am grateful for his enthusiastic support for the project. The HS 2 consultation will include the detail of the route from London to Birmingham, the wider strategic principles of the high-speed rail network and the selected route corridors, so his constituents, his local authority, and indeed he himself, will have an opportunity to make that point.