1
Revised transcript of evidence taken before
The Select Committee on Economic Affairs
Evidence Session No. 4 Heard in Public Questions 38 – 48
Witness: Professor Stephen Glaister
Lord Hollick (Chairman)
Baroness Blackstone
Lord Carrington of Fulham
Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach
Lord Lawson of Blaby
Lord McFall of Alcluith
Lord May of Oxford
Lord Monks
Lord Shipley
Lord Smith of Clifton
________________
The Chairman: Welcome, Professor Glaister. I am sorry for the slightly delayed start, but you have the stage to yourself. Lord Lawson will start off the questioning.
Q38 Lord Lawson of Blaby: Professor Glaister, you have been sitting here listening to the previous witnesses. Is there anything that they said to us with which you disagree or which you would like to qualify in any way or add to?
Professor Stephen Glaister: Thank you. I was not taking notes but, broadly speaking, I agree with what I took to be the feeling of the panel that the October strategy document is a satisfactory one and much better than its predecessors. It is very helpful. I have always felt that the standard cost-benefit analysis that HS2 have done over the years—I saw this as a member of the analytical challenge panel—was even-handed and well done within the rules of the game, which are clearly codified for this kind of thing.
In your first discussion, you quoted my remarks about the lack of an overall strategy here. I do not think that that was addressed and will perhaps say a few things about that. I do not think that the question of pricing has been properly discussed. There is a lot more to be done with that, and there has been a big failure from the very beginning to look at it properly. I am not at all convinced about the £15 billion of incremental benefit—perhaps we can come back to that later on.
On whether there has been a proper discussion in government about the big picture, my position is as follows. The way I read the numbers in the October 2013 report, the proposition is to spend £30 billion of Exchequer money on this project. The way I get to that is that it costs £40 billion, roundly, to build, another £10 billion to provide the rolling stock and another £10 billion to operate the service. That gets you to £60 billion in total. But then, eventually, you get back £30 billion of revenue. So the hole that has to be filled by the Exchequer is the difference: another £30 billion, or £31.5 billion, I think, on the central estimates.
So here is a proposition to spend £30 billion of taxpayers’ money. For me, the strategic question is what problem we are trying to solve and whether you could spend that £30 billion in an alternative way to address the problem. That has never really been discussed adequately in my view. If you are worried about the state of the economy in the north, then you can ask how you could use £30 billion in an alternative way to deal with that particular problem; if you are worried about capacity on the west coast route, you can ask how you could use part of that £30 billion to approach the problem in a different way. I do not think that Mr Steer gave full credit to the analysis that 51m has done on how you could in fact provide quite a bit of capacity at much less cost, to at least delay the need for the decision to expand on the scale of high-speed rail.
When I gave that quote, we were waiting for the Government to publish their draft national policy statement. They eventually did publish it in spring this year. You might have expected then to see a discussion of this big picture as to what the national needs are in surface transport and how conventional rail, high-speed rail and road contribute to those needs. In fact, that policy statement says at the very beginning that the Government are taking HS2 as given—it is not up for grabs; end of story. Then there is some discussion about the needs of the national conventional railway and the needs of roads, but there is never a discussion about how the options of spending more on roads and less on railways, or more on railways and less on roads, have been evaluated.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: The comparison of alternative ways of spending money—in particular but not exclusively on alternative transport projects—should surely be an essential part of the analysis.
Professor Stephen Glaister: Yes, but the whole point of doing a decent cost-benefit analysis is that it allows you to look at whether it is good value for money across the piece in terms of ways of spending that money on other sectors. Nobody has really addressed the problem that a future Government will face over the next decade or so in terms of the national debt. We all know that it is going to be very difficult to find a billion here or a billion there. Listening to the debate at the party conferences, all the parties are struggling to find a billion a year to help the health service, education or whatever it is. If you look at the spending plans that were published this time last year by the Government and are reproduced in the executive summary of the HS2 strategy, you will see a line in there that is new for High Speed 2. It starts at not very much, but by 2018-19 it is £3.3 billion for that year, in 2019 it is £4 billion for that year, and in the following year it is £4.5 billion for that year. I am not saying that it is a bad thing, but I am saying that it is an expensive and painful thing to fund, relative to other things you could do with the money. That goes on for year after year, beyond this horizon.
Hence, I do not believe that there has been a decent discussion. That is why you have to show a really good rate of return—a really good benefit to cost ratio—for HS2. If it is not good enough, it is telling you that you could spend the money in better ways, according to a well defined set of principles for evaluating these things. I do not think, in the world we are sitting in now, that a rate of return of 2.3:1 is very good.
Q39 Lord Lawson of Blaby: So two things are the massive taxpayer subsidy required to finance this project and whether the money could be better used in some other way.
I wonder whether I can ask you about a third thing. The alleged benefit comes from the saving in business time. This seems, from what we have heard so far, to be largely based on the time saved on the train journey. The train journey will be shorter, but what matters is the door-to-door time; and, partly because of where the stations are being located, the door-to-door time will not be reduced to that extent—indeed, I am not sure it will always be reduced at all. What will happen is that the amount of useful time, which is the time on the trains when you can work, will be reduced, while the amount of useless time, which is everything except the train journey, will be increased. Has that been properly evaluated, in your opinion?
Professor Stephen Glaister: Within the limits of what is a difficult piece of evaluation, I think it probably has been, yes. You have raised at least two issues there. One is whether the unit values of in-vehicle time saving are correct in the appraisal, and the other is whether the modelling is correct about how long it will take people to get from their homes or place of work to the station. The second of those is so big and complicated that it is very difficult to model, but I think a good attempt was made at doing that. We can have a discussion about whether the proposed station locations are optimum, as you did at the end of the previous session, but as I understand it, that is history—the decision has been made and they are fixed, so there we are.
On the value of time in the vehicle, the first appraisal was done using standard values, which is the right thing to do because the Government wanted to compare this scheme against other ways of spending money, and you need consistency. Subsequently, as set out in the strategy document, the Government changed their mind about what the best values of time were—that is progress and the way things go—and the work has been redone with the new values of time. There is a discussion to be had about whether the values now being used reflect what people actually do on trains or not. Bearing in mind that these are not average or standard people—
The Chairman: I wonder if you could just hold that thought until we have voted, and we will come back to it. Thank you very much.
The Committee suspended for a Division in the House.
The Chairman: One or two of our members have had to leave, but we will start with Lord Carrington.
Q40 Lord Carrington of Fulham: You heard the previous evidence when we queried this £15 billion of benefits, which is going to come out of HS2. Does that £15 billion sound as though it is in the right ballpark, or does it sound rather as though, if you put a row of assumption in, you pop out a number, but it is only as good as the assumptions you put in at the beginning?
Professor Stephen Glaister: I will answer, but I defer to my colleague Professor Overman, who I think you are going to be hearing from. He is the real expert, and he was referred to in the evidence earlier today. Reference was made to evidence he gave to the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons about a year ago, which I heard. I was very much convinced by his line of argument. For what it is worth, I think he is correct in his critique of the work that led to the £15 billion. It does not mean that the £15 billion is incorrect; it means that we do not know because of a statistical problem. The approach was fine, but there was a statistical problem which Lewis Atter referred to. The data were not good enough to give you an answer. We just do not know.
There has, I gather today, been further work on this since then, and I am not privy to it, so I will leave that for you to discuss later. What I would say about the £15 billion is that, if you believe it, an uplift of £15 billion a year from whatever the year was—I have done this calculation—£15 billion in the first year, and in the second year another £15 billion, if you bring that back to present value, that is an astronomical amount of money; it is between £200 billion and £300 billion. If somebody is offering you that if you put in your £30 billion, or perhaps you are thinking about £50 billion, and you get £250 billion back, you would bite their hand off for it, if you believe it. It is a very productive investment, if you believe that number. I think it is a long way higher than the more conventional methods of appraisal would suggest.
By the way, Lord May prompted me to clarify that my earlier answers were in terms of present values. The way we do these things is to bring them back to a common timescale. That is what I was doing there.
There were real technical problems with the original piece of work. Whether they have been sorted out, I really cannot judge.
Lord Carrington of Fulham: Can I just ask you about two other aspects of that? I find them quite interesting. We have had some difficulty getting out of anybody what they consider to be their margins of error or their uncertainty elements. I am used to looking at the Bank of England’s forecast. It now puts a fan of where it thinks the probability range is and where it will end up on things such as interest rates and so on. We do not get any of that for these types of analysis that I can find. Not only do we not get it; they say that you cannot do it, which I find surprising. They are also doing it at such a long distance in the future. We are talking 20 years before this railway starts to produce the £15 billion that they are talking about. You have so many uncertainties that to come up with a number which they say it will be without saying that it might be 5 or it might be 30—I have not done a lot of this sort of long-term project analysis although I have done a lot of short-term ones—strikes me as very odd.
Professor Stephen Glaister: I could not agree more. It is a problem that we have in any structural planning issue where we are dealing with; what the population growth is going to be and what the relative economic growth is going to be. To be fair, I think that the most recent document I have seen, which is the October document, very helpfully does quite a lot of sensitivity analysis. If you look at the full document, they have been really quite thorough in saying “Of course we do not know what the demand is going to be over this horizon”. Supposing it were 20% lower, or supposing the rate of growth or the value of time is going to be different, which we were discussing just before you went for your Division, how much difference would that make to the estimated benefit-cost ratio, the rate of return? It is not surprising that a quite small variation in long-term demand growth will make a big difference to the rate of return because you are putting in a vast amount of money now and only getting a return in a long time. That is a fundamental problem in all these things, which you cannot get away from, but those sensitivity analyses help you a great deal to form a view about how risky it is, on both the upside and the downside. Some things turn out not to be very important, although you might think they were, but other things, such as the value of business time, is desperately important because at the end of the day it is all about saving business time. You can see in the sensitivity analysis that if the value of time for business users was reduced—I am sorry that I have forgotten the particular test they did—by 20% or something like that, it makes a big difference to the rate of return.
That is a framework for further discussion about whether we think the value of time is correctly done or whether more research is required.
Lord Carrington of Fulham: The other aspect—I shall finish on this quite quickly and I do not know whether there is an answer to it—is that when I have done project analysis in business, the discount rate is obviously critical. We were told that they were using a 3% discount rate, which strikes me at best as not a risk-adjusted discount rate, which is what I would expect them to use. Equally, if you are starting to use a higher discount rate, you inevitably shorten the project time. I was taught many years ago—things might have moved on—that if you are using a very low discount rate, using a horizon on a net present value of beyond 10 years you are starting to get into cloud-cuckoo-land and you really ought to be looking at no more than 10 years. If they are not using a high risk-adjusted discount rate on the £15 billion in 20 years’ time, I think the numbers must become very odd.
Professor Stephen Glaister: What they are doing is using the standard Treasury discount rate that is prescribed for this purpose at the moment. A long time ago, it used to be 10%, then it reduced to 7.5%, as I recall.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: It was 6% in my time
Professor Stephen Glaister: It is now 3% real, and I think it changes to 3.5% at some point. You are absolutely right: if you change that discount rate to 5%, it will wipe out HS2 because you are spending a lot of money now and getting nothing for a long time, so the discounting hits the benefits more than it hits the costs.
Q41 Lord Carrington of Fulham: If you do not put the risk into the discount rate, which I was always taught you should do, you end up having to put the risk into the number in 20 years’ time, because you have to have it in somewhere. They clearly have not put it into 20 years’ time and they have not put it in the discount rate, so where is the risk being adjusted for in the cash flow?
Professor Stephen Glaister: This is a long discussion for another day. One argument is classically that Governments have the ability to pool risk. They have a portfolio of projects, some of which will turn out well and some of which will turn out badly. Governments can defray the cost of risk in a way that a private firm cannot. That has been an argument for not putting a big risk adjustment into the discount rate. With a project that is as big and singular as this one, you might think that is a slightly specious argument.
You cannot get away from this problem. It applies on roads and power stations. It is big in nuclear power, of course. You cannot escape from it. There is an advantage in using a standard discount rate across the piece so that you can at least compare on a common basis, and that is what they have done. I do not want to defend it.
You have raised in my mind an important point that I would like to make about this. It raises very clearly the issue about whether you should delay the project. If you are uncertain about what is going to happen in the way you have discussed, it becomes important to ask whether we should wait a bit and see whether we can create a bit more capacity, as 51m has been suggesting. As I said earlier, I think you could create a lot more capacity than some people are given credit for. You could then wait a bit and see whether things change and you can make a better decision. What you must never do, however, is spend a lot of money up front and then delay completion, because that is absolutely fatal and we have done that lots of times in the past. We have done it with Crossrail. We spent vast amounts of money planning Crossrail and not doing it. If you are going to do it, you spend the money and get benefits flowing.
Q42 The Chairman: What do you judge the risk around the £50 billion capital cost to be? They are 2011 numbers anyway, so there is inflation to date. We have written evidence that inflation in this sector is rather higher than the annual rate of inflation, and the history of large projects—and there are not many as large as this—is of cost overruns. What is your assessment of the risk around that £50 billion?
Professor Stephen Glaister: I am not expert enough to be very helpful to you on this, but I believe that the £50 billion has a large optimism bias adjustment, which the Treasury insists on precisely to aim off for the phenomenon you have described. That is one of the ways the Treasury tries to deal with this particular risk. There is a real risk of prices of construction materials going up very rapidly in the near future because the economy is recovering. The Chinese economy is recovering and the price of concrete is shooting up. With Crossrail, we have had the advantage of, in the end, building it at a time when construction prices are rather low for reasons we all understand. That was a bit of good fortune, in a way. People have to make their own judgment about whether there has been adequate contingency for increases in unit prices in the construction costs of this thing. You also have to worry about what might be given away, if that is the right term, in the build process in terms of mitigation because the scheme that is now on the table has been changed quite a bit to reduce the impact on particular interests, which is a perfectly fair thing to do, but it greatly increased the cost. More tunnelling, which people are attempting to put in, increases the costs of delivery and reduces the benefits because you cannot run the trains so fast, as you heard Jim Steer say. There are lots of things that may happen between now and Royal Assent to the hybrid Bill that will change these numbers, typically, I suspect, adversely. That is something to watch out for.
Q43 Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach: To what extent do you think this project is a punt? That expression was used last week. We heard a lot about connectivity last week and in the earlier session this afternoon. Connectivity seems to be a necessary condition, but if you ask the question—and this is in no way to be derogatory of Manchester, Leeds or Birmingham—I can clearly see why people should come to London, because there is a lot of growth and there are firms with a great return on equity that are successful. You can see why people want to go to Cambridge or why people in the media business want to go to Cardiff, which is an international centre for independent production. Unless you have Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham really becoming clusters of something that is greater than just using connectivity—earlier today, Bridget Rosewell talked today about an appetite to take advantage—you just feel that in a way it is a political economy issue and rather imprecise. To what extent are we really just taking a punt?
Professor Stephen Glaister: Inevitably these things are going to be very risky. You are referring to what might happen to the industrial structure of these places over the years. Historically, there has been massive change. Edinburgh has developed a big business and financial services industry, as has Leeds, which is nothing to do with the transport infrastructure, given that they were reasonably well connected to start with. These places all have basic high-speed rail connections down to London by international standards. There may be a capacity problem, and we may be able to make it a bit better, but fundamentally they are already well connected. Over the past 20 or 30 years, you have had massive changes in the industrial structure for other reasons. So your question, if I can rephrase it, is: how do we know that that kind of change is not going happen again, and how do we know whether high-speed rail will help?
There was some discussion in the previous session about whether it might just make access to London easier and therefore produce commuting to London. That is a real issue. I do not know, but over the decades there has been a massive increase in long-distance commuting into London. The existing conventional rail system has improved so much and the fares have been held down, so people now live in Peterborough and travel daily. They live much further away and travel daily. With High Speed 2 to Birmingham, it will take about the same time from Birmingham as it now takes from Barnet, so there is a possibility, although I do not know, that you will encourage a lot of longer-distance commuting into London, but this is a guess—a punt, as you put it.
Q44 Lord May of Oxford: The Department for Transport told the Committee in written evidence that HS2 is designed to be a long-term answer to the capacity problem that we face on the railways. Are you convinced that there really is a capacity problem and, if so, where does it exist? The enthusiasts refer to this problem, but there is a study by High Speed 2 Action Alliance that says that crowding is more on commuter trains than intercity trains.
Professor Stephen Glaister: I hope that your inquiry will press this issue very hard. I do not believe, but perhaps I have not seen the evidence, that the Government have established the nature of the capacity problem on the railway.
Lord May of Oxford: My experience is that travelling intercity you very rarely see people standing, but maybe that is atypical.
Professor Stephen Glaister: That is actually set out in the executive summary of the strategic case at figure 7, which shows the crowding patterns on the railway. It confirms what you have said. My experience is that, travelling out of London at least, trains often have more staff on them than passengers. The evidence you referred to, which I have seen, suggests that the real problem is with the London commuter network and that the line of route in from Birmingham is one of the least congested on the commuter network. If your issue is with crowding on the London commute, then you might, to go back to my original proposition, use some of your £30 billion to deal with that problem, not spend it in the way that is proposed here. There is no doubt that the train paths fill the track. Perhaps you could squeeze some more capacity, which is something else you should press. What would the franchise operators like to do or offer to do with a bit more signalling and so on? Fundamentally, there is a shortage of track capacity, but you are running a lot of empty trains up and down at certain times of day. There is capacity at many times of the day. It is a peak problem. That is why I said that I would like a decent discussion about pricing. You may have a few trains at 7 o’clock in the evening that are crowded, and that crowding is exacerbated by the pricing policy that is being used at the moment. If you are willing to use a different pricing policy to spread the load to the times when there are empty seats, you could, at least for a number of years, solve this problem without spending £30 billion on a brand new railway and you could buy off any interests that are badly affected with a small proportion of that money.
Lord May of Oxford: You are way ahead of me on ticket pricing. You answered that before I asked it.
Professor Stephen Glaister: Just to repeat, the case that there is serious capacity problem today on that railway has not been made. It may be true but, to my knowledge, it has not been thoroughly investigated.
Q45 Lord Shipley: There are capacity issues and demand issues. Could you say a bit more about demand forecasts? The economic case states that the average year-on-year growth in demand for journeys on long-distance rail operator services between 1994 and 2012 was 4.9%—almost 5%—but the assumed rate of growth for 2010 to 2036 is 2.2%. Do those figures look robust to you? We do not know what the population increase might be, although there are estimates from ONS, but do you think that the growth forecasts expressed in the economic case are strong?
Professor Stephen Glaister: Within bounds, my guess is as good as anybody else’s. It is a really difficult area of course, but one has to hang on to the fundamentals. There are two things that tend to drive most of these demands, population and employment, and the level of economic activity. Part of the answer to your question must be what view there is about the level of economic activity over the period we are talking about. I notice that long-distance travel in the last few years has been flat, although if you look at the Office of Rail Regulation figures it has just picked up in the last quarter, as I would expect it to, as the economy has picked up. We are noticing that on the road network—by the way, we have exactly the same problem in forecasting road traffic over this kind of horizon, something that we need for road planning, as we have for the railways. The forecast does not look unreasonable, but whether it is the best estimate, I could not say.
However, I refer to the answer that I gave earlier about sensitivity analysis. It is useful to change that assumption and see how much difference it makes to the overall rate of return. That is a very helpful approach. As you will know, the analysts were faced with the fundamental difficulty that if you allow growth to continue at compound rates for ever, you get to the situation where almost everybody is using the railways, so they capped it in 2036, I think. That capping date turns out to be quite important: if you cap it at 2040 rather than 2036, you get a rather different answer. I really cannot help you a great deal on this, except to say that it is a matter of judgment as to whether the central estimate is a good one and that you should look at the sensitivities as you change things. That is, helpfully, in the strategic document.
Lord Shipley: Many of the figures that demand analysis are based on assuming a journey to London. Have you seen any work that you think is robust about demand that might arise for journeys between the northern cities and the Midlands, for example, or between the Midlands and Scotland—in other words, not involving London?
Professor Stephen Glaister: I have not, but people have worked on that. The Northern Way has worked on that, and I think Henry Overman will be able to help you next week on that, because he has worked in that area. We know that there are significant congestion problems between the Yorkshire conurbation and the Lancashire conurbation. The M62 road over the Pennines is a nightmare, and there is a very strong case for improving the capacity certainly of the road link and maybe also—I do not know—the rail link as well. I suspect that if you were to improve those connectivities you would get a lot more usage of the links between those cities. We know there is a shortage at the moment.
Q46 Lord Smith of Clifton: Professor, if premium fares were charged on HS2, what effect do you think this would have on passenger demand and, consequently, on the economic case?
Professor Stephen Glaister: This is a fundamental and interesting question that has never been properly addressed. As I understand the history, when Lord Adonis commissioned HS2 to start to investigate the proposal, he dictated that fares should be the same on the new railway as they would be on the old railway. That was the starting point and it has been fundamentally that way ever since. No one has asked the question that you just asked: how could you change the fundamental economics by being radical with your pricing? I think the answer to that question can be split into at least two parts. One is what you could do with the level of charges, and the other is what you could do with their structure. I have already begun to address the latter, because you will have peaking problems and you will no doubt get the kind of things that airlines do with their pricing. To manage peak demand, if airlines are short of capacity they try to adjust their charges by time of day or whatever and will then think about leasing other aircraft if they need to. That is the kind of discussion that has never been had, and that we need to have.
On the level, we have a fundamental difficulty here. What is being proposed, as you heard earlier, is a massive increase in capacity along that line of route. You are also going to have a competing railway—the existing one. An aspiration is set out in the strategy to keep the level of connectivity on the existing railway between the towns and cities there. That means running much the same kind of train service on the old railway as you have now, so you will have a lot more capacity and, arguably, competition between the two. In that situation, the ability to raise fares on the new railway will be quite constrained by the competition; nor will it necessarily be the right thing to do. In the public interest, if you have lots of capacity, you want to have it used; the last thing you want to do is to price people off and have empty trains. That is a classic problem in first-year economics: if you have an empty facility, you do not want to raise the price. Raising the price may give you more revenue and help with the taxpayer cost, but it will damage the economic value of the facility. You really want the prices low. So you are faced with a dilemma: if you build this thing, which may be a good thing to do, you want to have it used; and if you want to have it used, you do not want to charge too much for it. That means that the call on the taxpayer might be even bigger than we are currently contemplating, as the revenues will not be the £30 billion that I mentioned earlier. I am not saying that it is an insuperable problem; I am saying that it has not been discussed properly and that it really ought to be. As I said earlier, you could do a lot with pricing on the existing system in order to at least delay the need to invest in the new one.
Q47 Baroness Blackstone: My question is related. Most of the benefits that are cited in the economic case are based on assumptions about what businesses will pay for faster journeys. Do you think these assumptions are robust or not?
Professor Stephen Glaister: I think the only way you can address that question is to look at the evidence. The principle is a good one and underlies all cost-benefit analysis: how much are people willing to pay for this benefit? That is the way you value it, not on how much I want it or how much the Government want it. The question is whether we have the right value here in terms of what business would be willing to pay for this time-saving and for the reduction in congestion and crowding, as was mentioned in the previous session. The only way to address that is to look at the research reports underlying it. As I said earlier, my understanding is that the Government have done further research and revised their view about this, and reduced the value of business time.
But there is an argument that, on this particular line of route, these are not your average businesspeople—they are particularly high-income, high-activity people who would be willing to pay a bit more than the national average for business travel. You will see a sensitivity analysis in this document which tries that out and says, “Here are the original values of time and here are the new official values of time for business, and here’s one that is somewhat higher and therefore between the two”. You can see that it makes a substantial difference. But the only way you can form a view about what is reasonable is to look at the evidence and see how people behave, and then look at whether that has been adequately researched. My own view would be that it has been reasonably well researched. There are other things we know much less about than this.
Q48 Lord Lawson of Blaby: I have one quick question. From your evidence, it is slightly odd that there is this massive sum of taxpayers’ money being spent on increasing substantially the north-south capacity, where there is already substantial capacity, even if it might be used more effectively. However, where there arguably really does need to be improvement is in east-west capacity and connectivity in the northern part of England, between the north-east and the north-west. That would probably do much more to help the north of England become more efficient, more effective, more competitive and more productive. It is a bit odd is it not?
Professor Stephen Glaister: We just have not had the debate. If you talk to people in Network Rail or the Office of Rail Regulation who have been through the process of agreeing the five-year settlement, you will find they have a big bag of schemes, with good rates of return, that they would like to implement. They are quite concerned that HS2 will gobble up all the capital available.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: It will.
Professor Stephen Glaister: That is the reality. As for freight, you need to serve the ports and bring stuff east-west, not north-south. It will not be very helpful with those kinds of movements. Those kinds of issues just have not been debated. That is why I go back to my opening remark: what is the best way of spending this money and have we got to it?
The Chairman: On that very point, the Division Bell cut you off part-way through the value-of-time question. A number of questions have been raised, both in writing and around the Committee discussion today. Could you indulge us by giving some thought to your answers to those questions? In particular, you raised a number of issues which you feel we should press. It would be most helpful if you could also include those in a note to us.
Professor Stephen Glaister: I will do my best. It might be helpful if the advisers want to talk to me about what would be helpful.
The Chairman: We could do the latter.
Baroness Blackstone: I just wanted to emphasise freight in particular, which you just mentioned. I am really puzzled why so little attention in the case for HS2 is given to freight. I do not quite understand why.
Professor Stephen Glaister: Do you want me to answer that now?
The Chairman: I am conscious that we have run out of time, unfortunately. If you could speak to our adviser, particularly on the questions that we have raised, and if you could give us a written response to questions that we have not been able to cover today—freight was indeed one of them—that would be very helpful.
Professor Stephen Glaister: I will do my best.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.