High-Speed Rail

Thomas Docherty Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve for the first time under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. The hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) suggested that when both Front-Bench teams are in agreement, we should count the spoons. Given that I broadly agree with him, I am not sure what we should be counting. Hopefully, as a member of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association and a former Network Rail employee who worked on a number of civil engineering and major projects, I will bring something to this debate.

The past 30 years of rail infrastructure projects in the UK have been somewhat chequered. There are some great successes: we have reopened a number of rail lines; reconnected communities; and brought social and economic benefits to large parts of the United Kingdom, and a permanent link to mainland Europe. Those are, I hope, benefits in everyone’s eyes. However, we have had some significant failures in those rail projects. Each one has been over budget, if we look at what the politicians claimed originally and the actual bill the taxpayer received. Many require ongoing subsidy and many communities have been blighted, including one in my area, thanks to the Stirling-Alloa-Kincardine railway.

The hon. Gentleman was right to make a point about budgets. This is not a party political point. The channel tunnel came in desperately over budget, and there has been talk about ongoing problems with High Speed 1. To look at a small-scale project, the Stirling-Alloa-Kincardine railway, which only involved the reopening of seven miles of track, went from being £20 million originally to £77 million when it was finally delivered, and compensation cases are still to be resolved. The Airdrie Bathgate project, which I helped to deliver, was £40 million when it was first mooted and £300 million when it was actually delivered. For that reason alone, I do not believe a single figure that has been bandied around for the cost of any section of HS2 and its successor projects.

If the line reaches Edinburgh, a whole new station would have to be constructed, because Edinburgh cannot take high-speed rail. The current station is right in the city centre and there is no capacity left for any more track or platforms. That means that a whole new set of connecting track would need to be laid from the parkway station that would be required to the network, and those costs have not been worked out.

The question is: who benefits from high-speed rail? It only works if it travels great distances between stops. It needs to get up to high speed to make the time savings. This is a blindingly obvious thing to say, but every time we add a stop, it adds several minutes to the journey. That is not just because the train has to slow down and pick up speed again, but because passengers have to get off and on the train.

I hope that the Minister will learn from successive Ministers, both in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK, that leadership is required. When a route is set out, she must not give in to the very eloquent lobbying that she will get from many Members who will say, “Of course I support it, but you need to add my local area to it.” The line can only work if it is genuinely high-speed and connects only the great conurbations. I doubt that either Warrington or even Carlisle will qualify on those grounds, despite the eloquent cases that will be made for them.

The Minister must recognise that we need to have rolling stock in place before we start to build. One of the great reasons for the failure of the Edinburgh airport rail link was that Ministers in Scotland tried to build a rail link under a live airport without any clear sense of what the rolling stock would actually look like. For instance, for safety reasons, it is impossible to send a diesel train underground, and a whole network would need to be electrified. That project floundered because it was impossible to find suitable rolling stock that worked anywhere in the world. One of my great concerns about High Speed 2 and its successors is that I have not heard a clear articulation of what the required rolling stock is. Perhaps when the Minister responds to the debate she can say whether the Government have identified suitable rolling stock that actually exists somewhere on track, rather than on paper.

I sound a final note of caution about the independence of the business case. The Minister is fully aware of the ongoing dispute between the TSSA and Network Rail, which she has been helping to mediate. That dispute is about the past leadership of Iain Coucher, the former chief executive of Network Rail. I do not wish to detain the House, but there are some very serious concerns about Mr Coucher’s financial practices and about why he has spent so much taxpayers’ money lobbying for a high-speed rail project. I hope that the Minister will give a cast-iron guarantee that Mr Coucher and his associates will play no part in the delivery of high-speed rail, if and when it goes ahead.

In conclusion—I am trying to stick to your six-minute limit, Mr Walker—there are five key things that the Minister must demonstrate for this project to go ahead. First, there must be robust and independent analysis of the business case and the time savings. Secondly, clear leadership must be given on delivery. Thirdly, there must be no compromises on stations once the route is set out. Fourthly, there must be rolling stock that actually exists on track somewhere, rather than in someone’s head. Fifthly, there must be honesty about ongoing costs for the subsidy of the line of route and the rolling stock.

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

I call Graham Evans. Six minutes.