Before the Minister sits down, may I press him for on connectivity between HS1 and HS2? I presume he agrees with my noble friend Lord Adonis that there are problems with envisaging the number of passengers—let us say passengers between Birmingham and Paris—who would use such a link, but is there not something uniquely English about us having an existing link between the two lines that is not used? My noble friend’s argument was that there is no market for passengers between Manchester or Birmingham and Paris. How do we know that if there is not a direct link? The Minister has made it plain that he has three children. The last thing he wants to do is change between different modes of transport. I have every sympathy with him; I have only two and they are adults, but the last thing I would want to do is take them on such a trip. We have an existing link that is not signalled and not used, yet my noble friend, to whose work on this scheme I pay tribute, says that there is not a market for those passengers. If we do not run the services, how will we ever know? Only in England could we have a link, unsignalled, between two high-speed lines—one of them a prospective high-speed line—and say that we are not going to use it. On the economic arguments in respect of passengers taking a through journey, if the Minister moved from the wilds of Wimbledon to Birmingham, would he not find it more attractive to take his three children to Paris on a through train rather than using Euston and St Pancras, no matter how the two were connected?
When were the economic arguments made that there is not a market for the sort of travel that I am envisaging? They obviously did not occur until we had ordered the trains and built the depots. There must have been some feeling that there was a market when trains were built. If I recollect rightly, the Nightstar trains were virtually given away to the Canadian railways. I know that there is a big difference between Canada and our country, but they managed to find a practical use for them—so they should; they got them at cut price; the British taxpayer paid for them all. When did those economic realities first impinge on the decision not to have a link between the two? Will the Minister at least consider looking again at signalling that single line just to test the water and see whether we can have through trains connecting those taxpayers in Birmingham and Manchester, who are contributing to the cost of this whole thing, with Paris and Brussels—to name but two destinations?