Rail Investment and Integrated Rail Plan — House of Commons, 2021-12-08
Topic: Transportation
Gavin Andrew Stuart Newlands (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I, too, welcome the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) to her post and wish her well. No doubt we will chat soon about the role Those of us with long experience of the UK Government’s trail of broken promises and inaction knew that this day was likely to come. The minute the High Speed 2 Bills in this place were split by phases, it was clear that the Government were preparing the ground for cancellation once the political cover of promised HS2 to the north was no longer required. The idea of a rail strategy coming from the Department for Transport is a bad joke. In recent months, my office, and indeed my house, has accumulated a colourful collection of glossy DFT booklets and reports—a substitute for genuine action and construction. What with the Williams-Shapps plan, the integrated rail plan, the net zero strategy, the Union connectivity review and the transport decarbonisation plan, to name but a few, the Department is at least keeping graphic designers in work, and will no doubt keep fact checkers busy for months and years to come If hon. Members want to see real ambition and forward thinking, they should look across the North sea to Denmark—do not worry; I will come to Scotland. Denmark has managed to construct an 8 km bridge and a 4 km tunnel linking it with Sweden—a real bridge and a real tunnel, by the way, not a back-of-a-fag-packet scheme with roundabouts under the Isle of Man, dreamed up by the Prime Minister while he organised secret Santas. [Interruption.] I will come to it; don’t you worry, Secretary of State. Denmark’s fixed link with Sweden includes a high-speed rail link between the countries. For the foreseeable future, there will be more high-speed rail over and under an inlet of the Baltic sea than over a single inch of the north of England Now the Danes are building a fixed link to Germany —the project is financed and run by the Danish Government—while also building high-speed rail links joining the rest of the country. In fact, on current plans, Denmark, which takes up a third of the area that England does, will have more high-speed track in use than England by the end of next year, and it will continue to pull miles and miles ahead The Danish authorities are showing more vision and commitment to the nation’s transport infrastructure than their counterparts in the DFT. In Denmark, connecting neighbours is not a wheeze dreamt up by the Prime Minister, with no basis in reality; it is part of a sustained, long-term strategy to truly level up. I cannot imagine the Danish transport authorities planning a bridge or tunnel over a munitions and radioactive waste dump. They live in the real world, where they are building real infrastructure and real connections. This is a small, independent, northern European country taking bold and radical steps to improve connectivity with its neighbours, to push towards decarbonisation, and to boost its economy and that of its neighbours Contrast that with the Union connectivity review, where, despite the Scottish Government wanting meaningful engagement on a raft of issues, the UK Government simply ploughed ahead and ignored them.