My right hon. Friend is entirely right, and she has been basing her case on that. The advantage of doing that is that roads, rail, freight and air would have all coalesced into one Heathrow hub. The one thing that has not been said in this debate is that we need to be visionary about this, because 15 years ago, the latest technology, the internet, was just coming into its infancy. Who knows what technology will be available in the next 15 years?
Let us future-proof this railway as much as we possibly can. There will be all sorts of new technology to track people and suitcases and to make travel on an international scale hugely better than it is today. If we do not do that, we will already be losing business by the day because of the experience of passengers who have to go through Heathrow. If we do not get this right, we will lose even more business to the likes of Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle and Munich. The complete passenger experience, door-to-door, is what will matter. People will simply not come into Old Oak Common and take the underground for one station to get to HS1; they will fly from wherever they were coming from in the first place straight to continental Europe and further afield.
We need to consider HS1-HS2, the route and a Heathrow hub. We must think about how we will link to the world’s busiest airport. I have little doubt that when push comes to shove, Davies will come up with Heathrow as our major hub airport, yet we are not going to link
the most expensive civil engineering project ever carried out in this country with our major airport. That is crazy.
I want to make two final points. First, I do not believe the case for business being sucked from the north to the south is true, which is why earlier I advocated starting equally from the north and the south if we can afford the cash. Finally, I must tell my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that I am one of the very few chartered surveyors in this House. I know how the law on compensation for property works and the French and Germans are far more generous than we are. If he is generous with the compensation, he will have far fewer opponents to the railway line, which will be built far quicker without so many legal battles.
9.31 pm