My noble friend is completely correct. Of the £10 billion spent on the last upgrade of the west coast main line, £1 billion was spent on compensation to train companies for not running services. The easiest way to make money if you are running a train service on the existing rail network is to have major upgrade work taking place, which means you get compensated. You get a huge and reliable source of funds for not running any services at all.
I do not want to go through these big arguments again. I come back to the Chilterns. The villages and settlements my noble friend Lady Mallalieu mentioned would not be the successful, vibrant settlements they are without the Chiltern line itself. It was the construction of the Chiltern line that put life-blood into many of these communities. Two sets of decisions were taken at the end of 2009 in respect of these lines, one of which has been hugely controversial, and will continue to be until it is open, when people will wonder what all the controversy was about, which is the construction of HS2. The other big investment that I authorised, which also took some persuading because there were alternative uses of the money, was a significant sum for the upgrade of the Chiltern line, which I assume my noble friend welcomes. That upgrade now enables services on the Chiltern line to run at 90 miles per hour. As my noble friend mentioned, it provides an economic alternative route to Birmingham, which was not possible before. We have just opened the new services going to Oxford, which will transform the connectivity of that area, including the construction of a great deal of housing.
All this is being made possible by significant investment in a major transport artery, including one that goes through an area of outstanding natural beauty. We cannot have successful communities and a thriving economy unless we have decent connectivity. The Chilterns knows that better than anywhere because it has one of the most successful and fastest-growing railway lines, in traffic terms, in the country in the Chiltern line. It is
vital that we do not deprive our great conurbations and all those who depend on them, which are the life-blood of the nation, of the essential benefits of connectivity into the next generation.
What we need to do—huge attention has gone into this—is reconcile those big investments and the big projects with the amelioration necessary for the local communities. Nowhere in the history of the planning of railways has seen greater investment in tunnels to ameliorate the impact on the community than what is taking place in the Chilterns. A huge amount of work is going into ensuring that the impact of the construction work is reduced too, but it is important not to confuse these two essential points. The continuing work that needs to be done, which HS2 Ltd should do and which my noble friend is quite right to continue to press it on, is seeing that the impacts of the construction work on the communities affected are minimised. Equally, we as a Parliament need the resolve to see that we have the essential connectivity between our major conurbations in the next generation, without which our economy would be severely damaged.