I am grateful to all noble Lords who contributed and to the Minister for her response. My noble friend Lord Adonis was absolutely right about what happens in Amsterdam. There are several different stories of enormous great buildings of bicycles, but bicycles are also allowed to be carried on trains—I think there might be a charge for them. That allows cyclists to be flexible: they can leave their bicycle at the station and get another one at the end of the journey or, as my noble friend Lord Young pointed out, they can take their own bicycle on holiday if they want to. We need to be flexible and I think that our discussions this afternoon have gone some way towards that.
We must also recognise that, yes, HS2 will be a lovely service, but it will be a commuter service to start with—Birmingham to London. It will probably be not that different from any other commuter service, except the trains will hopefully be a bit nicer and might go a
bit faster, and sometimes you will be able to look out because you will not be in a tunnel. However, the facilities will be the same and passengers will do the journey every day. They might want to take a buggy or pram or wheelchair or anything else, but I do not think that the design is that much different from any other modern commuter service train in other parts of the country.
I have to challenge the Minister on this. I think she confirmed that we are not going down the route of having an appraisal methodology, which requires good value for money. This means that you have to have as many bums on seats as possible, crammed sideways and frontways, to get some Treasury-induced figure to justify it. It would be much better to have some flexible seats. I do not know whether flip-down seats are included in the Treasury’s methodology but I hope that we can move on from that. I have got the impression that there are to be some rather nice trains with lots of flexible space, so on that basis I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.