argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): I plead guilty to a serious omission, as I should indeed have mentioned the hon. Gentleman, as Coventry is one of the areas that is probably going to suffer as a result of HS2; not only is it not going to benefit from HS2, but there will be an adverse economic effect on Coventry. We may hear a little more about that later.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Philip Andrew Davies (Conservative, Centre-right): HS2 is often seen as being done in the name of constituencies such as mine in the north of England. I want to put it on record that although there are undoubtedly some supporters of HS2 in my constituency, it is clear to me from speaking to my constituents that there are far many more opponents. They would much prefer that the money was spent on infrastructure in our local constituency economies than on a grandiose project that is going to waste billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend makes a very important point, and the opportunity cost issue really needs to be addressed I live in hope, because two years ago today my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced a change of Conservative party policy on a referendum on the European Union—he announced that we would have an in/out referendum. Two years to the day, I hope that the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), whom I am pleased to see on the Front Bench, will be able to make a similar announcement to give the people their say on one of the largest ever "publicly funded" infrastructure projects. It is described as that, but I would prefer to put the emphasis on it being a taxpayer-funded project, because, as the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in 1983: "There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money." That point has recently been emphasised by none other than Alex Rukin, aged nine, who gave evidence before the High Speed Rail (London - West Midlands) Bill Select Committee. He said in his petition that money should be spent on things that we really need and described this as a "stupid" project. I see Alex Rukin in a similar cast to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, who made that memorable speech to the Conservative party conference at the age of 16. If Alex Rukin comes forward at the age of nine with such sound ideas, he has very good prospects politically, as someone who is going to bring common sense to our discussions Throughout our history people have spent money on vanity projects—follies and white elephants. I have no problem with that, provided the money they are spending is their own, rather than somebody else’s and, in particular, the taxpayer’s. In HS2, we have what is best described as a vanity project. It was conceived by new Labour and promoted by the then Transport Minister, Lord Adonis, on the basis that we needed more high-speed rail than just that between London and the channel tunnel. It was said originally that HS2 would link people from the north directly to the channel tunnel, but that proposal has long since been abandoned, so HS2 will come only into a London terminal Unfortunately, the leadership of the Conservative party was seduced by the argument that it would be able to avoid having another runway at Heathrow by using HS2 to divert traffic away from it. It was only later that the Government realised that HS2 would actually increase demand for Heathrow airport, meaning that they immediately decided to stop the connectivity between HS2 and Heathrow.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Alexander Randall (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my hon. Friend for introducing the Bill. Does he realise that the so-called Heathrow spur, which most people realise will be completely unnecessary, whatever the results of the Davies commission, is still on the plans? If it were not there, that would not only save a lot of money, but take away a lot of blight, mostly from the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd) and, especially, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve). We should think about transport projects together.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to look at proposals on an integrated basis. That is one of the messages that comes out loud and clear from today’s report by the Transport Committee, "Investing in the railway", which was published just after midnight. The Committee emphasises the importance of planned investment right across the railways to maximise the benefits of that investment. It is critical of the idea of just putting a certain amount of money into the HS2 project on its own When the Government realised that the project could not be justified on the basis that it would reduce demand at Heathrow airport, they started the line that it would reduce long-distance journey times. However, it was clear that the cost-benefit analysis that was carried out overvalued business time on the basis that business men did not spend any of their time on trains working. All the benefits were calculated on the basis of an improvement in speed that would mean that 15 minutes could be knocked off the time it took to get from London to Birmingham. My constituency is about 100 miles from London. This morning I got on the train at Hinton Admiral and arrived here two hours and 10 minutes later. Given the nature of a lot of our rail infrastructure, people expect to spend that sort of time travelling such distances.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. He will be aware that the New Economics Foundation published a report in June 2013 entitled "High Speed 2: The best we can do? Creating more value from £33 billion". The essence of this debate is that if we are to spend that amount of taxpayers’ money—assuming that that is affordable—are there better ways in which to do so?
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Philip Andrew Davies (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend referred to speed, but I have never yet come across anyone from a business in Shipley who has said, "Unless you can get me to London half an hour or so quicker, we are out of here and we’re going to relocate." In fact, many of my constituents fear that this emphasis on speed will not benefit the north, but merely increase London’s commuter belt.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): What my hon. Friend says is not just an assumption, because there is a lot of academic evidence about what happened when high-speed rail was built in other countries. For example, using a high-speed rail to link Paris with an outlying city generated more traffic coming into Paris than leaving Paris to go elsewhere. That highlights another incorrect assumption behind the project.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Daniel Byles (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is right to say that a lot of the economic analysis of this project has been simplistic. Evidence from France shows that while the number of visitors to Lille from Paris increased as a result of high-speed rail, there was a decrease in the number who stayed the night. The dynamic impacts of such projects are extremely subtle, but the economic analysis produced by the Department for Transport has been very blunt.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend, who is a strong opponent of HS2, is absolutely right. We cannot oppose HS2 only on the grounds of emotion and prejudice. Instead, we must deploy arguments, but the arguments against HS2 are well established and supported by not only facts, but sound judgments by academics and politicians I am conscious that several hon. Members wish to speak, but I want to touch quickly on the latest iteration of the HS2 sales pitch: economic regeneration in the north. Again, that heroic claim is not borne out by the evidence, because most of the economic benefits of the project will probably come to the south-east How can we, as politicians and taxpayers—working together—help our colleagues out of this hole without humiliating them? That is where the Bill comes in, because it would allow us to ask the people to express their common-sense view. I am sure that they would be against the project, so when they had spoken in a referendum, the Front Benchers of both main parties, and indeed our Liberal Democrat friends, could get themselves off the hook by saying, "The people have spoken and we got it wrong." They could then say, without any humiliation, "We will revise our plans and spend the money in a different way."
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Alexander Randall (Conservative, Centre-right): A lot of people say that those who are strongly opposed to HS2 are the individuals who live along its route, but one of the great advantages of the Bill is that it would provide the proof that many people who are concerned about the amount being spent live a long way away from the route, It would therefore give our colleagues in government and Labour Front Benchers the opportunity to say, "This is not required and not wanted, and therefore we should stop."
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. My constituents live on the Weymouth-Waterloo line. When I held a meeting with representatives from Network Rail’s Wessex route study earlier this week, they confirmed that Waterloo is the busiest station for passenger numbers in the whole of Europe, with Clapham Junction the busiest for rail movements. They said that in 30 years’ time, they will need 60% extra capacity, but how will that be paid for? People in my constituency are therefore worried about spending so much on one particular vanity project that will not help them at all. Network Rail representatives said that if HS2 were built, it might increase demand, ironically, on the already overloaded Weymouth-Waterloo route, so there a number of very serious problems I shall close by referring to the 28th report of the Public Accounts Committee which was published on 16 January this year. The Committee recommends that the Department for Transport should set out a 30-year transport infrastructure strategy and use it to inform decisions about investment priorities. The Committee is sceptical about whether the Department can deliver value for money for the taxpayer on HS2, and it says that the extraordinarily large contingency sums that have been set aside are a way, potentially, of hiding the cost of overruns and increases in price. The report refers to the fact that Crossrail 2, which is likely to be needed as a direct result of this, could cost £20 billion extra, so even with the enormous sums involved—up to £50 billion—HS2 cannot be considered in isolation. That money would need to be spent alongside other money, because if something were not done about the interconnection at Old Oak Common, for example, there would be complete chaos in the connectivity into London There are an enormous number of reasons why people should be given a say on HS2. I commend the Bill to the House.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Dominic Charles Roberts Grieve (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a great pleasure to be able to participate in this debate. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) for providing the forum for this debate. I regret that I was not able to sign his Bill when he introduced it. One of the advantages of having left ministerial office is that I now have greater scope to express my views on the subject One of the responses that has been chucked at Members of Parliament who have raised a whisper of protest about whether the scheme is desirable is that as they largely represent constituents who may be directly and adversely affected by it, the validity of their representations is diminished. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) described so well, the vast majority of letters that I received from constituents were from people who were not directly affected by the construction of this railway line, and who from the earliest stages wrote to register their concern about whether an infrastructure project, which in theory is a good thing for a Government to undertake, warranted the colossal amount of expenditure involved and the environmental damage that must inevitably go with almost any infrastructure project I am a realist. My constituency has a history of huge infrastructure projects—the M4, the M40 and the M25—which have all done massive environmental damage, but I accept that my constituents do not routinely write to me asking for those motorways to be ploughed up. That is not to say that we should construct a white elephant. It is abundantly plain that there are real doubts about whether the project justifies the expenditure. The point has, I am sure, been made in the House on previous occasions—and I know that all infrastructure projects have costs that run away with themselves—but it is remarkable that we started in 2009 with an announcement that this railway line would cost some £16 billion and we are currently on what we have been told is a fixed, definitive and final figure of £50 billion, after a process that took us to £29 billion, then to £32 billion. Why should any of my constituents have any confidence in the costings of the project?
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Dominic Charles Roberts Grieve (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman is right. I will come to another point about compensation in a moment. If the Heathrow spur is not needed, the junction at the entrance to the tunnel into the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham is not needed, which would make the tunnelling even easier. I am a constituency MP, wanting to do right by my constituents and trying to apply myself rationally to the fact that areas sometimes have to be disadvantaged to promote national infrastructure projects that may be in the wider public interest. The House will understand my frustration at being unable to get any clarity on these really key issues, which must be resolved if there is to be informed debate, and my real anxiety that, although we will go through the entire hybrid Bill process—through the Committee, with the evidence taking—when we get to Third Reading all sorts of issues will just have been left hanging in the air.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Government Operations
Cheryl Elise Kendall Gillan (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my right hon. and learned Friend not agree that a referendum would force the Government to reveal the risks associated with the project? I am referring specifically, as he knows, to the Major Projects Authority reports, which have been withheld from Members of this House and from the very Committee that is scrutinising the passage of the major Bill through the House. If there were a referendum, the Government would be forced to let those risks be seen in public by the public who would be voting on the project.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Government Operations
Dominic Charles Roberts Grieve (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree entirely. It would be to the Government’s political advantage to reveal as much information as possible about how the decision making process took place. Of course, I am mindful of the rule that Ministers must have the possibility of confidentiality so that they can make informed decisions. I am very respectful of that; my time as Attorney-General made me understand how important it is, and the matter is very much for our ministerial colleagues to determine. However, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Wherever possible, documents should be put forward. Even a document that might appear disadvantageous to people would at least have the merit of their being able to explain why, notwithstanding it, they had changed their minds. To come back to the Bill, that is exactly why the public debate at the moment is not adequate for the magnitude of the project that the Government have been creating.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Government Operations
Philip Andrew Davies (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that the other advantage of the Bill would be to tease out how much support the project has in the north of England? Projects such as this are often proposed by people down south pretending that they care about the north, when all that actually happens is that those in the north realise how out of touch those people are with the north. If we were to have a referendum, we would know once and for all how popular the scheme was in the north and whether it was as popular as people in the south seem to think it is—or as unpopular as I seem to think it is, from speaking to my constituents.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Dominic Charles Roberts Grieve (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I have no idea how widespread the support for the project is in the north of England; anecdotally, there is a suggestion that it is much less than has been suggested. Most referendums have regional or local results, which would be a telling way of showing whether the enormous expenditure is the best way of building better infrastructure for this country in future Whoever speaks on this matter in the House will have no difficulty in agreeing on the benefits of sound infrastructure; travelling on the London underground, one can see the need for investment. I also entirely accept—I make the point again—that infrastructure development cannot take place without some adverse environmental consequences. We have to do our best to minimise those, and one of my anxieties is that I am not sure that we have really considered that issue properly in the context of this project. However, I accept that there are those consequences. I am a realist, but I worry about this project, which is why I think a referendum would be so desirable I shall now bring my remarks to a close. I must apologise to the House, and above all to my right hon. Friend the Minister. There have been changes to the Order Paper, and unless I fail in my duties to my constituents in other respects, in a way that would be difficult for me, I will not be able to remain to hear the end of this debate.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Daniel Byles (Conservative, Centre-right): Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, although we do not have referendums on infrastructure projects across the board, this is a unique infrastructure project, and that because every party capable of forming a Government is in favour of it, it is impossible for any party to claim a mandate for it?
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Philip Andrew Davies (Conservative, Centre-right): The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Is it not the case that it takes almost as long on the train to get from Leeds to Liverpool as it does to get from Leeds to London? It is, therefore, bizarre that so much money is being spent to try to make it quicker to get from Leeds to London when many people would prefer it to be quicker to get across the north of England.
HS2 Funding Referendum Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Transportation
Cheryl Elise Kendall Gillan (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson). If we had a secret, unwhipped ballot across the House, I think we may find less support for this project than those on the Front Benches would like. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) on bringing this Bill to the House and giving me and my colleagues the opportunity to sponsor it. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) was not free to sponsor the Bill, but it is good to have his affirmation that he would have added his name to it had he not been on the Front Bench. I have been liberated for some time, and fortunately I have been able to speak about this matter. For the first two years of this Parliament, however, owing to Cabinet collective responsibility and observing what is right and proper in the House, I was unable to air my views about this project on the Floor of the House Friday mornings are never convenient for Members who want to spend time in their constituencies, and it is commendable that colleagues have joined the debate this morning, probably on their way to their constituencies. My right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington) has asked me to mention the strong feelings in his constituency about the huge cost of this project, particularly because the lack of any interim station means that local people are set to gain no benefit from the line, while facing massive disruption to their lives for years to come. I echo that point for my constituency and constituencies in Buckinghamshire that will be severely disrupted should the project go ahead. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) supports the Bill but is unable to attend the debate, and I am pleased to put that on the record to show that many Members up and down the line—and now beyond the line—feel uncomfortable with the proposals That we are debating giving people a vote on this project is absolutely right, and if the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes)—