My Lords, I declare an interest as the Secretary of State who started HS2, and as a member of HS2 Ltd. I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for missing the beginning of her remarks. I know the whole Committee will want to pay tribute to the Select Committee, which put an astonishing amount of work into the Bill. I cannot
think of a more onerous duty that Members of your Lordships’ House take on than being members of hybrid Bill Committees. At the very least they require some kind of parliamentary medal for endurance, which I hope will give them some special form of extended life that ensures they will definitely see the opening of this line all the way through to Manchester and Leeds in 2033. That is the least they deserve.
There are two different issues here and it is important not to mix them up. The first is through trains from Paris to the great cities of the Midlands and the north, which my noble friends Lord Snape and Lord Berkeley rightly said was envisaged in the original scheme for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. The trains were built, but the services were never run. The second is the lamentable connections between Euston and St Pancras. The two issues are separate for this reason: with the best will in the world, the economic case for running through services from Paris and Brussels to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds is very weak indeed.
If I may detain the Committee with a story, when I was Secretary of State I tried to persuade Eurostar to run services to Birmingham once the upgrade of the west coast main line had been completed, which would have made it possible to run a service once that and the High Speed 1 line to St Pancras had been completed. It ought to have been possible to run a service from Paris to Birmingham in three and a half hours, which I thought would have been competitive with the plane and played a very big part in changing the whole mentality of people in respect of high-speed rail and connections with the continent. I simply could not persuade Eurostar to run even one service a day without public subsidy because the traffic projection figures were so low.
If noble Lords stop and think about what has happened on that line, it is not so difficult to fathom. Although HS1 has been a great success in engineering terms and has played a useful part in linking two of Europe’s great cities, it is way off all the projections of traffic between London and the continent. I do not think it is yet even at half the level of the projections of what the traffic should have been. There is still only one service an hour between London and Paris for most of the day. Often those services have quite light loads. The London to Brussels service, which is also about hourly, is often barely half-full. Eurostar told me that there was not enough traffic to fill even one train a day between London and Birmingham and it would do it only if I was prepared to give it a very large subsidy. I had so many other parts of the railway I was seeking to subsidise, including many of the parts that my noble friend Lord Snape has mentioned because the lines in the Midlands and the north require great subsidies to be maintained, that I simply could not justify a public subsidy to do it.
It is important to be frank about this because everybody pays lip service to the benefits of linking HS1 and HS2. On the face of it, it seems absurd that there is not a connection between the two but because the service would be so intermittent—with the best will in the world, only a few trains a day would run on that service—I very much doubt it would be taken up in any big way. While we have cheap airlines that offer
very frequent services to Manchester and Birmingham—both are highly successful airports, which are expanding and have significant capacity that they can make available to flights to the continent—it is unlikely that such a line would be viable.
As a footnote, it is always the unexpected in life which changes the course of events, including in transportation. The big unexpected event of HS1 was the massive development of domestic services on the high-speed line—all those Javelin trains—which has made the whole thing much more viable than it would otherwise have been and was not expected on anything like that scale. The other great unexpected gain of HS1, which nobody projected at the time—and who knows what the unexpected gains of HS2 will be?—was the Olympic Games. When the decision was taken to give the Olympics to Stratford, a critical part of the decision was the connectivity that the Javelins provided going out of St Pancras. I am not criticising the decisions to build HS1 or the Channel Tunnel, which were visionary and historic decisions, but unfortunately a link between HS1 and HS2 would be hugely expensive —running into many billions because it would have to be tunnelled. The economic benefit would be limited without massive subsidies. Given the huge costs already in the HS2 scheme, it would be hard to justify those expenses.
My noble friend Lord Snape referred to the plan for a kind of patch-and-mend link between HS1 and HS2 using the North London line. There was a plan for that in the original HS1 scheme, linking to the conventional lines. There was also initially from HS2 Ltd a plan for it in respect of the HS2 line. It has to be said that nobody much liked this. It would have been a very slow connection, weaving its way up to the North London line, across and down, which would have made the line even less competitive with the airlines. When the trains were running, it would have used a lot of capacity on the North London line, which, as noble Lords will know, is now an integral part of the Overground service and a major freight artery. That would have been highly inconvenient. Even that required the building of a substantial single-bore tunnel at a cost of more than £1 billion. The view was taken that rather than expend a large sum of money on a very unsatisfactory patch-and-mend link between the two, which would barely be used in any event, it would be better to wait until some point in the future when our relations with Europe reach a new and glorious period, in which traffic between the major European cities flourishes on a scale never seen before and might then make it economically viable to construct a link between HS1 and HS2.
However, only a tiny fraction of those people who wanted to connect between Euston and St Pancras would have been using direct services to the continent in the first place so the issue of connectivity between Euston and St Pancras, which I think everyone will accept is still highly unsatisfactory, is there in any event. There is a long-term solution: Crossrail 2, which will have a single station serving Euston and King’s Cross St Pancras, and will connect the two underground. That will make it much easier to get to them; it will give big dispersal capacity at Euston when phase 2 of
Crossrail is completed in 2033, which is hugely important; and, as I say, it will connect the stations because the entrance at one end will be at Euston and the entrance at the other will be at King’s Cross St Pancras.
Although this degree of work has not yet been done, my assumption with the planning of Crossrail 2 is always that it will be possible to use it also as a pedestrian tunnel with a travelator for getting from Euston to St Pancras. The transport planners are not wildly keen on that idea because it will add to the cost of Crossrail 2 and they want a more limited scheme that has access only for transport users. But it looks patently obvious that if you have a Crossrail 2 station serving the two stations, and you have this underground link, putting in a simple travelator and making it possible for people to connect between the two stations underground must be sensible.
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However, that is still a long way away, and does not deal with the first phase of HS2—the period between 2026, when the service to Birmingham is opened, and the construction of Crossrail 2. There will be very significant further traffic flows coming into Euston, including passengers who will want to transfer to St Pancras—for example, to the Eurostar and Javelin services—but there is no adequate link. A lot of discussions have taken place about—and plans been put forward for—a travelator between the two of the kind that I think the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, had in mind, which would offer an airport-style connection. However, that is very difficult to do because of space constraints on the Euston Road itself. It would have to be done on streets further in, and it is not easy to do there either, because of the Crick centre and the other uses that that land has been put to.
It has to be said that, at the moment, this issue still does not have a satisfactory resolution. It would be well for the Committee and the wider House to note that by the time we get to 2026—of course something less than a travelator does not require years of planning—there will at least need to be an improved walking link between the two. Passengers cannot be expected to put up with the current state of connectivity between Euston and King’s Cross St Pancras. It should be incumbent on the Government, the mayor, TfL and HS2 to see that there are better links for that period between the opening of HS2 at Euston and the completion of Crossrail 2. As I say, that is the only long-term solution to this issue.