My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, has made some powerful points. She has also teed me up splendidly because her amendment raises the issue of connectivity. I can see that the Minister is much looking forward to the fact that I am going to speak again about the connectivity of the east Midlands, Yorkshire and the north-east, which is imminently threatened by this review and potential cancellation of HS2 east.
Lest noble Lords think that I am unnecessarily alarmist on this, I am doing my public duty to see that this catastrophic and historic error is not made. Every time I raise this issue and engage with stakeholders, my concerns become greater. Since I made my remarks on Monday I have had a number of private representations, which it would not be proper for me to reveal because I gave non-disclosure agreements in response to those, but I have also had a very significant public representation —which I have forwarded to the Minister to give her an opportunity to respond in her reply—from Professor David Rae, who is a professor of enterprise at De Montfort University in Leicester, an area which would gain enormously from the benefits of HS2 east. Perhaps
I may read the key part of his letter to the Grand Committee, because it specifically responds to the points I raised in our previous sitting on Monday. He writes:
“Consistent with your Twitter messages”—
I tweet summaries of my speeches because they are far too long to inflict on the public at their full extent—
“regarding the threatened axing of the HS2 Eastern link, a well-informed source tells me that the National Infrastructure Commission, which is preparing the Rail Plan”—
the one that the noble Baroness keeps referring to, and which she rightly says I do not like because it is the disguise for delaying or cancelling it—
“which will recommend the future investment, is more likely to propose that HS2 East is only built from Birmingham to East Midlands Parkway (EMP) and there to join the existing Midland Mainline and follow existing … lines to Nottingham, Derby and North to Leeds. Even if this is approved, there are multiple negative effects. In terms of rail, there will be few gains in either rail capacity or speed, and none north of EMP. In effect the Leeds and Northern HS2 link would be via HS2 to Manchester and thence via Transpennine Rail”.
I should say in parenthesis that that means that the east Midlands would gain very little out of HS2 and the journey times to Leeds and the north-east would be significantly delayed because all of their HS2 journeys would need to go via Manchester. That presupposes that a tunnel is built under the Pennines at high speed to take the line from Manchester to Leeds, which itself, as I know from having looked at the costings, is a hugely expensive and very problematic project.
Professor David Rae continues:
“There is also a large economic development loss to the region. As you will know, the development of the Toton ‘Garden of Innovation’ new community and innovation district around the HS2 station—
the junction station between Derby and Nottingham that is proposed as part of HS2 east—
“is of strategic importance to the region and is one to which the Councils in Derby, Nottingham and respective Counties as well as the Local Enterprise Partnership … are committed. This is crucial to grow the high-value and high-skill capacity of the region, predicated on HS2, and if lost will set back the region’s economic development by 5 years. We simply cannot afford this loss, set against the effects of COVID-19 job losses and anticipated Brexit impacts.”
4.30 pm
I could continue to quote, but the noble Baroness has the letter. The point underlying this is that the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, is absolutely right to highlight the wider connectivity issues at stake in HS2. HS2 is a network, not simply a single line, and it is essential that the network benefits of HS2 are secured to the eastern side of the country as well as the western. If HS2 proceeds only to Manchester, with some stunted version ending either at Birmingham or going on only to East Midlands Parkway station, north-east of Birmingham, we will essentially have two nations in England in the century ahead. We will have the prosperous, dynamic, western side of the country, which will have the benefits of 21st-century technology, capacity and railway engineering, and the eastern side of the country, which will be stuck in the 1830s and 1840s in terms of its rail technology and capacity and will inevitably fall behind.
So, I make no apology for raising the alarm again. I give the Minister another opportunity to confirm that HS2 east will proceed, and I hope I will at least have alerted the local authorities involved—Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle and York being the primary ones affected—that their economic prospects for the next generation and beyond are about to be blighted by this review. The only consolation I have is that the review is being conducted by the National Infrastructure Commission, which I had the honour to establish and to chair, and I cannot for a moment believe that my colleagues on it would be so unwise as to recommend the scaling back of HS2 east, with all the damage that would do to the long-term infrastructure and economy of the eastern part of England.