I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for his kind words when he spoke in support of his amendment, although I did detect a hint of criticism. I am not going to respond to that, but instead offer, if I may, the Minister some guidance in responding to this issue, based on my experience as a lawyer.
Everything that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has said, I agree with. He set the scene very well indeed, but I would like to make it clear that there is a good deal more substance to the point he made, which I would like to touch upon. Before I go further, lest there be any misunderstanding, I should make it clear that in my view, the petitioner who raised the issue about the Stone IMB-R—the railhead at Stone—was not in any way attempting to delay the scheme or have it cancelled. It was a genuine attempt to put forward an alternative method of dealing with the very complex issue of how the railhead should be constructed. It raised all sorts of other questions, such as ground conditions. They put forward a genuine issue in good faith. The question is: should we have gone further, to the point of making a direction? It should not be forgotten that a committee like ours, after hearing a petition, either makes an order or does not. In this case, it would have been a direction to HS2 to proceed by a TWA.
Proceeding by way of a TWA is not a simple matter. It is not a foregone conclusion that, just by asking for an order to be granted, it will be granted. The statute lays down a procedure that involves the making of objections, for obvious reasons, because people whose land would be taken have to be given a chance to be heard, and it would result in the holding of a public inquiry. One has to bear in mind, given the stage at which the issue was raised with us, that there is the very considerable question whether the time and effort involved, were we to make such a direction, would be justified.
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The procedure the Select Committee operated was devised particularly for those whose property interests are directly and specially affected, who should be able to make representations one way or another for their position to be carefully considered. The Stone railhead issue was not one of those cases where individuals were directly and specially affected in bringing forward issues for us to consider. What was brought before us was an interest on behalf of a community.
This raises issues as to how a committee of that kind should deal with issues brought forward by a community that will give rise to a substantial amount of expert evidence and debate as to the side of the argument on which the issue should be decided. If we had proceeded with the invitation that we should deal with this in detail, I would have foreseen that we would have to consider the issue in much greater detail than
was available to us on the day we heard it. I say that as someone who has dealt with many public inquiries, and private legislation procedure too, when issues of this kind have been raised. It would involve hearing expert evidence, hearing expert evidence in reply, assessing that evidence and making a detailed judgment as to how the issue should be finally resolved. For a committee in the second House to engage in that kind of procedure would be a major hurdle in the way the whole process would be handled, which we would simply not be prepared to contemplate, given that the opportunity to raise issues of this kind was available in the House of Commons as the first House.
I hope I have made it clear that these issues are very difficult and that it is not enough for somebody to argue a case as forcefully as was indeed argued before us to think they should be given what they wanted. It would require careful assessment. If it went to the point of an TWA order there would be considerable expense of time and money in getting the issue debated. I do not wish to underestimate the importance of the issue, but it was not one we could properly contemplate given the nature of the proceedings we were dealing with.
I recognise that we will need to consider at some point—not now, of course—how the procedures we are dealing with should be reformed or improved. I come back to the point that they were devised primarily to deal with individuals whose property interests were directly affected. This case is not one of them. There may be other ways of dealing with details of this kind that we can perhaps discuss at a later stage.
I have one final point. I researched, with the assistance of the committee’s clerk, whether there is any example of a Select Committee making a direction that a TWA should be resorted to. I am told that there is no example that a committee in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords has made such a direction. There was a TWA order for Bromley, which HS2 will know about because it asked for it. There is of course power in the Bill for it to do so in the case of the Stone railhead should it decide, having made further investigations, that it is necessary. That is not a matter for the committee I sat on and I respectfully suggest it is not a matter for the House.
As for the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, that the matter should be remitted to a fresh Select Committee, I am entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis: I cannot see that that would get anywhere. It would get back to the same problem I have been suggesting: that committee would have to consider whether it would make a direction that a TWA should be ordered. I regard that as a very difficult decision and any further committee would hesitate long and hard before it made such a direction. I would be hugely surprised if it reached a different conclusion from that which we reached.
I leave it there, stressing that I recognise that a genuine point was raised and it was not an attempt to delay or bring the project to an end. That was not the point, but it was not one we could properly deal with as we were being asked to do.