High-Speed Rail

I was not expecting to be called. I would have preferred to wait a little before making my speech. I will be fairly brief. I want to touch on the business case figure for high-speed rail, which is estimated at 2.6, including the wider economic benefits. That is considerably higher than the business case of Crossrail. I know that we can all doubt the Department's methodology, but nevertheless let us put that on the table first. One of the arguments against the project is whether we can afford it. It costs £32 billion and we are in a time of recession. It is also worth saying that it will cost £2 billion a year, which will kick in more or less when Crossrail finishes. On a cash-flow basis, therefore, it is not too tough. The business case is predicated on capacity constraints. I have some conservative figures here. Over the last decade and a half, rail journeys have increased by around 5% a year. This business case assumes an increase of 1.6% a year. We do not know whether that will happen; it may not, but the figure is certainly not aggressive. The business case has been criticised because it does not take into account people's ability to work and be productive while travelling and therefore overestimates the benefit for time saving in terms of economic activity. It has been shown in a number of debates that such a view is false because if these trains are so full that everyone is standing up, no one can work on PCs or anything else. The business case is supported if we assume that. In his excellent remarks, the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) talked about the north-south divide, for which this project is not a panacea. However, to say that it will not make a contribution is just fatuous. We have already talked about the pamphlet from Action Alliance—I like to call them the Amersham-based Action Alliance—that came out today. The argument that the benefits would accrue more significantly to the bigger city does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny. It implies that the M6 and the M1 are bad because they fix the north-south divide and I find that hard to believe. I will not speak about the wider benefits of the project other than to say that the chambers of commerce in the north-west, Leeds and Scotland have come out strongly in favour of these transformative—actually, transformative is not a bad word—benefits. The impact on the north-west economy is calculated to be around £10 billion and we need that. It is easy to unpick the business case by saying, ““Actually, my town is not really on the route and it is not too good for my town because we will have to do this and we will have to do that.”” The truth is that we have to look at some of these decisions regionally. If £10 billion is injected into the north-west economy, it is just not possible that that will not help Warrington, whether or not Warrington is on the spur. I have three points for the Minister. One is about timing. Once we accept and buy into the transformation benefits, there is an issue for the north-west in how the Government are going about this. Broadly speaking, Birmingham and the west midlands will receive this infrastructure, in which we all believe, about a decade sooner than Manchester and a further decade before Scotland, which is not even on the map yet.