High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

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 Bradshaw (LD)]

If I may just follow up a few of the points made by my noble friend, we have discussed before the question of a link between Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross. When I was deputy general manager at Euston back in the far-off days, it was being discussed—it is one of these projects that seems always to be under discussion but is never carried out. I am looking for something like the link you get between terminals in airports; that is, a wide, well-lit way of getting between the two stations with a travelator or similar device for your luggage. I am not looking for some form of futuristic railway, just a convenient, out-of-the-weather way for moving you and your luggage between the two places.

There will be a lot of time to think about this, because there will be a long period when Old Oak Common will be the London terminal for HS2. There can be dispute about how Old Oak Common could be used, but there will be six platforms there and the trains from Birmingham, which will take only 38 minutes, can almost be described as commuter trains. They will not require huge amounts of servicing at Old Oak Common, it will be possible to turn trains back there very quickly, and Euston may well not be needed until after phase 2A of HS2, so there is plenty of time to think about it and get it in place.

My noble friend commented on connections to HS1. I know that people in the south of England feel that it is very difficult for them to use it: they have to make a big journey. That will be alleviated if the Government could—again, they could work on this contemporaneously with the work on HS2—strengthen the link along the south coast between Brighton and Ashford. There are bits of that railway that need sorting out. I hope we can get some sort of assurance about what the Government intend to do.

Those are questions, not things that we will have disputes on, but we want to know what the Government envisage that they will do, in the long term, about the problems here.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, my Amendment 9 is grouped, although I am not sure it is closely connected to what the two previous speakers have been discussing. It would delete one of the amendments that the Select Committee proposed in its report. Let me make it quite clear: I do not criticise the Select Committee on this issue; I am sure its amendments are just what is needed. I ask the Minister, however: is it not a bit unusual for a Select Committee’s amendments to be incorporated in a Bill without debate? I had assumed that they might have been tabled for debate today, and we could have debated and no doubt approved them, but it was surprising that a new issue of the Bill was published in the past week as a result of the amendments being included. This may not be a question for the Minister—it may be a question for the Chairman of Committees or someone else—but it is something that we should debate. Perhaps it will be different next time, if there are to be more committees such as this.

While I am on my feet, the Minister kindly briefed us on progress just before we broke up for Christmas. One question that many asked him was: were the Government going to respond to the excellent report from the Select Committee? It would have been nice to have their response before Committee today. We have not had it, but can he assure me that we will receive it in good time for Report?

--- Later in debate ---

I will not go on. I think that I have set out the reasons for tabling these amendments, but I urge the Minister to undertake this independent cost analysis and everything else that goes with it before the construction starts. Otherwise, in a couple of years, whoever is the Minister will say, “Sorry. It’s going ahead and we’ll need more money”. I can see Ministers in this Government and probably in any other Government saying, “Well, if you want more money, you’d better find it from the other railway budget”. That would be a complete disaster. I beg to move.

[Lord Bradshaw]

I support what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has said. The scheme as envisaged is extravagant, and this is not a time when we can afford extravagance. There is a good case for having an independent assessment of the costs, particularly to consider such things as how long this railway can terminate at Old Oak Common, which would set aside a considerable sum of money. If a connection has to be made to Euston, how can that be done in the most economical way? I do not believe that that issue has been addressed. We are not talking about small sums of money; we are talking about billions of pounds.

One thing that I was told about the Bill was that people had made assumptions about the time it took to turn round a train from the north that was heading in the direction of London. I have run a lot of London stations. I can assure noble Lords that, with the number of trains that it is proposed to run from Manchester to Old Oak Common, it would be quite easy, given the six platforms there, to turn the trains round. What one has to factor in is the capacity at Old Oak Common. That means that there has to be a sufficient number of people to service the trains. Special attention also needs to be given to the access to and from the platforms.

I rather agree with the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about the Handsacre link, which seems to cost a lot of money. I certainly agree on the issue about speed. There is a complete misapprehension of the value of journey time savings when we talk about savings of two minutes or less, yet that structure holds up the whole of our transport evaluation, whether in road, rail or anything else—the biggest factor to be taken into consideration is the value of the small time savings, which are all added together and form a colossal sum. However, people making a journey do not take into consideration whether they are going to be two minutes quicker, because in lots of modes of transport unpredictability is a much bigger factor than the journey time saving.

I also want to probe—to push very hard—on the time savings. We should be very careful about speeds which go much above 125 miles per hour, possibly up to 150. It costs a lot once you push speeds towards the upper end of the limit. I am happy to join the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, in his call for independent costings, but there is also a need for re-evaluation of the economic basis on which the line is to be built.

[Lord Framlingham (Con)]

My Lords, we have dealt with only two amendments so far, and any member of the public sitting listening to the Committee will be asking themselves: “Why on earth are you going ahead with this project?”. All we have are problems, which seem to me almost insurmountable; we have no answers to them. When we ask about the trek from St Pancras to Euston, the answer is, apparently, offer £3 million to the local authority as a prize if it can come up with the answer. That does not sound to me like much of a solution.

I know that this is not Second Reading, but we must ask ourselves whether there is any sense in going ahead with this whole project. We have not yet dealt with the environmental problems, which will be huge and last for years. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, whose amendment I support, that the whole scheme is not properly costed and nobody knows what will happen in the long run.

The Minister described it as a vital scheme. It is not. The money could be much better spent on all sorts of things: hospitals, schools, or Liverpool-to-Hull transport. If we pursue it, I think we will regret it for a long time. As this matter proceeds, I hope that your Lordships’ House will think it through very carefully and perhaps have second thoughts about proceeding with the whole scheme.