My Lords, this is very much a probing amendment, designed to give the Minister the opportunity to place on the record a description of the approach that HS2 intends to take to a very sensitive issue and to explain the lessons it feels it has learned from the experience of phase 1.
Briefly, Schedule 20 deals with the removal of remains and monuments from burial grounds. This featured as a major issue in phase 1, in both Euston and Birmingham. It attracted a great deal of publicity and aroused some public concern that on occasions the approach was rather heavy-handed. In Birmingham 6,500 skeletons were exhumed from a 19th-century graveyard; in Euston it was 50,000 skeletons. It took three years to do this and it counts as one of the UK’s largest ever archaeological programmes. We have learned a great deal about the past, not just from the gravestones but from various other artefacts.
There are no known burial grounds on the route up to Crewe for HS2 but there is always a possibility that one might be found and, assuming that 2b is built—as I hope—there are likely to be similar issues there.
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The provisions in the Bill set out the procedures required of HS2 and there is an assumption that if remains are more than 100 years old, there is unlikely to be an objection from relatives of the deceased. There are provisions in the Bill to allow archaeological examination where appropriate and to allow all this to be done within an appropriate timescale, so that relatives may apply to remove and rebury remains, if they wish. Can the Minister assure us that this worked smoothly and sensitively in relation to phase 1?
Then there are provisions on how the monuments should be dealt with, including their removal and re-erection, the right to move them to another place—I
assume that this means a museum, in general—and the right to deface them or break them up. That is an issue on which I wish to press the Minister. How exhaustive will the searches and historical studies be before what are historical records, in essence, are defaced? Do we have guarantees that it is not left just to HS2 to decide whether or not these gravestones are important? Are academics, genealogists, local records offices and other relevant people fully involved and are full records kept and placed in the public domain?
We should bear in mind that when you visit a graveyard, that is always a public domain. You are free to look round, consider and view the history that is there. It is important that if, for example, photographs are taken, they are public and easily accessible to those wishing to research history. The historian in me always worries when the destruction of historical records occurs. I accept that keeping thousands of gravestones may be impractical, but we need the record of what they were so that the lives of the people concerned are not completely erased from our history. I look forward to the Minister’s response. I beg to move.