East West Rail Route Consultation: North East Bedfordshire

The 2019 consultation exercise was not statutory, but as the phrase goes, if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. That consultation was not done well. Many parish councils on the potential routes were not contacted, including three in my constituency at Colmworth, Staploe and Wilden, all of which are on route E, the current preferred route. Postcards notifying residents of the consultation were sent to only some residents in the affected areas, not to all residents. Coverage of those postcards was variable; some wards received 5% coverage and others 20%, with no explanation for the variance.

Of the responses received to the consultation, fully half were from supporters of a single charity, which obviously made a tremendous effort to consult its members. That raises the question why East West Rail was not able to generate a fraction of that participation. Of all the in-person consultation events, not one was held in the area that was ultimately selected as the preferred route.

Those facts are the foundation for the lack of trust. I have spoken to countless residents who say they found out about the railway only after their opportunity to have their say was done. This is very shaky ground on which to proceed.

In the 2019 consultation documentation, there were five route options, A through E. Routes, A, B, C and D had costs of between £2 billion and £2.6 billion. Route E, the one subsequently chosen, had a substantially higher cost of £3.4 billion, £1 billion more than the average of the others, going into the consultation.

In the documentation released after the consultation, the cost figures for each of the routes A, B, C and D were raised by more than £1.3 billion, with increases of between 50% and 80%, yet the costs for route E were changed by only 9%. No satisfactory explanation has been provided for why East West Rail got the costs so hopelessly wrong on four of the route options and so forensically right on the one that it selected. The consequence was that route E went from being the most expensive to the second cheapest and became the preferred route.

It is clear why many residents feel cheated by a consultation that gives every appearance of having had its numbers fixed after their right to be consulted had ended. Does the Minister agree that the change in cost estimates played a significant role in the route decision process? Does he agree that that change clearly indicates that the consultation was done too early and gave a misleading impression to consultees? Does he worry, as I do, that the Treasury should be highly sceptical of any project cost estimates made in the future by East West Rail?

Two years after the first consultation, there remains considerable mystery about the costs and benefits of each route. As one constituent advises me, these uncertainties and the general lack of financial transparency indicate the clear risk of future cost overruns with a failure to achieve claimed economic benefits. I have asked East West Rail for a detailed session with me and others to unpack the costs and assumptions. Will the Minister nudge East West Rail to grant that meeting?

The Campaign to Protect Rural England for Bedfordshire has stated its firm opposition to the route selected and highlighted severe limitations in the consideration of the environment in the consultation.

Essentially, the directly elected Mayor of Bedford submitted his secret plan, which added costs, made journey times longer and created an environmentally brutal route. I fully appreciate that the Mayor was committed to a line running through the centre of town rather than to a parkway station, but that personal commitment did not give him or his executive the right to bypass his own council’s scrutiny. He may say that he had that discretion, but my constituents feel duped. And for what? What was the big economic gain for the borough? The council’s own analysis says that the proposal adds just 0.05% to annual economic growth—0.05% is hard to justify to the owners of homes that will have to be demolished.

Further, there are unanswered questions about whether the push for that route required the borough council to accede to additional future housing growth in the borough—essentially, whether the plan was secret because it stored up a development bombshell for rural north Bedfordshire. Will the Minister therefore advise me what significance the input of a local authority has in his Department’s evaluation of rail route options? Will he also allay the fears of my constituents that, in regard to additional housing or development expectations, there was no direct or indirect communication with Bedford borough by his Department or any other Department as a result of the routing of East West Rail through the town centre.

Engineering considerations for the route remain a source of significant contention. A consultancy was hired by the borough council to advise on engineering costs twice in the space of two months. In its first report it stated that the northern routes,

“come at a price of increased construction costs, increased disruption during construction, longer journey times and increased operational costs, as well as increased congestion and other highway costs.”

One month later, it produced a second report, stating that Bedford Borough Council

“has developed its own preliminary Route E design that reduces the cost differential to Route A by nearly half and avoids much of the highway disruption.”

Will the Minister advise me as to whether he was aware of what special engineering source was discovered by the council in that one month? I believe their analysis has proved highly influential with East West Rail, yet these figures from the council have never be made open to external review so that that assumption can be questioned in detail.

A number of changes have been made since the origination of this consultation. It originated in Lord Adonis’s Oxford-Cambridge arc vision, as part and parcel of acceding to the provision of 1 million homes in this region between Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire, including Bedfordshire, yet just a week or two ago the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government confirmed to me that that 1 million homes target is no longer a target. We know that the other project of Lord Adonis’s vision, the expressway, is no longer a long expressway; it has been junked in Buckinghamshire. We know that covid has changed crucial traffic assumptions, with greater working from home and with the opportunity for more office space in London to be converted to residential. We know that the vision for East West Rail has been cascading back in history, from his shining, 21st century, forward-looking vision where we connect two—potentially three—of our great universities to one involving a 19th century fuel of dubious merit. The Government have issued a 10-point plan for net zero, yet in some ways there are concerns that East West Rail now stands directly against those ambitions. As I said, we have more examples to show that people will change lifelong voting intentions to express their discontent with top-down projects that fundamentally change their surroundings.

I support East West Rail—I think it is a good idea, and the vision has its strengths—but what we are now being sold as the vision of East West Rail is not what the original intention was. Worse still, the process of going from that original vision to where we are now has destroyed trust, faith and belief in East West Rail, rather than building it up. People like infrastructure and we talk about it a lot here, but when people think about infrastructure they are talking about improvements to their town centres, about making it easier for them to get access to a GP appointment or about ensuring that their child gets into a good local school; it is not thought of in terms of spatial frameworks, visions for the future by departed technocrats or consultation exercises that treat people like fools. I urge the Minister to take these concerns and priorities seriously, play his part in restoring trust in this process and give the people that rail connection that they want, can understand and believe in.

My hon. Friend will be aware that both consultations were non-statutory and so were not a legal requirement for the project to continue. Indeed, they were examples of East West Rail trying to ensure that it was listening to the voices of people along the proposed routes. The East West Railway Company genuinely does want to hear from the people affected and use their views to shape the design of the railway. I hope my hon. Friend understands that the new chairman of the East West Railway Company is determined to listen to the views of the people along the route.

There are no fixed rules about the duration of a non-statutory consultation, but the East West Railway Company decided to run the consultation for a period of 10 weeks to provide opportunities for virtual question and answer sessions—given the lack of in-person meetings because of the pandemic—and to try to ensure that people had enough time to respond in a meaningful way.

My Department is content that both consultations met open and fair consultation standards. A range of promotional activity took place for both consultations, including, as my hon. Friend said, the sending of postcards to more than 120,000 households and businesses in the consultation zone for the first consultation, increasing to 270,000 for the recent consultation, to ensure that the virtual nature of the consultation did not mean that people missed out on the chance to take part. Advertisements were placed in key local publications and social media and local print were utilised.

Public consultation has been and continues to be a crucial part of the development of the East West Rail project, which is why the East West Railway Company has made great efforts to speak to as many local people as possible from an early stage. While I am the Minister responsible, the company will continue in that spirit as the project is progressed. Indeed, in my time as the sponsor Minister for the project I have tried to sit in on as many meetings as I can so that I can see exactly what is going on and how people’s views are being reflected.

I completely get the point that my hon. Friend made about the environmental concerns. I am not one to go to No. 10 to ask for something—that is a tad above my pay grade—but I continue to listen to him on the question he is essentially asking: is there evidence that quality environmental assessments have been made on East West Rail? An appraisal was undertaken to assess the comparative environmental sustainability of the route options as part of the process for determining a preferred route option, as described in the preferred route option report. That assessment concluded that the routes by Cambourne—routes, B and E—were broadly comparable and had the

“fewest problematic areas with potential direct impacts on irreplaceable or sensitive features and the lowest likely mitigation effort.”

East West Railway Company will continue to assess the potential environmental effects as part of the route alignment development work. An environmental impact assessment will be undertaken and an environmental statement submitted when East West Railway Company submits its development consent order application to the Planning Inspectorate. It will therefore be going by the letter and in the spirit of the rules and the law.

My hon. Friend asked me about Bedford Borough Council’s representations and the Bedford Mayor’s secret plan. I have no idea whether the Bedford Mayor has a secret plan, but I truly believe he would not have had undue influence over any of the plans for East West Rail. I have asked the question previously, but I will happily go away and ask East West Rail whether it can bring anything to me so that we can either finally put to one side and dismiss what my hon. Friend says, or, if there is something in it, have it out in the open so that everyone can see it. It would then probably be a matter for local politics. However, I do not believe that would be the case, because I do not believe there is anything to see.

My hon. Friend asked about the significance of local authority contributions to the consultation process. I come back again and again to the point that we want everybody and anybody interested and affected by the proposed route alignment and the development of the railway to be involved in its design so that we get the process completely right. I believe there would have been significant conversations between the local authorities along the route and the East West Railway Company; less so, to be honest, with my Department, because that is not necessarily our brief. As he knows, his constituents will have many further opportunities to raise issues for consideration, including in a statutory consultation. In the meantime, anyone who wishes to make representations should contact the East West Railway Company to have their voices heard.

With that, I hope that I have answered a number of my hon. Friend’s points. I am determined that we and East West Rail are as open and transparent as possible with my hon. Friend, with other Members of Parliament in interested areas and with people potentially affected along the individual routes. I hope to have demonstrated by action, not just word, that I truly believe that East West Rail needs to do that. I will continue to turn up at meetings with his parish councillors and others to ensure that that is the case. There will be further opportunities to influence the decisions that will have an effect—hopefully a very positive one—on the lives of his constituents going forward.