Railways: High-speed Rail

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, my noble friend is right to say that the hybrid Bill process is long and complicated. He suggests that we should do this in one Bill. I should point out that a difficulty with that is that, while we could secure political co-operation to deal with the Bill as expeditiously as possible, my noble friend will be aware that outside organisations can petition against a Bill as long as they have a locus, and there is nothing that we can do in Parliament to stop that—and I am not sure that we would want to either. My noble friend talked about including provisions for the spur in the initial hybrid Bill. I make no promises whatever, but I will mention his suggestion to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State.

[Lord Berkeley]

I very much welcome the Statement. It would be helpful if the Minister, through his colleagues in the Commons, could encourage as many Members of Parliament as possible along the route—they may have strongly opposed the project—to look at their constituents’ best interests now and say, “Right, we’ll work with this and get the best mitigating measures possible”. That is what happened with the Channel Tunnel, which I worked on, and High Speed 1. Members of Parliament, led by the noble Lord, Lord Howard, did extremely well in looking after their constituents’ interests rather than opposing the principle.

I have one question for the Minister on the connection between HS2 and HS1. I welcome the fact that there will be a railway connection, which is mentioned in the document, but I am very concerned that it will run for about half a mile along the North London line, which is not only at its most congested there—most people would say that it is full already—but will not be capable of taking any international train of the current design. I do not know whether that is another reason for the scheme not getting any European money, which my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham referred to; but to make the system work, there has to be a through connection built to the new gauge. I understand from Network Rail that it is technically quite possible to do so, and it would probably be cheaper too.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I am pleased to say that opposition to the scheme is waning in the light of the work done by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State and her predecessor, and I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, might have done a little bit of work on the side as well. We must not forget that the duty of MPs is to represent their constituents.

The noble Lord asked about the important question of connectivity between HS2 and HS1. The North London line, to which he referred, will support at least three trains per hour in each direction while also maintaining the current service levels. Some gauge clearance will be necessary to accommodate the wider and taller HS2 trains on the North London line. We are confident that this can be achieved with minimal impacts on the local community and rail services.