I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly on the motion, and grateful to the Minister for setting out the process, but I am afraid the measure raises some serious questions about the integrity of the process. It raises the question of whether High Speed 2 is listening to the petitioners, to the Minister or to the Bill Select Committee, which has begun considering petitioners’ concerns with interest.
The integrity of the process is fundamental. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), the shadow Minister, said, we do not expect some kind of celestial design from High Speed 2. There are bound to be problems and they will need correcting. That is why the Bill Committee, to which I again pay tribute, is so important, and why hon. Members are so grateful that it is doing such a magnificent job.
The motion contains a couple of provisions for the Saltley business park that are intimately connected with the proposed rolling stock maintenance depot, which takes out a considerable chunk of the north of my constituency. I do not want to detain the House with the details of the proposal because I have mentioned it on the Floor of the House a number of times. Suffice to say that that area of land is the size of 100 football pitches. It represents one third of the available industrial land in the whole city of Birmingham, and it is located at the junction of two of the constituencies that are among the four most unemployed constituencies in the whole United Kingdom. If we develop the site in its entirety, we could generate 7,000 jobs, which is my estimate, or 3,000 to 3,500 jobs, which is the Minister’s estimate. That is still a very considerable number that could knock off something like a third of the unemployment in the city of Birmingham.
This is a site of such economic significance that the High Speed Rail Bill Committee has considered it in considerable detail. I was incredibly grateful that although the Committee did not side completely with my argument, it recognised that the issue of unemployment in and around the rolling stock maintenance depot had to be considered. The provisions set out today on the Saltley business park do nothing to address the Committee’s concerns; in fact, they take out even more industrial land in the city of Birmingham. It could be that the site is proposed today for the relocation of business, but we simply do not know.
The Committee said:
“We impress on HS2 the need to adjust the scheme”
to reach agreement with the site owner, AXA, to maximise the number of jobs and to minimise the time for which land would be required. HS2 was directed by the Committee to work with the site owners to deliver that solution. That judgment was passed down in December. Although there have been detailed technical committee meetings and the site owners have now presented a detailed redesign of the site that would minimise land take, we have seen nothing of those discussions reflected in the provisions this afternoon.