I am grateful to all colleagues who have spoken, and to the Minister for replying to the debate. To be absolutely clear, I have no intention whatever of seeking to delay phase 2a. This amendment is a device to get a debate on what is to happen to the scheme as a whole. I am completely with all of my colleagues who have said that the importance of this is that we cannot see phase 2a in isolation. We obviously would not build a 36-mile high-speed railway in isolation; the interaction between phases 2a and 2b is the essence of the project, and I therefore make no apology for tabling this amendment.
A lot of good points were raised in the discussion. I fully respect the fact that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, did not support the project to start with but she made the critical point that to build a railway stopping in Birmingham, and therefore to deny the north the benefits of the scheme and extend them only to the Midlands, would be perverse and counterproductive.
The point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about the importance of continuity and mobile factories was very well made. One reason why our infrastructure costs are so high in this country is because of the stop-go attitude we have adopted historically to the building of major infrastructure. She mentioned the electrification of the Great Western Railway, which I also authorised when I was Secretary
of State. The estimate that I was given then, in 2009, for the entire cost of the electrification of the Great Western from London right through to Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea was £1 billion. The noble Baroness can probably tell me what the latest estimate is, but when I last checked I think it was heading towards £4 billion, and it has been substantially descoped. For example, it is not going to Bristol Temple Meads but will now stop at Cardiff, which I would be very concerned about if I was in south Wales, and it has been massively delayed. That goes to the heart of the point the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, made about continuity in projects. If we separate Birmingham to Leeds from Birmingham to Crewe and Manchester, and turn it into a separate project with discontinuity between the two, that alone would probably ultimately double or triple the cost of the project, as well as delaying it and therefore delaying its economic benefits.
My noble friend Lord Liddle said that there is a debate in the further north-west, going up towards Scotland in Carlisle and Cumbria, about the benefits. He is absolutely right that there will be direct benefits because it will take an hour off the journey time to Carlisle from London. However, he said that the saving in journey time would be to London and the south-east in that respect. It is absolutely crucial to understand that there is also a massive journey time saving to the Midlands, because the first stop on the line out of London is in the West Midlands and that is a huge benefit to the north-west, as it would be to the east Midlands and to Leeds if the eastern leg is built.
I am not going to respond to all the other points raised, except to congratulate my noble friend Lord Berkeley on his massive ingenuity in bringing in the services to Paris and Brussels. The Minister did not rise to that challenge but I assume that she will address it in due course.
Coming to the Minister’s response, I am now much more concerned. She speaks with such elegance that she is of course beguiling, but what she actually said in the content of her speech left me much more concerned after than before. She said something which I was not aware of before, but which I will take up and probe significantly on Report. She said that there will be Bills—plural—for phase 2b. I have never seen that stated by the Government in the past. It was always the intention, and I thought it still was the formal intention of Her Majesty’s Government, that phase 2b —that is, Crewe through to Manchester and Birmingham through to Leeds—would be encompassed in one hybrid parliamentary Bill, not more. Because I have sat on both sides of the fence, not just as Secretary of State but when in more recent times I was privileged to be on the board of HS2, I know that three years ago we were then preparing for a single Bill to take HS2 from Crewe through to Manchester, and Birmingham through to Sheffield and Leeds. I think that under the constrained proceedings of the Grand Committee, the Minister cannot respond to me again but maybe she might respond me to in writing.