High Speed Rail (West Midlands-Crewe) Bill

Committee (2nd Day)

A participants’ list for today’s proceedings has been published by the Government Whips’ Office, as have lists of Members who have put their names to the amendments or expressed an interest in speaking on each group. I will call Members to speak in the order listed. Members are not permitted to intervene spontaneously; the Chair calls each speaker. Interventions during speeches or “before the noble Lord sits down” are not permitted.

During the debate on each group, I will invite Members, including Members in the Grand Committee Room, to email the clerk if they wish to speak after the Minister, using the Grand Committee address. I will call Members to speak in order of request and call the Minister to reply each time. The groupings are binding, and it will not be possible to degroup an amendment for separate debate. A Member intending to move formally an amendment already debated should have given notice in the debate. Leave should be given to withdraw amendments.

When putting the Question, I will collect voices in the Grand Committee Room only. I remind Members that Divisions cannot take place in Grand Committee. It takes unanimity to amend the Bill, so if a single voice says “Not content”, an amendment is negatived, and if a single voice says “Content”, a clause stands part. If a Member taking part remotely intends to oppose an amendment expected to be agreed to, they should make this clear when speaking on the group.

Amendment 6

6: After Clause 58, insert the following new Clause— “Independent peer review (1) The Secretary of State must commission an independent peer review of the High Speed Rail (West Midlands to Crewe) project.(2) The review must include consideration of the project’s—(a) environmental impact,(b) costs, forecast revenue and economic impact,(c) engineering, and(d) governance.(3) In this section, “independent” means it is carried out by persons who are independent of—(a) Government,(b) HS2 Ltd, and(c) persons contracted or subcontracted to carry out any of the scheduled works.(4) In this section, a “peer review” is a review conducted by experts of equivalent professional qualifications, expertise and standing to the persons responsible for each aspect of the project set out in subsection (2).(5) A report of the review under subsection (1) must be laid before Parliament and have been debated in both Houses before commencement of the scheduled works.”Member’s explanatory statement The purpose of the amendment is to require the Government to commission and publish a wide ranging audit of all elements of the scheduled works, costs, forecasts and economic impact and done by professionals who have not links with the Government or the promoters.

My Lords, the amendment is in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. On our previous day in Committee, we discussed regular reporting and had a good debate. This amendment is slightly different, because the emphasis is on independent peer review. I remind noble Lords that this project has been around, discussed in another Parliament, for probably 10 years and things have moved on. We have learned a lot. There have been changes, which we all know about. It is probably time for Parliament to commission an independent review so that it knows what has been asked for, what will be built, how much it is going to cost and so on. In particular, we have had a lot of debate both on the Floor of the House and in the Select Committees on the environmental impact, costs, forecast revenue before and after Covid—well, not after yet—the economic impact, the engineering and the governance.

I do not wish to express any opinion on whether what we have now is good or bad. What is needed is an independent opinion—independent of government, of HS2 and of the various contractors. The experience in the Oakervee review last year was that when we tried to seek independent opinions on whatever we were looking at under the terms of reference, we found it quite difficult to identify people or organisations that were not or had not been in some way linked to HS2 or the Department for Transport. I am not being critical, but it is pretty important if one wants an independent review that those conducting it are independent and not worried about where the next contract will come from, for example.

I shall not say much more except to remind noble Lords that probably one of the most important things that I am focused on is costs. There have been three or four times when Department for Transport officials or HS2 staff have basically said that they do not know what the costs are. One HS2 executive, when asked why they had not been transparent on costs, memorably replied:

My Lords, I do not have much to add to what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, so ably said, and the amendment is largely self-explanatory. It will become apparent as further amendments are moved that there is a strong case for an amendment such as this, which is why I added my name to it.

For all the many pages written on matters of safeguards, it seems that few outside the cerebral world of the department, HS2 and its contractors are entirely convinced that HS2 Ltd will honour the spirit as opposed to the letter as it sees it. Too much of this Bill appears to rest on HS2 Ltd’s self-assessment, in which the Government as ultimate funder and promoter are a party. Costs have soared, as we have heard. Budgets for things such as land acquisitions seem to have been woefully inadequate. Timelines have become stretched; procedures have been subject to novel interpretations, and a good deal of unnecessary uncertainty and doubt about aspects of the scheme have crept in as far as those outside but affected by the scheme are concerned.

This is a scheme by the nation for the nation, and it should embed best practice and be seen to be doing so. I am pleased to support the amendment because it goes to the heart of public confidence in the manner in which this truly mighty project is being managed.

My Lords, I oppose the amendment. I do not see any point in it whatever. It seems to me that in this country we can never make up our minds about whether we are going to do anything that is big and expensive. We have constant reviews, and we are constantly cancelling projects that have already made some advance. We have just had the independent Oakervee review of HS2, and we have just had a government decision to go ahead with the line to Manchester—although I share the worries of my noble friend Lord Adonis about what the Government are thinking about the eastern leg. However, I see no purpose in launching another review now.

My noble friend Lord Berkeley says that it is very difficult to get independent advice regarding all these concerns about costs, et cetera. Of course it is difficult to get independent advice, as the people who really know the facts are the ones who are doing the job. Unless the taxpayer is to fund an independent organisation to be critical of a scheme that Parliament has voted for and that the Government have reaffirmed and have cross-party support for, then this is a ludicrous proposal. I suppose that the answer to my noble friend’s legitimate concerns is to have an effective HS2 board. If there is an answer to this problem, it lies in having an effective board to supervise the management of the project. That is the point that the Government ought to be satisfying themselves on. I honestly do not think that this is a matter for legislation at all.

My Lords, I agree with every word that my noble friend Lord Liddle has said, and I hope that the Minister will not give an inch to this amendment and will comprehensively refute it when she speaks. HS2 has been reviewed to death.

I find it utterly astonishing that my noble friend Lord Berkeley should be moving this amendment because he has brought his great, independent wisdom and distinction to the biggest review yet of HS2, which concluded only this February after the best part of six months’ work. When he says that there are no independent people to conduct that review, it is a lot of complete nonsense. The members of the Oakervee review were very eminent and very independent: Doug Oakervee himself, a man of immense distinction in the delivery of infrastructure projects here and internationally, including some of the most successful developed in modern economies, in Hong Kong; my noble friend, who was the deputy chairman; Sir John Cridland, who is the former director-general of the CBI; Michèle Dix, who is responsible for directing Crossrail 2; Stephen Glaister, one of the most eminent transport economists in the world; Sir Peter Hendy, the chairman of Network Rail and former commissioner of Transport for London; Andrew Sentance, of the Bank of England; Professor Tony Travers, who is one of the most independent-minded and distinguished professors of government in the world and holds a chair at the London School of Economics; Andy Street, who is the elected Mayor of the West Midlands; and Patrick Harley, who is the leader of Dudley council. So I ask my noble friend Lord Berkeley to tell us in his reply: what sort of independence does he have in mind? Who are these great independent judges of infrastructure projects who can bring their wisdom to bear and have not already been consulted? At the end of the Oakervee report, which is 130 pages long, there is a list of the people who submitted evidence and were consulted. That list extends to more than 400 people and organisations.

My noble friend then said—because he is being disingenuous, if he does not mind my saying so—that he is not trying to get it cancelled, and he does not wish to express an opinion on whether it is a good or bad thing. However, he has consistently expressed an opinion that HS2 is a bad thing. He says that there should be independent review, but he then says that it is very poor value for money and the costs—whatever they are at any given time—are spiralling out of control. He makes a series of assertions that—although he is perfectly entitled to make them—mostly do not correspond to the actual analysis by independent advisers, and he then calls for another review.

The Oakervee review—which, as I say, has just been concluded, and on which the Government have decided to proceed—is the fifth major independent review of HS2 since I announced the scheme to Parliament in March 2010. What my noble friend Lord Berkeley is seeking to do is to kill the scheme by review. That is what is happening. I hope the Minister will not accede to this amendment. Indeed, I wish the Minister would cancel the current review of the eastern leg, which is doing precisely what my noble friend wants to do: to review to death one-third of the scheme.

I have the highest regard for the Minister, and I thank her very warmly for replying within 24 hours to the points that I made in the previous Grand Committee sitting. With that sort of service she should be put in charge of test and trace—but I am probably ruining her career. The Department for Transport is a great department. It deals with these things efficiently, unlike other departments. I am glad to see that those processes are still in place. However, the big concern I have at the moment is that, under the guise of a review, the Government are essentially seeking to indefinitely delay and quite possibly cancel the eastern leg of HS2. I do not want to reiterate all of the arguments that I made on Monday, although I am glad to see that the Yorkshire Post has picked them up and that leaders of major local authorities in the east Midlands, Yorkshire and the north-east have picked them up as well. The Minister will have to forgive me but I am going to carry on agitating extremely hard on behalf of her department—which, as everyone knows, wants the eastern leg to proceed but is being thwarted by Dominic Cummings and the Treasury at the moment. I am doing my best for her even though she will not be able to recognise my efforts in her reply.

In the Minister’s letter to me on the issue of the eastern leg review taking place at the moment and the announcement she made to the Grand Committee on Monday that the western and eastern legs will definitely be separated in terms of hybrid Bills—which is a hugely consequential amendment—she said:

“As the Integrated Rail Plan Terms Of Reference make clear, more than one hybrid Bill could run concurrently in Parliament. There is nothing to suggest that bringing forward a Western Leg Bill should entail delay to any Eastern Leg legislation”.

The first sentence and the second sentence are in stark contradiction. There is every reason to suggest that bringing forward a western leg Bill will delay any eastern leg legislation; otherwise, why split them up at all? If the aim is to have them running concurrently, they should be in one Bill.

The Minister says that it is possible for the two Bills to run concurrently. If the Government’s intention were to run the two Bills concurrently there would, of course, be no need for separate Bills. There is no gain whatever in having two Bills running concurrently. On the contrary, there is a significant additional workload both for HS2 Ltd and for Parliament in dealing with two Bills rather than one, because of the whole process of petitioning and the need to comprise and set up new committees and so on. The only reason for separating the western leg and the eastern leg into two Bills is to delay the eastern leg Bill. Anyone who knows about parliamentary workload and procedure will be able to judge—correctly—that for Parliament to run two major hybrid Bills at the same time is a near impossibility. It has not been done before and I very much doubt it will be done in the case of a western Bill and an eastern Bill. The whole purpose of splitting the Bills is to delay the eastern leg Bill. It is very important that stakeholders outside, including the leaders of local authorities in the east Midlands, Yorkshire and the north-east, and Members of Parliament are aware of that and that the Government statement of policy that they are going to separate the western leg and the eastern leg will of necessity and by design lead to a significant delay of at least five years, in my judgment, in the eastern leg Bill, because that could come only after the western leg Bill has been enacted—and of course, that delay could be indefinite and could lead to cancellation.

Regarding delivery of the project and the argument in the Oakervee review about dividing the project, how construction is managed is entirely a matter for HS2, once it has the powers. There is no need whatever to split western and eastern leg legislation to phase the delivery of the construction; on the contrary, if you want the best possible phasing of the project, including continuous working, economies of scale and so on, as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said on Monday, you would actually wish to grant all the powers to HS2 for all the north-of-Birmingham sections of the line—that is, all the way up to Manchester and all the way up to Leeds—in one Bill.

Far from acceding to this request for a further unnecessary review that is intended to stop HS2, I would be much happier if the Minister announced the cancellation of the review already under way and simply reaffirmed the decision that was taken two years ago, complete with a detailed route design, after much consultation and engagement with stakeholders, to proceed with the eastern leg of HS2 on the same timetable and with the same hybrid Bill as the western leg.

I think that the previous two speakers are actually getting a little bit personal, putting words in the mouth of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and misrepresenting him. They should both perhaps row back a little from personal comments, which they seem keen to make at the moment.

It is true that HS2 had the Oakervee review but, quite honestly, it was little more than an election gimmick by the Conservative Party. Sure enough, after the election, the Government were absolutely committed again, and they reiterated full support for HS2. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, explained this incredibly clearly in his opening statement, and perhaps it was so clear that people misunderstood it—I am not sure. He proposed a truly independent peer review on the full range of issues. I do not see why this is controversial. You cannot learn lessons if you have no lessons to draw on, and that is the big problem with HS2.

The proposed publication of a cost-benefit assessment of HS2 with annual revisions seems to me like good business practice. I have absolutely no idea why anybody would object to the amendment. It should be standard for any government project to have this sort of truly independent review and a cost-benefit analysis. Rigorous and independent peer-reviewed analysis would give a much more informed public debate; at the moment, we have HS2 blasting out its credentials all the time, when we know that it is doing the most incredible environmental damage and is costing a fortune. How can the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, dare to talk about taxpayers’ money when we are spending billions on this project? In view of the pandemic and people therefore working remotely these days, it is quite likely that there will be less demand for this demand for a project for a year, at least, and for much longer after it has finished.

Everybody says that HS2 is a project for the future, but it is a creature of the past, quite honestly. It was designed for a past that used to be the norm, and we will not be seeing that norm again very soon. For me, the cost far outweighs the benefit. Regrettably, it is perhaps too late to stop it, but really, we should—we should not spend a penny more. These amendments would help to settle that argument. If I saw the results of an independent review that ruled that it was worth the money, I would accept that.