My Lords, I must correct two points that my noble friend made. The first was that the HS2 people did not communicate with the residents of various places. They held meetings and sent leaflets and the response was totally pathetic, particularly in the Camden area. It is not unreasonable to think that the response would be pathetic, because we were talking about something that would not go through their patch for seven years, so people thought, “I can’t really be bothered”. That was the information we got from HS2, and the petitioners did not correct us on it.
Secondly, on a point I made on Tuesday, in numerical terms we had over 100 meetings and produced a 60,000-word report, and the verbatim of all those meetings is available. It would be jolly nice if noble Lords tried to look at the various areas about which petitioners now say, “Well, of course they didn’t listen” or “They didn’t do this”. We bent over backwards, to the extent that sometimes I felt that HS2 would get fed up with the committee members trying to understand the various differences between the petitioners. There was just one QC who flung the file at Mr Mould, the HS2 barrister, because he simply could not understand his way of thinking, and that was wrong.
The noble Lord, Lord Young, has explained it completely. I feel utterly traduced, having spent all that time on it. We worked from May through to December, relentlessly, four days a week. We did our best. The noble Lord and I were both worn out. I think I remember him saying, “If I die, Wendover will be written on my heart.” On another occasion, he said, “If I ever hear of Wendover again, I will go mad.” We spent hours on Wendover, and on the Chilterns—and then the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, said that there should not be a tunnel anyway because the people who travel on the train want to see the scenery. To hear this kind of thing after all the work we have done frankly made me want to give up. I lost the will to live at one stage. It had an effect on us. We were getting colds. We were tired. Our weekends were spent in a daze
wondering how to recover. I am not trying to plead a special case, but to hear this sort of stuff coming out is not at all rewarding to people who went there, unpaid, and gave up a huge amount of their private life for it.