Transport Committee
Oral evidence: HS2: progress update, HC 85
Thursday 30 November 2023, Birmingham.
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 30 November 2023.
Members present: Iain Stewart (Chair); Jack Brereton; Grahame Morris; Greg Smith.
Questions 334–344
Witnesses
I: Trevor Gould, Railway Lead, Stone Railway Campaign Group; and Trevor Parkin, Engineering and Environmental Lead, Stone Railway Campaign Group.
Witnesses: Trevor Gould and Trevor Parkin.
Q334 Chair: Welcome to the Transport Committee here in Birmingham, rather than our usual place in the House of Commons. Before I start today’s proceedings, I would like to place on record, on behalf of my colleagues and the staff of the Committee, our sadness at the passing of Alistair Darling, who served as Secretary of State for Transport for four years from 2002. We pass on our condolences to his friends and family.
The purpose of today’s session is to continue our scrutiny of HS2. We would like to record our thanks to HS2 Ltd for showing us some of the works around Curzon Street here in Birmingham. Could I invite our first panel to introduce yourselves and your organisations for the record, please?
Trevor Parkin: Good afternoon. I am the engineering and environmental lead for a local group in Staffordshire. It has just changed its name; it is now the Stone Railway Campaign Group. We have been working on the HS2 project for seven years and have given evidence on four occasions in Parliament, three times to the House of Commons and once to the House of Lords. I am a mining engineer and an environmental impact assessment specialist, and I have worked in the industry for 30-odd years.
Trevor Gould: Afternoon. I am the railway lead for the same organisation as Trevor Parkin. I had been involved in the HS2 project for about three or four years before the SRCG was inaugurated and I have been in railway operations for probably around 50 years, so I have a great breadth and depth of knowledge in that area of operation.
Q335 Chair: Thank you; we are grateful for your time this afternoon. We are particularly interested in hearing from you to get your opinion on the consequences of the Government’s decision to cancel phases 2a and b of the HS2 project, which of course would have gone through your area. To begin with, could I invite you to give us your opinions as to what the consequences of that decision might be for the West Coast Main Line and related connections, and what else might we need to guarantee future capacity for that line?
Trevor Parkin: I will start. We have forensically analysed the HS2 proposals—not only the engineering and environmental proposals but also the consequences for the West Coast Main Line, particularly in terms of services to west coast destinations. We think that rather than increase the capacity on the railway network in the north, HS2 would have done precisely the reverse. The evidence for that is the comparison between the Avanti timetables that we currently have in the north-west via the West Coast Main Line and what HS2 is proposing, or what is in the DfT's strategic outline business plan. Those proposals have been updated over the years, but if you do a direct comparison, over 75% of west coast stations would have ended up with a far inferior service, not only compared to London but where we are in Staffordshire. We currently have one train—or one and a half—an hour from Stafford to London. That is the Liverpool Lime Street service. Stoke-on-Trent enjoys two trains an hour, which is the Manchester service.
HS2's plan would be to remove all of those Pendolino trains because there wouldn’t be capacity for them and to replace them with one single train that would terminate in Macclesfield, having gone through Stafford, crawled up the Norton Bridge line, through Stone at 25 miles an hour, stopped at Stoke and then terminated at Macclesfield. The service to the north-west would be far inferior. Edinburgh wouldn’t get any trains with HS2’s current proposals and eight other stations would see a dramatic reduction in their levels of service, including places like Carlisle, Glasgow, Wigan, Warrington and Lancaster.
We think that the decision is an excellent one and we think that with some improvements to the West Coast Main Line—not big improvements, but relatively strategically targeted ones—we can take HS2 trains to the destinations they should have gone to in more numbers than was being offered by the HS2 proposals.
Chair: I would like to turn to what those alternative projects might be in a moment but, Mr Gould, do you have anything to add to what your colleague has just said?
Trevor Gould: Yes. Originally, and for many years, I was a great advocate of the HS2 project. I fully support the idea in principle and I still think that it is important that high-speed trains are segregated from freight and slower passenger trains, but unfortunately this HS2 is not the way to do it; it does not do what it says on the tin. It does not release capacity north of Birmingham, it does not improve connectivity because of that, and it certainly doesn’t level up if you start investing in the south and building northwards. As a result, I started looking at alternative options because we need, as Rishi Sunak originally said, to put it on pause, but then start building further north while we have another look at this because this is just not the way. This is not the answer.
Q336 Chair: Just briefly, because we don’t have a huge amount of time this afternoon, can you summarise what type of other enhancements might need to be done, what the broad cost estimate of those might be, the time delivery, and what additional capacity it might release in the future?
Trevor Parkin: The first thing that needs to happen is that the Handsacre Junction needs to be properly constructed so that HS2 joins onto the fast lines. That was the original proposal as part of phase 1 in the hybrid Bill of 2013. At the time it was described as the least disruptive to the West Coast Main Line and the cheapest option. Then in 2019, HS2 decided, bizarrely, to join on to the slow lines. It did an options analysis, which has not been published publicly, so we have not seen it, but it only looked at six options, which all joined onto the slow lines. That affects the capacity on the slow lines, which is where the freight and the local trains are. I have heard it said that the HS2 changes were to save money and to simplify the connection. If you look at the engineering of the two schemes, I can’t see how it can come to that conclusion. It needs a much longer viaduct to cross over to the West Coast Main Line to create the Handsacre Junction on to the slow lines. It needs to return to the original proposals. We have not seen the costs of the Handsacre connection to the junction, either of them, and I think it would be useful to see that options appraisal published in full.
With the stub end of phase 1, if you like, which continues over the Trent and Mersey Canal at Fradley Junction, there are nearly 2 kilometres of railway that are no longer required under phase 2a and I suspect that you could save at least £500 million by not constructing that. I went out there the other week and had a look at what is happening on the ground, and apart from a very large embankment that is constructed on that stub end, there is plenty of opportunity to return to the original plan for Handsacre. It just needs that design to be worked up in accordance with the HS2 original proposals. I cannot see it would need any additional powers because the phase 1 powers are still in place. That is the first thing.
One of the issues on the line in that area is the Shugborough Tunnel, which is only two tracks and was built in the 1840s. That tunnel is underneath the historic gardens and in the AONB, but it is only 710 metres long and you could put another tunnel through the hill that it goes under and take four tracks up the West Coast Main Line to Crewe. But the big thing that we think should happen—Trevor will probably talk about this in more detail—is to go back to the HS2 plan of the Crewe consultation, which was to have the independent lines on the west side of Crewe station upgraded so that you could put the platforms there and take passenger traffic. I will hand over to Trevor and he can say a little bit more about that.
Trevor Gould: Just as an addendum to what Trevor was just saying, under current HS2 plans even now trains to Stoke-on-Trent only terminate at Macclesfield. They go through Stafford and on to Stoke-on-Trent. With our plans, we can reach Stoke-on-Trent seven minutes faster than HS2 can, using HS2's trains, but that would require this great separated junction at Colwich and running up the Colwich line. That is the current route of the Pendolino to Manchester and that route is by far the shorter and quickest to Stoke-on-Trent. Under HS2's plans, that route becomes redundant, which sounds ludicrous—a section of the West Coast Main Line becoming redundant because the only commercial traffic on it is the Pendolino trains to Stoke-on-Trent. If those trains are diverted via Stafford because of the HS2 plans, there is no reason for having that section of the West Coast Main Line. You can see that is just a nonsense.
As regards the Crewe section, I see that Andrew McNaughton has very helpfully submitted some written evidence to you in support of what he was saying two or three weeks ago. I agree with a lot of what is said about the Crewe area. The approach to Crewe from the south certainly needs the fourth track to be reinstated into the throat of the station to allow more trains to run into the station area. That would require the western island of Crewe station to be reintroduced, tracks to be re-laid there and a reconfiguration of the track layout—I hope you know a little bit about that now that Professor McNaughton has done that work—and also the platforms to be lengthened. Our plans rely on those four tracks, those extra platforms and the longer platforms, so we have no issues with any of that at all.
The big issue we have is that it is only incremental capacity improvements at Crewe. You can certainly get more trains in from the Shrewsbury line, but they have to terminate at Crewe. They cannot get beyond Crewe because of the issues at Crewe North Junction, which I will come to in a second. You can get more trains in from the Chester line with fewer conflicting moves and those trains can access the West Coast Main Line, but the big issue is Crewe North Junction. Crewe North Junction is already up to maximum capacity. Network Rail made a statement a few years ago—in 2016—which I will not read through because it says a lot of uncomplimentary things about North Junction, but putting it simply you can't get any more trains through without withdrawing services. HS2 plans to put more trains through that junction.
Originally, as Mr Parkin has mentioned, the plan was to put a double-faced island platform on the independent lines, which is a set of four lines that runs to the west of Crewe station. It only carries freight trains at the moment. There are two lines to Liverpool and two lines to Manchester. Those lines head into tunnels underneath the north end of Crewe station and emerge, but the Liverpool lines emerge on the West Coast Main Line going north and the Manchester lines emerge in the Manchester direction and on to Manchester. We propose that we should resurrect the plan for a double island platform face there so that passenger trains from the Manchester direction can use those tunnels and still call at Crewe by using the independent lines platforms, the new platforms. That would release capacity to allow the extra HS2 trains that the company wishes to run to go through the north junction without having to withdraw any passenger services.
We also recommend that at least one per hour of the local Crewe to Manchester services, which also cause conflicts at Crewe North Junction, is routed through the independent lines tunnels to call at those platforms. That would allow those services to run southbound to Stafford, for instance. At the moment, nowhere in Staffordshire has access by rail to Manchester Airport. This would be an ideal opportunity to correct that for 2 million people. The route of the Cardiff to Manchester train would also be safeguarded. That approach is from the Shrewsbury end, but that one conflicts with every track in Crewe station. It would not conflict with any tracks in Crewe station if the independent lines were platformed.
Q337 Jack Brereton: Have you had any thoughts about what other potential enhancements could be delivered as a result of the savings that have come from the cancellation of phase 2?
Trevor Parkin: Yes. We have developed a series of papers. One is very close to our locality and that is what used to be called the Stoke to Market Drayton line. This is a section of 13 kilometres of railway that used to connect the West Coast Main Line at Stoke through Newcastle-under-Lyme, which is one of the largest towns in the country without a railway station after the Beeching cuts of 1965, to the West Coast Main Line at Madeley. If you don’t know where Madeley is—I am sure you do, Jack—Madeley is only 12 kilometres south of Crewe. The reopening of that line and some minimal upgrades between Stoke and Derby and beyond, some of which are already in the Network North plan, would see a lot of freight traffic able to bypass the West Coast Main Line and address the bottlenecks that currently exist and come out just south of Crewe. That is one of our plans.
We are also looking at the alternative to the Northern Powerhouse Rail proposal. Currently, the idea is it shares 24 kilometres of railway with HS2 phase 2b between Manchester, Piccadilly and High Leigh, which is to the west, not far from the M6 motorway. That is a very circuitous route. We think a far more direct route between Liverpool and Manchester and Manchester and Leeds could be achieved for a lot less money. The £12 billion that has been earmarked in the Network North plan for potentially NPR, I don't think that money will go any further than the HS2 piece and it certainly will not stretch to Liverpool.
The alternative, with a through station at Manchester—which the Manchester authorities are desperate for—I think is the only sensible investment in terms of Northern Powerhouse Rail, rather than a turn-back station where trains have to pull into Manchester Piccadilly and pull out in the opposite direction. That is a far better proposal and a far better option than what is currently on the table with NPR.
Q338 Jack Brereton: In terms of some of the other things that the Committee has been looking at, we particularly have concerns about the road safety audit process. You may have seen that we recently had a letter back from the executive chair of HS2, following the Chair's writing to express some concerns, particularly in Staffordshire with some of the road safety audit process. I think you have had some involvement in this and dialogue with HS2. What are your thoughts on the current process that HS2 has used around road safety audits and in terms of the letter—if you have seen it—that we have had back?
Trevor Parkin: I understand the Chair of this Committee wrote to HS2 on this issue with particular reference to Yarnfield Lane, which is one of 20 schemes on the phase 2a project. Yarnfield Lane was probably the biggest of those projects because it was a new bridge over the M6 motorway. It was a 1.2 kilometre diversion of the existing lane between the village where I live and our main local town, which is Stone. We gave evidence back in 2018—in fact, our transport expert gave evidence—on two occasions, where we pointed out that we were very concerned about the outline design of Yarnfield Lane and whether it was feasible. The issue came to a head in the early part of this year, when we met with HS2 just before the phase 2a pause took place. We now have the design plans from its contractors and consultants. These are the first detailed design plans.
We have analysed these plans and the basic point is the proposed road is just unsafe. It is not just unsafe because we don’t like the idea of this lane, but it is unsafe in terms of UK technical standards. I am sure that the Committee will be aware that under the DMRB process, there are lots of design standards that road designers have to adhere to when designing new roads or new junctions. These are CD 109 and CD 123. The whole process is governed by the road safety audit process, which again is set down in a UK technical standard, GG 119. That requires the relevant highway authority to be what is known as the overseeing organisation.
The problem with these HS2 roads is that the highway authority has been pushed aside from this process and effectively HS2 has appointed itself as the overseeing organisation. The reason why the overseeing organisation should be the highway authority is because it is the highway authority that adopts the roads. We have evidence that Yarnfield Lane fails UK technical standards in about 10 ways, yet it got through the road safety audit stage 1.
Q339 Jack Brereton: Has that process not been sufficiently robust?
Trevor Parkin: We don’t think the process has been properly followed. It is not appropriate for the developer to be marking its own homework; I think that is a phrase you have used before. It is just totally inappropriate. If that is a problem on a road on phase a, which now doesn't look like it will take place, what will the position be all along phase 1, where there have been plenty—
Q340 Jack Brereton: We have heard evidence previously—for example when we visited Buckinghamshire—that there are concerns in other parts of the country about whether that process is being followed properly and about the safety of some of those roads.
Trevor Parkin: It is very important. This is a very serious issue because we are talking about the safety of the public on these roads and there needs to be full transparency with this. We have asked, through freedom of information, to see the involvement of the highway authority—in our case, Staffordshire County Council—on this issue and we have been refused on three occasions now by HS2. The Committee has asked for this information—full details of what correspondence and minutes of meetings that took place. I note that the response that was received last week from the executive chairman of HS2 just said there was a meeting on 2 November last year. The road safety audit process should have started in 2018 or even 2017 when the roads were first alluded to. If the county council has not been involved until November 2022, it does demonstrate a serious concern for us that it has not been allowed to properly scrutinise these roads. I would stress very strongly that there is a big issue here and that HS2 needs to be far more transparent than it currently is willing to be.
Q341 Jack Brereton: I want to ask both of you about your experience of, as you say, giving evidence at the hybrid Bill Committee. First I would like to ask about your feelings in terms of the engagement of HS2 with those giving evidence. What is your experience in terms of how HS2 has listened and considered some of the suggestions and genuine issues that have been put forward about how it could improve the project both in terms of listening more to the issues of residents and environmental issues, but also in terms of reducing the burden of cost for the taxpayer?
Trevor Parkin: We started on this back in 2016. Just to give you a bit of background, I have been involved in environmental impact assessment since it was first invented in the late 1980s, and I have managed and authored a lot of major development environmental impact assessments. The reason why we first got involved—or I first got involved—in this was because of the proposed Stone railhead which, by any engineering standard or any planning standard, is not a feasible operation, never was and never should have been considered.
The problem is when you try to give evidence on this subject. I have been at public inquiries in the past and have been under cross-examination. We were hopeful at the beginning when we started this process. First we tried to have a dialogue with HS2, which it cut short. It wasn’t interested in listening to what we had; we had an alternative much more feasible location to put a railhead. Setting that aside, when we went to the House of Commons and then to the House of Lords, it was all extremely rushed. We had a QC the first time we went and we were giving literally two weeks of evidence in the space of five hours on the first occasion. Most of that time is taken up by HS2’s legal counsel interrupting the evidence that we are giving.
Unfortunately the problem I have is that those Select Committees do not have access to independent experts, so the tendency is to believe what HS2 says as if it is the gospel. I think that is not just our experience; it is the experience of many others. I think the problem is the hybrid Bill. If you have a major infrastructure project of this magnitude for any other kind of major development, there is a process called a development consent order, which is managed by the Planning Inspectorate, where technical professionals from both sides can make the case.
That doesn’t happen with a hybrid Bill. In effect, before you even get to petition or turn up in front of the Committee, it has had its Second Reading and it is already deemed to be approved, so the best that you will ever get is a bit of tinkering around the edges. Any substantive changes HS2 is not interested in. You just don’t get enough time to make a technical case and the people who are making the judgment don’t have the technical knowledge on which to make the judgment. It is a very frustrating process.
I have analysed HS2’s environmental impact assessment in great detail and although it is a staggering amount of paper and a huge amount of baseline information, which for phase 2 has cost over £500 million, as I understand it, there is no proper methodology for assessing any environmental topic and no proper assessment. The conclusion is already drawn before you even walk in the room and that is incredibly frustrating if you are an environmental professional, as I am.
Jack Brereton: Mr Gould, do you have any points to add to that?
Trevor Gould: Yes. Although those sound like strong words, the position is ,I think, that Mr Parkin is being a little bit reticent. I do have major issues with the candour of HS2 officials. It is not going beyond the pale to say that it is almost deliberately misleading in terms of what they tell Select Committee members. I gave my railway evidence for most of the morning the first time that we went down the House of Commons Select Committee, chaired by James Duddridge, now Sir James Duddridge, and it seemed that the evidence that was put forward against me by HS2 in the afternoon was in part—it would not be too strong a word to say—fabricated during the lunch hour. That is the opinion that I have and I think that is probably where we stand.
We have tried to engage with the company many times. Had it been more open and honest with us and listened to us with our ideas for Aldersey’s Rough instead of the Stone railhead, we would have been working with it, if it had said, “Yes, there are better ways of building this railway than our ideas.” But no, it carried on irrespective of what evidence was put in front of it, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. That was when I unfortunately lost my support for HS2, because I could see that it was not in the public interest. It does not do what it says on the tin.
Trevor Parkin: If I could make one point about the whole process, it is described as a quasi-public inquiry situation, so more time is needed for giving evidence. The critical thing about the way that should work is that you should be examined in chief ,if you have a representative such as a KC, and then you should be subject to potential cross-examination, and the same should go for the witnesses for HS2. We were not allowed at any point to cross-examine the HS2 witnesses and what we considered to be highly misleading evidence found its way into the special report. It is not a proper process.
We also believe that it is not the job of the advocates to be giving evidence. That is quite wrong. It is the job of the witnesses to give evidence. You can watch hours and hours and hours of HS2 proceedings of phase 2a and phase 2b and you will see the advocates effectively answering the questions for HS2. The witnesses make only occasional appearances. Remember the advocates don’t have to swear the oath; the rest of us do. That is a part of the process. It is very important that when statements are made there is an opportunity to cross-examine and that was never permitted. That is a big failing of the process, but the main thing is there needs to be greater involvement from technical specialists and it needs to be run by the Planning Inspectorate, in my opinion.
Q342 Jack Brereton: One final question about the unwinding of the process of phase 2. In particular, there have been concerns about radio silence from HS2, and a lack of engagement with parish councils and their concerns about the length of time that it will take to unwind, all while costs continue. What do you think about the unwinding of the phase 2 process now, those compounds and the handing back of land to landowners?
Trevor Parkin: On phase 2a, unless you were down at the southern end at Lichfield, most of the works have been enabling works or environmental works, so there have been a lot of minor road closures or temporary lights and we have quite a few compounds for gas main diversions—that kind of stuff. Since the announcement by the Prime Minister, there is not only no communication from HS2—or minimal communication—to say, "We are still looking of the implications of the decision," but there is no evidence of the removal of any of their paraphernalia from any of these sites. We are in touch with quite a lot of landowners and the landowners are pulling their hair out about this.
There is an issue about the compulsory purchases. Some people who had been subject to compulsory purchase have received money; some people have not. Their land has been compulsorily purchased without any payment. They cannot get access to some areas of their land and they are extremely inconvenienced. Some of these people are suicidal because of the way that they have been treated because it is just deplorable, yet there is still radio silence about that. There is still no effort on the ground to do anything to remove any of these things. That has to change. I think the decision has been made, the safeguarding needs to be lifted, and it needs to be lifted along the whole railway.
The NPR route, which uses part of phase 2b, is not a serious proposition to be able to deliver, so I think the safeguarding needs to be lifted, the blight needs to be removed from people's lives and HS2 needs to get on with it. It just seems to be dragging its feet. I don't know whether it is part of saying, "If we can wait long enough, somebody might change the decision after a general election," but as far as the people in the area where we live are concerned, it needs to communicate, it needs to leave and it needs to remove all of its stuff soon.
Chair: Grahame, do you have any supplementary questions?
Q343 Grahame Morris: I have a couple of points, some of which were raised with us in our consultation with parish councils yesterday. Mr Parkin, you mentioned the use of the tilting of Pendolino trains and HS2’s decision not to utilise that. Could you elaborate a little bit on the implications? This session is HS2 scrutiny—it is one of the six-monthly sessions that we do—but we are doing a broader inquiry about the lessons we can learn in how best to deliver nationally important strategic infrastructure, so your comments about the hybrid Bill procedure are very relevant. As someone who has served on the 2b hybrid Bill Committee—that was from Crewe to Manchester Piccadilly—I understand exactly what you are saying and I believe the criticisms are legitimate.
As we have started this inquiry on strategic infrastructure schemes and what happens now with the appraisal system, it is interesting that you mention technical appraisals and people who are properly qualified to put forward the case for and against particular schemes, rather than leaving it to professional advocates and laypeople like me to make a judgment. I think there is merit in that.
We received evidence from an academic—I think only yesterday—and he set out this “how, why, when, who” approach, which I thought was very interesting, particularly on HS2 and national railway infrastructure. When we talk about Pendolino trains and maximum speeds, for example, when it was decided that the high-speed line from central London to Manchester should run at 330 kilometres per hour, that had major implications for the route, the type of trains, the capacity and interchangeability.
Do you have any particular thoughts on whether at the very outset it would have been a dreadful thing if the maximum speed of the trains was 250 kilometres per hour? It would still have been faster than the intercity trains and the time saving would have been marginal, but had that allowed the completion of the route, it would have been tremendously beneficial.
Chair: Can I ask for slightly shorter questions and answers, please?
Grahame Morris: Yes. I am sorry, Chair.
Chair: We have quite a lot to get through this afternoon. Thank you.
Trevor Parkin: The first thing I would say is that this railway is overspecified. We had to have the shiniest, fastest railway ever built in the UK when it first came about. It was never about capacity with the original intention; it was about speed. Certainly there are pressures on the railway, if you are running trains at a speed that is far greater and you have to go in straight lines, which is why there is no tilting technology. I agree that it would have been far better. If you wanted to increase capacity—if that had been the objective from the first point—you would never have come up with this plan for a high-speed railway in its current form.
With phase 2, I think there is an opportunity to go back to what we need. We need to be able to take trains without being delayed and quite often that is just a question of having four tracks or electrification or better signalling or whatever. Take the Northern Powerhouse Rail example. What is the objective? The objective is to get from Liverpool to Manchester and Manchester to Leeds and Leeds to York, so you want to go in a straight line. You would not be able to get out of second or third gear in a high-speed train because there are only 40 miles between Liverpool Lime Street and Manchester Piccadilly, or even 30 miles if you go the route we suggest. It is crazy. It should have been down-specced.
It is too late for phase 1, but for phase—well, not phase 2 because it is not going to happen, but for NPR and all the other schemes that should be brought about, this is about getting from A to B. What passengers want is to be able to get on a train and go somewhere. The problem with HS2 is it just goes to Birmingham; it goes to Manchester. Trevor talked about the situation at Crewe. None of the Manchester-bound trains, HS2, stops at Crewe. If you withdraw the south Wales train and one of the northern trains, you will barely be able to get a train from Crewe to Manchester. It is ridiculous. It is the wrong plan. I know it is 14 years in, but it is not too late to change.
Trevor Gould: Might I add a little bit to that?
Chair: Quickly, please.
Trevor Gould: The Pendolino trains get from Handsacre Junction to Glasgow anywhere between 11 minutes and 13 minutes faster than the HS2 trains because they have tilt technology. Tilt technology does take more maintenance. It makes the trains heavier so they need more power, so the specification has to be higher, but you are saving on time. Because the project has been cancelled, it gives everybody the opportunity now to look at the specification, to look at everything that HS2 is providing and say, “Right, let’s draw a line under what we have done. What do we really need out of this? Let’s make the right decisions from now on. Do we need tilt technology? Do we need the trains to stop at the stations where the Pendolinos stop?" and so on instead of just ploughing on.
Chair: Greg, do you have any last questions?
Q344 Greg Smith: One very brief one. If we can go back to the points, Mr Parkin, that you were making earlier about the way decisions are made on projects like this, it seems to me that inherent in the hybrid Bill process—and indeed, other shiny thing decisions that Governments make—is that you have a row about the concept and the real design doesn’t come until much later. I was struck this morning when we visited the gigantic waste of money just outside the window from this building where we are sitting right now, the Curzon Street construction. There was an admission at one point, “Oh well, we didn’t know the land conditions until we started digging.” For someone in your position who has such expertise in environmental impact assessments, surely no infrastructure project should proceed where you don't even know the land conditions on which you will be building.
Trevor Parkin: Yes. If you were building a nuclear power station or you were building an airport, you would be doing your ground investigation in advance of coming up with your proposals. Unfortunately, with HS2 the route was decided based on BGS plans, geological plans, a lot of which geology dates from a century ago and is only updated when somebody drills some boreholes.
The Stone railhead is a classic. The Stone railhead is in a location that is a disaster for ground conditions. People should have realised that when they looked at the BGS plans because I could see it but when they drilled some boreholes and found artesian water shooting up into the air, they had 30 metres of what is called head, glacial material, which could be running sand moving through to massive boulders. The engineering that would be required to put a railhead there is phenomenal, but they did not want to listen to, “There is an alternative halfway up a hill on good solid rock”.
You are right: it is essential that you understand what you are building on before you come up with a proposal. Any other developer who doesn’t have a bottomless pit of money being provided by the taxpayer would have done that. If this was a private sector venture and you had to borrow money from the banks, you wouldn’t be able to say, “We want to build a railway, but we are not quite sure exactly where we are going and what we want to do with it and we don’t even know what the timetable will look like. Can we have £100 billion?” or maybe £150 billion, which is where we are with HS2.
Chair: Can I thank you both very much indeed for your time this afternoon and the evidence you have given, which will add to our collective knowledge as part of our inquiry? Thank you very much.
Trevor Gould: Thank you for the invitation.
Trevor Parkin: Thank you.