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.
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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.