I thank my hon. Friend for her ongoing support; it means a lot to me. I am sure the Minister has heard the points she made, which I totally agree with, and will answer them. I thank her for her sterling work on the Welsh Affairs Committee, and I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) for his work on that Committee.
Not only does HS2 lengthen journey times on the south Wales main line, when the initial electrification investment aimed to reduce journey times, but it is all done for the benefit of an HS2 business case that no longer works, and there is nothing but disbenefit to Wales. Under the levelling-up agenda, it would not be unreasonable to extend electrification at least to Swansea, and/or make available other investment for Wales. That would help us to recover some of the five minutes lost by trains calling at OOC, and would be a fraction of the cost of the overspend on HS2. It would also mean that Wales would, for the first time, benefit from HS2, even if in a roundabout way.
Investment in Wales is now much harder to get, due to significant budgetary cuts, but investment in HS2 continues, with the business plan forever changing to fit the emerging and ever changing HS2 railway. There is no possibility that current HS2 plans would ever have been deemed acceptable in a business case review; they would never have seen the light of day. Wales suffers while billions continue to be swallowed up by a project that no longer works, when a relatively modest investment would allow Wales to at least share some of the supposed benefits of HS2.
Does the Minister agree that investment in Wales’s rail infrastructure is important both to our collective decarbonisation obligations and to the need to support economic development across all parts of the UK? On that basis, will he acknowledge the detailed work of Transport for Wales and its metro development teams over the last two years, and support the substantive rail enhancement plans that they have set out for Wales, and services over the border that impact on Welsh rail services, which will help us to meet those objectives? Primarily, we need the UK Government to commit to funding and supporting the delivery of a range of rail
enhancement schemes up to 2030. That includes the upgrade of the south Wales main line, as highlighted in the recent Western Gateway 2050 rail vision.