My Lords, I support Amendments 6 and 8. Amendment 6 deals with the question of peer review, which is absolutely essential. In my remarks to the Committee last Tuesday, I explained that one of the great shortcomings of the HS2 project from the very beginning has been the complete unwillingness of the responsible Ministers to listen to the best and soundest advice coming from outside their department. Amendment 6 would allow these qualified railway experts to examine all aspects of the project in an unbiased way and give the Government the benefit of their advice. It must, of course, be totally independent of Government, HS2 and any company or individual linked to HS2.
We are all aware of the stories of massive financial and time overruns with aircraft carriers, and nuclear power station building disasters. With HS2, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” I remind the Committee that we are talking about £106 billion to date—probably £150 billion —and the sum is confidently forecast by reliable sources to reach £200 billion. Surely it makes sense for us to take steps to put in place the strongest possible oversight; peer review will do just that.
Amendment 8, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, recommends the publishing of a cost-benefit analysis of this project. I totally agree with that, although I fear that we are locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. This fundamental exercise should be undertaken, of course—in private business it invariably is—before any decision to go ahead is made. Perhaps it was; perhaps the Minister will tell us, and perhaps we can see it. It is quite simple to do: you make a list of all the costs and a list of all the benefits. You put one on one side of the scales and the other on the other, and I have done just that.
I chose benefits first and it is quite a short list: high speed, capacity and jobs. I turn first to high speed. For all sorts of reasons, the promoters of the scheme no longer cite this as an important aspect of it, so this cannot go on the benefit side, even though high speed is what it says on the tin and that is how the idea was originally sold to the Government. For a whole variety of reasons, it is no longer top priority. I do not know all the reasons: I understand that certain aspects of the line—embankments, tunnels, et cetera—would not cope with the proposed speed; and energy costs were also an issue. Therefore, it is no longer a high-speed train in the accepted sense, and we cannot put that on the benefit side of the scales.
Lastly, we come to jobs. Jobs are the proponents’ fallback position, guaranteed to sway faltering Ministers. Obviously, any extra jobs are not just welcome but, in these difficult times, invaluable, although it must be remembered that this was sold as part of the deal long
before Covid arrived. It is my view that however much we need jobs, they should not be used as a reason to proceed with a project that is manifestly nonsensical.
If you spent this amount of money on regional railways, improving links from Liverpool to Hull or relieving commuter services in the north and in and out of London, you would produce just as many jobs, spread throughout the country—and, at the end, unlike HS2, you would have something really worth while to show for it. So the jobs argument does not work and that leaves precious little to go on the benefit side of the scales.
Let us look at the costs to the taxpayer: a minimum £106 billion and almost certainly considerably more—all those vital projects which are having to take second place to HS2, we could probably rebuild every hospital in the country for this kind of money; massive, irreparable damage to our environment through a huge swathe of the country; damage to the thousands of people whose lives, homes and businesses have been affected; and massive distrust in the Government’s ability to build anything. I mark it: benefits, precious little; costs, enormous. How did we get into this mess? I truly believe that this will prove to be the most monumental infrastructural and environmental blunder of all time.