I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) for her kind remarks about our co-operation and for thanking the various bodies concerned.
Today’s report from the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee batters great lumps out of the case for HS2. The Committee did not ask any questions that we have not been asking for the last five years. HS2 had no satisfactory answers before, and it apparently still has none.
I want to draw attention to the situation in my constituency, which is the most affected by the proposals. The proposals involve the demolition of the homes of about 500 people and would leave about 5,000 people living next to Europe’s biggest building site for the best part of 15 years.
Under the original proposals, HS2 was going to knock down Euston station and rebuild it, incorporating a further 75 metres to the west to provide space for everything, including the new high-speed line. Originally, that was going to cost £1.2 billion. Eight months later, a revised estimate of £2 billion was put forward—the figure had gone up by just £100 million a month. Apparently, £2 billion was too much, so the scheme was cut back, which would have given us a rather elegant lean-to shed for HS2 at the west side of Euston station, at a cost of £1.4 billion. That is what was in the Bill that came to the House of Commons. By the time it got here, however, we were told that that was not going to be done any more and that we would go back to the vast new scheme. The detailed proposals for that scheme were supposed to be available in October last year. Recently, in meetings with local people, however, HS2 has admitted that it has no such proposals and that it is going back to the lean-to shed version, which will now cost £2.6 billion. Who would put £50 billion on a racing stable that produces rubbish like this?
We were told that a supposed connection to the channel tunnel link would bring all sorts of benefits: people would be able to get on a train in Manchester and go to Paris. We told HS2 that that was not a workable proposition, and even the Institution of Civil
Engineers said it was not, but no, HS2 persisted—and then the connection was abandoned. One explanation was that HS2 had come across “unforeseen factors”, including the need to “widen the route”. Now, anybody who starts an engineering project without realising that they will need to widen the route if they add some lines really is not fit to be put in charge of spending £50 billion.