My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Their homes are not just blighted now—they have been blighted for three years, even since this God-forsaken route was published. I know elderly people who want to downsize, but cannot sell their homes. They are now, one might say, asset rich, but very cash poor. They cannot afford the homes they live in as they are retired, and they cannot sell them because they are blighted. It is essential that the Government are generous and swift in their compensation. I welcome the paving Bill, because it will, I hope, enable swift compensation. The Government are currently conducting a compensation consultation on phase 2. I do not know whether you responded to the phase 1 consultation, Mr Speaker, but I did. It was very tightly worded to such a degree that in the end I began to ignore the questions being asked, because I thought they were completely wrong. The phase 2 consultation has been formulated much more openly and satisfactorily.
I have been trying to find out from the Department for Transport whether, when it finally reaches a conclusion on the phase 1 and phase 2 compensation consultations, the compensation packages will be the same. I certainly hope that they will be, because it would be grossly unfair if people living south of Lichfield were treated differently. Incidentally, I am in a unique position because phase 1 ends in the Lichfield constituency and phase 2 begins there. A former chairman of the Conservative party, now chairman of the BBC, might have described that as a double whammy.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) pointed out, this route is blighting homes, it is blighting lives, and it is blighting the
environment. The HS2 policy, as it stands, is not a Conservative policy in the pure, theoretical sense of what conservatism is all about. We need to think carefully not about whether we need HS2, but about how we should execute the project. Otherwise, many people will think that in adopting Labour’s route, proposed by Lord Adonis, the Government have betrayed the vote that they cast in 2010.
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