BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4
TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “HS2: WINNERS AND LOSERS”
CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 8th October 2013 2000 - 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 13th October 2013 1700 – 1740
REPORTER: Gerry Northam PRODUCER: Ian Muir-Cochrane EDITOR: David Ross
PROGRAMME NUMBER: 13VQ5349LH0 - 1 -
THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.
“FILE ON 4”
Transmission: Tuesday 8th October 2013 Repeat: Sunday 13th October 2013
Producer: Ian Muir-Cochrane Reporter: Gerry Northam Editor: David Ross
ACTUALITY AT EUSTON STATION
ANNOUNCER: … platform 4 for the 1143 Virgin Trains service to Birmingham New Street ….
NORTHAM: The fast train is about to set off from London Euston to Birmingham. This is the service that HS2 would beat by about 35 minutes. But the tens of billions HS2 would cost and disputes over the projected economic benefits make it the most controversial infrastructure project in the country.
ANNOUNCER: This is a customer information announcement ….
NORTHAM: After disagreements opened up at the party conferences, HS2 has also become highly political. None of which puts off those promoting the scheme.
EXTRACT FROM PROMOTIONAL FILM
PRESENTER: Great Britain invented the railways. In 1825 the first public railway opened …. - 2 -
NORTHAM: To them, it’s quite literally an engine of economic growth.
PRESENTER: We’ll build a new network, connecting cities and businesses across the UK ….
NORTHAM: This week File on 4 travels the route planned for the first leg of HS2 to ask who would win and who would lose from it. And we learn that, perversely, even before it’s built, it is already blighting a development proposal promising thousands of jobs in the city that should be first to benefit.
ROUSE: It completely kills it dead at the moment, so all of those jobs which we really desperately need in this area, this is the most deprived part of Birmingham, so the need for jobs here is enormous and we need them now.
SIGNATURE TUNE
ACTUALITY IN CAR, RADIO ON
RADIO PRESENTER: … BBC London, 94.9, next update 12.30.
NORTHAM: The first place high speed trains would stop once they leave Euston is here, in what is currently a rather rundown area of north west London called Old Oak Common. It’s to the north of Hammersmith hospital and Wormwood Scrubs prison and it’s a tightly-packed maze of ageing industrial units, small offices and a gigantic car auction. This would be the only stop HS2 would make before Birmingham and it would be a transformation of this area.
BENNETT: We’re standing looking over the Grand Union Canal as it makes its way westwards out of London. You can probably just hear in the background the Great Western mainline, which we can see in the distance.
NORTHAM: Heading off to Bristol? - 3 -
BENNETT: And the station would be pretty much the entire extent we can see here.
NORTHAM: Neil Bennett is the architect/planner who’s been commissioned to draw up a grand renovation project for Old Oak Common, linking an enormous new station for HS2 with London’s Crossrail, the tube network and main existing rail lines.
BENNETT: What HS2 brings is a tremendous amount of accessibility, and the station will give access to 90% of London’s train and rail stations. Now, building on that, it’s very close to central London, we think this’ll make a station the size of Waterloo, so that’s a complete game changer..
NORTHAM: And while great claims are made for the potential of HS2 for cities in the Midlands and the north of England, Neil Bennett believes that the greatest economic revival would be right here in a London borough.
BENNETT: The vision for this is to enable growth around here and the economic regeneration probably, we think, on the scale of Canary Wharf with homes, probably about a seventh of London’s new homes for the next fifteen years could be here, and also possibly about 100,000 jobs, probably to do with Heathrow, probably to do with trade and commerce. A flow city is one way we’ve described it. It’s my view that Old Oak and the regeneration it brings is the single biggest positive impact that HS2 will bring.
NORTHAM: Bigger than the impact it’s supposed to have on Birmingham or Manchester or Leeds?
BENNETT: As a single impact, yes. The transformation, I think, will be immense.
NORTHAM: But you don’t have to travel far up the HS2 route to find a succession of areas, mostly solidly Conservative, where there’s a sense not of excitement, but of apprehension.
- 4 -
ACTUALITY IN CAR
NORTHAM: Leaving Greater London and heading north along the HS2 route, I’ve arrived first in Aylesbury and I’ve come here to meet the man who is leading the opposition of a number of local councils along the route to the whole HS2 project.
ACTUALITY AT COUNCIL OFFICES
NORTHAM: Here we are at Buckinghamshire County Council.
TETT: Hi there, good afternoon.
NORTHAM: Pleased to meet you.
TETT: Pleased to meet you. Follow me down this way.
ACTUALITY, WALKING
TETT: My name is Martin Tett and I’m the leader of Buckinghamshire County Council and I also chair the 51m alliance of nineteen local authorities who are opposing HS2.
NORTHAM: Councillor Tett too sees potential advantage from HS2 to the economy of Greater London. But in his eyes that’s a reason for saying no to the scheme.
TETT: Most experts, when they look at the issue of, for example, closing the north/south divide, recognise the fact that when you link cities to a major capital city such as London, what tends to happen is the real benefits are derived by that capital city rather than the satellite cities.
NORTHAM: You mean people will be sucked down to London rather than travelling from London to Birmingham or Manchester or Leeds?
- 5 -
TETT: Absolutely. What it tends to do, from experience around the world is it actually increases the dominance of the capital city and that’s not a good thing in terms of closing the north/south divide. If you really wanted to do that, what you should be looking at instead is actually linking northern and midland cities much more closely together rather than attracting more business down to London. Really the question isn’t, could we spend 50 billion on a high speed railway line? It’s, is it the best value for money when you’re investing 50 billion or are there better alternatives that would generate better wealth for the country more quickly?
NORTHAM: Doubts about who would benefit most from HS2 are central to the current debate. We’ll return to them later in the journey when we reach supporters of the project in Birmingham. Meanwhile, in constituencies along the HS2 route, it’s not only the possibility of losing out in the future that’s troubling residents. For some, the fear of planning blight has already become a reality.
ACTUALITY IN CAR
NORTHAM: I’ve headed roughly north towards Buckingham and turned off onto this narrow winding lane which leads to a small village of yellow/grey stone houses with an attractive village green with a pump and a surprisingly substantial church which has a plaque recording the village’s mention in the Domesday Book.
ACTUALITY OF SAT NAV
SAT NAV: Bear left, then you have reached your destination.
NORTHAM: This is Turweston and it lies just a few hundred metres to the west of the planned HS2 route. And that has given some residents here real anxiety.
HARPER-TARR: I’m Mike Harper-Tarr. I am the son of Elfrida Harper- Tarr, who owned the house we are standing outside and who, with my father, came here on my father’s retirement from the army in 1954 to take over what was a small village shop and post office. - 6 -
NORTHAM: Mike Harper-Tarr’s mother is now 98 and was the village postmistress well into her late eighties. She carried on running the shop into her nineties. Last year, after a series of falls and with failing eyesight, she decided it was time to go into care. They found a nearby home which suited her perfectly and then put her house up for sale to raise the fees.
HARPER-TARR: Initially it seemed reasonably all right. We had one or two people in the village itself who were interested. One of them pulled out but the other couple, who wanted to move into a bigger house, went ahead. We were anticipating exchanging contracts in the New Year. Just before the New Year came in I got a phone call from the people here saying, ‘Mike, can you come on over? We’ve got trouble.’ And they had been to their building society who had responded, refusing them a mortgage and citing there would be huge disruption from the building of the railway followed by continuing disturbance from the railway, HS2, and they put a value of zero on the property.
NORTHAM: Zero?
HARPER-TARR: Zero.
NORTHAM: What should the property have been worth?
HARPER-TARR: In the region of £250,000 or £260,000 – that sort of figure was reasonable. But sale could not go ahead because they were unable to raise the money.
NORTHAM: In the end, matters worked out satisfactorily for Mike’s mother, who eventually qualified as a case of exceptional hardship and had her property bought by the Government at close to the asking price.
TYERS: I have never come across anything quite like this in all the time I have been selling property in the area. It is quite extraordinary.
ACTUALITY IN OFFICE
NORTHAM: Hello, I’ve come to see Roger Tyers. - 7 -
WOMAN: Yes, he’s ….
NORTHAM: I called in on a local estate agent, Roger Tyers, to find out how significant a problem planning blight has become even before the first metre of HS2 track has been laid.
TYERS: It’s very real. In the last three to four years, we have had a number of houses on the market in Turweston and the only ones that we have managed to get any purchasers for have been ones where we have actually sold them to HS2 under the exceptional hardship scheme. It’s not necessarily the fear of HS2, because it will be in a tunnel most of the route, but the concerns about all the work that will be going on, all the traffic, people just don’t want to be living in that sort of environment for five, six years whilst it’s built.
NORTHAM: So it’s just a sort of paralysis?
TYERS: It is, very much so. People ring up from out of area, say they’ve seen properties on the website, they’d like to make appointments and 48 hours later they ring up and cancel the appointment and say, ‘We didn’t realise it’s in an area affected by HS2.’
ACTUALITY IN CAR WITH RADIO BROADCAST
REPORTER: No problems being reported to me on the trains, but if you can update us, call BBC WM95.6 travel on ….
NORTHAM: I’ve arrived in Birmingham on a drizzly day and I’m going to meet some of the city officials who are preparing for the arrival of the high speed train link from London. But first I’m going to a conference to promote HS2, which is being held at the Birmingham Science Museum.
ACTUALITY OF APPLAUSE
STEER: Today is an opportunity to discuss the questions and look at the evidence, in particular on the benefits of High Speed 2 …. - 8 -
NORTHAM: The conference brings together a few sceptics and a large number of supporters under the auspices of a campaign group called Greengauge 21. The Director, Jim Steer, seems to recognise a sense of caution in attitudes towards the project.
STEER: The benefits of HS2 have been under-represented in the public discourse, so ….
NORTHAM: You mean you’ve been losing the public debate?
STEER: Well, a lot of the debate has been people saying the same things over and over again – it costs too much, we don’t believe the business case, we’re unhappy with xyz. There are going to be people looking to try to stop it.
NORTHAM: So you think that you can win this argument back, do you?
STEER: Oh, totally.
NORTHAM: Jim Steer knows, though, that the mood music from the Labour Party – which originally created the project – is beginning to sound ambivalent.
ACTUALITY OF DOOR OPENING
BORE: How are you? Come and sit down ….
NORTHAM: But in Birmingham city centre, at the magnificent Victorian seat of local government, the leader of the Labour Council, Sir Albert Bore, remains one of the most ardent supporters of HS2.
BORE: There are economic benefits in the bucketful. Economic benefits which will come during the construction phase, where there will be undoubtedly a lot of local people who will find work during that construction phase here in Birmingham and, I think, in the region. Beyond that, as we move towards 2026, I think you will see a relocation of business activity around the West Coast mainline. That is therefore bound to bring additional business activity into Birmingham and into the environs of Birmingham. - 9 -
NORTHAM: How do you know that it’s going to do more for Birmingham than it will do for London? Why won’t it just become more attractive for commuters to go from Birmingham to work in London?
BORE: I suppose that question could be asked of us at the time we built the motorways down to London, and no one is proposing to sever the motorway links to London.
NORTHAM: So what’s the answer?
BORE: The answer is, London will take care of itself. We’re talking about an economy here in Birmingham and the West Midlands which undoubtedly will gain from a high speed line, will gain from the additional capacity that that high speed line introduces.
NORTHAM: How, though, does Sir Albert answer sceptics, like many of the local authorities along the route, who ask whether the money committed to the project could produce greater benefits if it were spent differently? If the Prime Minister said to you tomorrow, ‘Sir Albert, you can have £21.4 billion to develop the economy and the transport infrastructure of the West Midlands and Birmingham,’ would you spend it on a high speed rail link from London?
BORE: I would take his money and put it in place.
NORTHAM: And you wouldn’t have another thing you could think of to do with that enormous quantity of money?
BORE: Well let’s take the money, put HS2 in place and then go on and argue for the other parts that will need to be applied to bring more jobs into the economy of Birmingham and the West Midlands.
NORTHAM: Business opinion in Birmingham is largely persuaded by this case and predominantly favours HS2. The Chief Executive of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, Jerry Blackett, has made a point of canvassing his members in support. - 10 -
BLACKETT: We’re winning the argument at a macro level with business. We’ve just done a survey in Birmingham of 350 businesses, just finished. 71% of those say that they think this is going to be good for the regional economy. That’s 350 businesses, 71%. 41% are even capable now of saying they think it’s going to be good for their particular business, so I think there’s already a growing awareness about the importance of this and the opportunity of it to business.
NORTHAM: Do you think this is going to happen?
BLACKETT: I’m convinced it’s going to happen, because we need new rail capacity. It’s what we’ve been spending on Crossrail with no fuss at all, and what do you know, that’s been in London and, well, there’s a thing – everybody thinks that’s wonderful. As soon as we want to spend similar sums enabling the rest of the country, the great south east cognoscenti explode in rage and believe that no, no, no, the provinces don’t need that. That sort of money for Birmingham and Manchester? No, no, no. Much better in the south east. So I think time for a change.
ACTUALITY OF MACHINE NOISE
NORTHAM: But even in Birmingham there could be losers from HS2. Plans for the railway currently cut right through a proposed economic lifeline for one of the most deprived areas of the city.
ACTUALITY IN WASHWOOD HEATH
ROUSE: We are standing in Washwood Heath, it’s the eastern side of Birmingham, in the inner urban area. We are on the site of what was the former Leyland Daf vans factory. It’s about 137 acres.
NORTHAM: Paul Rouse is the Director of Planning at the property consultants, Savills. In the past three years he’s watched one of his major clients, AXA, take over the disused factory site and prepare it for a huge programme of investment. - 11 -
ROUSE: The whole site is now ready for redevelopment for the first time in about a hundred years. The only high quality employment site in Birmingham suitable for creating significant numbers of jobs – six thousand, seven thousand jobs for manufacturing or distribution type development.
NORTHAM: So this would become an industrial park?
ROUSE: Yes, it would.
NORTHAM: Under the plan?
ROUSE: Yes.
NORTHAM: How much work has already been done to get ready for that?
ROUSE: An enormous amount actually. Taking down the existing buildings and the site is now, as you can, cleared ready for development and indeed we were talking to occupiers ready to come in and take the development that we could bring forward on this site.
NORTHAM: Is there commercial interest in this site?
ROUSE: Yes there is, absolutely.
NORTHAM: Significant or just minor?
ROUSE: Yes. No, significant. Because we were talking to an occupier that would take out the whole site.
NORTHAM: But then came the spanner in the works. The planners at HS2 have earmarked a large part of the site for use as a marshalling yard and depot for their trains. What does that mean for Paul Rouse’s plan for six or seven thousand jobs? - 12 -
ROUSE: It completely kills it dead at the moment. Washwood Heath is in the most deprived part of Birmingham in terms of unemployment, Jobseekers Allowance payments etc, so the need for jobs here is enormous and we need them now, and what HS2 has done is to safeguard this site and say, we need all of this site for their rolling stock maintenance depot, and because HS2 says we will be acquiring your site and we think we need it is to completely prevent any development happening. No one can therefore come on site ….
NORTHAM: So it’s blighted?
ROUSE: Completely, completely blighted.
NORTHAM: How many jobs would the HS2 plan for the maintenance yard here involve?
ROUSE: Well, HS2 tell us that it’s 350 jobs. It is a massive loss of opportunity for the site and the people of Washwood Heath.
NORTHAM: Local MPs have opposed the HS2 proposal for the area. The council leader, Sir Albert Bore, also an opponent, would say only that negotiations are continuing. But at HS2 headquarters, the principle seems to be set. The project’s Chief Executive, Alison Munro, has clear plans for the Washwood Heath site.
MUNRO: We’ve done a thorough assessment of all the potential sites, we’ve worked closely with the Birmingham authorities on that and that has shown clearly that Washwood Heath is the only sensible location for our depot.
NORTHAM: So that’s now a decision, is it?
MUNRO: That is what we have put forward and that is what we’re proposing to include in our Hybrid Bill to Parliament will include a rolling stock depot at Washwood Heath. We will certainly deliver a significant number of jobs there with the rolling stock depot, but there are other opportunities on that site as well. - 13 -
NORTHAM: Will they amount to the seven thousand jobs that will be lost because of the scrapping of the development proposal which is going on there at the moment?
MUNRO: Well, I think we should be clear, I mean there wasn’t actually, you know there wasn’t actually a sort of concrete plan to deliver seven thousand …
NORTHAM: Well there’s developers interested in the project, they’ve flattened the site, they’ve put a huge amount of money into getting it ready.
MUNRO: As I say, I think we are now looking at how you can sort of master-plan the entirety of that area to get the most benefits out of it. I can’t say to you at the moment how many jobs at the end of that that will create.
NORTHAM: But will it be anything like seven thousand?
MUNRO: As I say, I can’t say at this stage what the number will be and where and whether in fact some of those, some of the aspirations, so there’s other jobs might actually occur elsewhere in the West Midlands region.
NORTHAM: You’re not going to give up the potential of Washwood Heath for your use?
MUNRO: We’re not proposing to give up the Washwood Heath site.
NORTHAM: Up and down the proposed line, as in east Birmingham, the argument over HS2 is about projected gains and losses. At national level, though, the key question is cost. The latest Government estimate for the full project, extending to Manchester and Leeds, puts it at £42.6 billion. Add to that a likely VAT bill of £8 billion and rolling stock costs of £7.5 billion and the total comes to £58 billion. And the case for spending that amount of money is under sustained criticism. The National Audit Office found errors in the official analysis - double-counting some benefits and using mistaken passenger demand forecasts. There have been awkward questions too from Margaret Hodge MP chairing the Public Accounts Committee. - 14 -
ACTUALITY AT PAC HEARING
HODGE: Before there has been a spade in the ground, all the costs are moving in the wrong direction. Is that correct? Costs are going up; benefits are going down.
RUTNAM: Errm, so I will ask David to say a bit more about this, but the costs of the project are dependent on the scope, and we have been doing, HS2 Ltd has been doing ….
HODGE: Is it just true or not true that, over the period, the costs have gone up and the benefits have gone down? The predicted costs are up and the predicted benefits are down.
RUTNAM: I am not disagreeing with the figures in figure 5, I am trying to …
HODGE: Thank you. Okay.
NORTHAM: The Commons Committee spoke of fragile numbers, out of date data and assumptions which do not reflect real life. Over three years, the claimed ratio of benefits to costs almost halved - falling from 2.6 to just 1.4, meaning that the official projection now is that for every pound invested there will be £1.40 in benefits. How does Chief Executive Alison Munro explain this slide?
MUNRO: You need to include the wider benefits as well but, but there have been a number of changes as we’ve gone through from our early days in 2009 to where we are now.
NORTHAM: Well the National Audit Office say you made some errors. They say you double-counted some benefits and you got passenger demand forecasts wrong.
- 15 -
MUNRO: There was a problem in the original modelling, which did lead to some double-counting. As I say, we’ve corrected that, so that was an element of why the benefit cost ratio has changed. Another important element has been the changing economic prospects and various other changes that we’ve made as we’ve gone along, but we are currently …
NORTHAM: But you acknowledge that you made some mistakes?
MUNRO: Yes, we’ve acknowledged that. As soon as we found them we’ve corrected them. We are currently updating the economic case, that will be published in the autumn. As part of that, we’ve gone through a really thorough quality assurance process.
NORTHAM: Are you telling me there won’t be any more errors discovered by the National Audit Office?
MUNRO: Well, we’ve done all that I think is humanly possible to avoid any further errors.
NORTHAM: Official confidence in the current figures is put at 95%. But the public can only be bewildered by the range of numbers confidently asserted for HS2. Councillor Martin Tett, for example, the Conservative leader of local authorities opposed to the project, has published an analysis reaching very different conclusions from the Government’s.
TETT: The business case for HS2 is in tatters. It isn’t just a bad business case, it’s an abysmal business case. Its benefit cost ratio - in other words the test of how much money is paid back for every pound invested of taxpayers’ money - has virtually collapsed.
NORTHAM: Well, it’s 1.4, which is still better than 1, which would be even.
- 16 -
TETT: If you strip away the fact that they’re using an outdated model and also assuming that, for example, no businessmen work on trains currently, which in an era of iPads and smartphones is clearly complete nonsense, then the real return on taxpayers’ money is that it actually loses something like 60 pence for every pound that’s invested in it.
NORTHAM: So hang on a minute. The Government says for every pound invested we will get back £1.40. That’s the benefit cost ratio of 1.4. You’re telling me that we’re going to lose 60 pence for every pound. So your benefit cost ratio is 0.4?
TETT: That is correct.
NORTHAM: That’s a striking difference from what the Government is saying.
TETT: Absolutely.
NORTHAM: At HS2 headquarters in Victoria, Alison Munro is sticking to the figures the Government has quoted.
MUNRO: The Department for Transport has done a lot of work, so they’ve looked at a number of alternatives and come to the conclusion that High Speed 2 is the right answer to the future needs of the economy.
NORTHAM: So those analysts who say that actually you’re heading into a project where for every pound spent we might only get even 40 pence back in benefits, they’re just wrong, are they?
MUNRO: They are wrong, I don’t recognise those figures at all.
NORTHAM: They have come from Martin Tett, who is the chair of the 51m group of local authorities. - 17 -
MUNRO: I mean, I don’t agree with that analysis. And as far as we’re concerned, our benefit cost ratio is robust, we are not talking of numbers at that sort of level.
NORTHAM: Last month, yet further figures were introduced into the argument with the publication of a new type of economic analysis prepared for HS2 by the financial consultants, KPMG. They examined not just the immediate transport benefits of the project, but also the wider economic advantage it could bring to Britain. KPMG concluded that in 2037, the first year of the finished high speed network, the economy would gain an extra £15 billion. This relied on a system of economic appraisal developed for some major cities by KPMG’s leading infrastructure strategist, Lewis Atter. So how much confidence does he place in that figure of £15 billion a year?
ATTER: Let’s just be clear about what that figure is. It’s our estimate of the impact on GDP, so economic output per annum in the later 2030s as a result of high speed rail. So what we’re saying is, on the basis of the analysis that we have done, it suggests that the difference between having high speed rail and not having high speed rail is an extra £15 billion of output in the UK economy.
NORTHAM: Given that economic forecasters can’t even tell you what inflation is going to be next year, does it really make sense to try to project 24 years hence?
ATTER: Given that investment decisions like high speed rail have to be seen in the context of the minimum a quarter of a century, what else are you going to do?
NORTHAM: But that doesn’t make your figures any more reliable. It might just mean we’re all working in the dark.
ATTER: I think you have to start somewhere and you have to start by understanding what the real world today tells you about the importance of connectivity to the economy. If you could see it in the real world today, then you can draw conclusions about the future.
NORTHAM: You’re not telling me that you’ve got it right and they’ve got it wrong then? - 18 -
ATTER: I’m not, I’m not. I, I …
NORTHAM: That’s very interesting for someone who’s put out a major report on behalf of HS2.
ATTER: I’m saying this is the best available evidence we have at the moment. It is possible as this evidence is refined that these numbers go down, but it’s also possible they go up.
NORTHAM: You’re not telling me that you have got it spot on, are you?
ATTER: I’m not pretending we would know whether we’d got it spot on.
NORTHAM: Which must leave the public even more bewildered - a point which we wanted to put to the Government. But the Transport Secretary wasn’t available for interview by File on 4. So, confronted by different projections of the advantages and disadvantages of high speed rail, as the old saying has it - why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book?
ACTUALITY OF JAVELIN TRAIN
ANNOUNCER: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. For those of you who have just joined us here at Ashford, welcome aboard this 1543 South Eastern high speed service to St Pancras International. We will be calling at ….
NORTHAM: Unless you live in Kent and travel on it every day, it’s easy to forget that the UK already has a high speed train line. It’s called HS1 and it runs at 140 miles an hour from parts of Kent up to St Pancras in London. When it opened, the promise was that it would make welcome reductions in journey times, not only for Eurostar services to and from Paris, Brussels and elsewhere, but also for commuters in Kent who could now whisk to and from the capital in record time. - 19 -
GUARD: Tickets please. That’s lovely, thank you very much.
NORTHAM: When we just set off from Ashford International, I started my stopwatch, and when we arrive I’ll let you know the result.
ACTUALITY AS TRAIN ARRIVES
ANNOUNCER: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving at St Pancras, where this journey ends. All change please, all change.
NORTHAM: We’ve been taken beneath east London in tunnels and we now arrive in St Pancras. And the stopwatch shows a time of just under 37 minutes. If you think that it used to take commuters an hour and 22 minutes to get from Ashford to London, that’s now taken us less than half the time. The Javelin trains on HS1 have clearly made journeys easier for some residents of Kent. But not for everybody. Some people complain that they are worse off than before.
ACTUALITY AT CANNON STREET
NORTHAM: This is Cannon Street station, one of the main railway stations serving the City of London, and commuters are arriving from various parts of Kent to get to their desks in the financial heart of the country. I’ve come here to meet a couple of commuters who complain that, as a direct result of HS1, their journey times to work have been lengthened. You must be John and you must be Peter. You’ve come from where this morning?
LEE: We’ve come from Herne Bay.
NORTHAM: Herne Bay, which is down in the eastern tip of Kent?
LEE: It is, yes.
NORTHAM: John Nicholson and Conservative councillor Peter Lee have arrived after a long journey of an hour and 37 minutes. This daily commute isn’t on a high speed line and now takes longer than it did before the introduction of HS1. Many - 20 -
NORTHAM cont: traditional services have been re-timed and have to take in extra stops to fit the new timetable around the high speed link. For John and Peter, that looks like a direct disadvantage of HS1.
NICHOLSON: Prior to the introduction of Javelin services, my journey was just under an hour and 20 minutes, which was bearable, which was one of the causes why we moved from south east London to Herne Bay, because it was one train into Cannon Street.
NORTHAM: And the addition of these seventeen minutes means what?
NICHOLSON: It means less time at home.
NORTHAM: Peter, you put that down directly to HS1, do you?
LEE: Oh yes, because as a result of HS1 coming in, frequencies were cut on the peak hour service to Victoria, for example.
NORTHAM: By what?
LEE: Victoria service was cut by a third from three an hour to two an hour. There are really now two classes of rail passengers in Kent. There are those that live close to where HS1 works very well, where it’s reduced journey times quite considerably, and there’s the rest of Kent where it’s actually had the effect of making journey times longer.
NORTHAM: Peter and John’s longstanding MP is the Conservative, Sir Roger Gale. His complaint is that HS1 is at best an uncompleted line. He expected an extension to run to the eastern tip of the county. But it never got built, leaving his constituents worse off than they were.
GALE: Commuters travelling to London every day find themselves first of all paying a very high price for their season tickets – in excess of £6,000 a year. Second, find themselves suffering from a slower traditional service – the Classic service as it’s called – into central London, because a path has to be cleared for the high speed trains. - 21 -
GALE cont: If I say to you the journey from Margate to central London is now slower than it was in 1927, it gives you some idea.
NORTHAM: What has it meant for the economic life of that part of east Kent?
GALE: Well, we had hoped to benefit from a high speed rail service. If the line was pushed through from Ashford to Thanet and if we could get that journey time down, as we ought to be able to, to under an hour, then the economic benefits for the whole of east Kent would be very considerable indeed. But it’s a half-finished job.
NORTHAM: And the consequence is what?
GALE: We’re getting all the downside – higher costs, slower trains – and not really any of the benefits.
NORTHAM: HS1 management weren’t available for interview. Southeastern Railway has told File on 4 that the changes in timetable were specified by the Department for Transport and the extra stops can’t be removed without Government approval. The company also points out that the 1927 fast service from Margate was a seaside special rather than a commuter service. HS1 began running Javelin trains four years ago, so we hoped to learn what economic impact it has actually had. Has it lived up to expectations? The Principal Rail Planner at Kent County Council, Stephen Gasche, maintains that it has benefited business in the county.
GASCHE: We believe it has.
NORTHAM: You believe it has?
GASCHE: We believe it has.
NORTHAM: Have you got evidence for that? - 22 -
GASCHE: We haven’t got evidence ourselves, but there is a piece of work that needs to be done to examine the effects of high speed domestic services since 2009 when they were introduced.
NORTHAM: And that hasn’t been done yet?
GASCHE: It’s a piece of work that still needs to be done and, for example, the Discovery Park enterprise zone in east Kent, on the former Pfizer site at Sandwich is a very important business development and we are working very closely to ensure that’s linked with faster high speed journey times to improve access for people to that new employment zone.
NORTHAM: So in the absence of empirical evidence, when you tell me it’s benefited, you believe it’s benefited businesses in Kent, that’s an act of faith, is it?
GASCHE: Well, it’s more than an act of faith. We have certainly evidence anecdotally from business people who’ve, for example, have made a decision to locate in the Discovery Park enterprise zone in east Kent precisely because we have high speed rail services supported by Kent County Council, so we are confident that it is already improving business and that it will continue to do so.
NORTHAM: Has anybody got it in mind to do this empirical research?
GASCHE: I’m not aware of anybody at the moment.
NORTHAM: The question of who could benefit and who would lose from the far bigger project involved in HS2 has turned in recent weeks into a central political issue. The plan devised by a Labour Transport Secretary and then eagerly adopted by the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in coalition is becoming bitterly divisive. At the head of it, Alison Munro knows that she now has a serious fight on her hands.
MUNRO: I recognise this is a very controversial project, there’s bound to be a very lively debate around, you know, whether we should be proceeding with High Speed 2 and whether we should be spending our money in that way. I think that’s, you know, perfectly lively, perfectly healthy. - 23 -
NORTHAM: Given how powerful those political arguments are on either side and what’s at stake, do you expect HS2 actually to be built?
MUNRO: I do expect it to be built, because actually I think there is such a need for it. We could, as a country, put off decisions but sooner or later we’re going to realise that actually the only way to address the capacity problem is to provide a new high speed railway line.
NORTHAM: You also need to keep your friends and at the moment you seem to be losing some of them.
MUNRO: We are confident that we can demonstrate that we will be able to deliver the project without a blank cheque, that’s not what we’re looking for at all. I don’t want to have a blank cheque, that’s not a good discipline for a project. So obviously we need to do that convincing, yes.
NORTHAM: The next stage in Alison Munro’s attempt to convince will be the launch of a new economic case for HS2 to be published later this month. After that the proposal will return to Parliament, where it is expected to be debated for much of the next year. There is speculation that Labour’s support may weaken further, making HS2 a prime divisive issue at the 2015 election. If you are a fan of white-knuckle rides, fasten your seat- belt.
SIGNATURE TUNE