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Read transport secretary Justine Greening’s HS2 announcement

Published on Tuesday 10 January 2012 11:22

The Transport Secretary Justine Greening has today released this statement on high speed rail, which she will base her speech to the House of Commons on.

The consultation High Speed Rail: Investing in Britain’s Future was one of the largest national consultations ever undertaken by the Department for Transport. 54,909 responses were received, from individuals, businesses and organisations across the country. It is clear from the consultation that a national high speed rail network - High Speed 2 - generates strong feelings, both in favour and against the scheme.

Since becoming Secretary of State for Transport I have taken time to consider all aspects of the consultation proposals and the evidence arising from both consultation responses and further work undertaken or commissioned by my Department and HS2 Ltd. This statement summarises my decisions.

I have decided Britain should embark upon the most significant transport infrastructure project since the building of the motorways by supporting the development and delivery of a new national high speed rail network. By following in the footsteps of the 19th century railway pioneers, the Government is signalling its commitment to providing 21st century infrastructure and connections – laying the groundwork for long-term, sustainable economic growth.

High Speed 2 (HS2) is a scheme to deliver hugely enhanced rail capacity and connectivity between Britain’s major conurbations. It is the largest transport infrastructure investment in the UK for a generation, and, with the exception of High Speed 1 (HS1), is the first major new railway line since the Victorian era.

The HS2 Y network will provide direct, high capacity, high speed links between London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, with intermediate stations in the East Midlands and South Yorkshire. There will also be direct links to Heathrow Airport and to the Continent via the HS1 line. It will form a foundation for a potentially wider high speed network in years to come.

HS2 will be built in two phases to ensure that the benefits of high speed rail are realised at the earliest possible opportunity. The line from London to the West Midlands and the connection to HS1 are expected to open in 2026, followed, in 2032-33, by the onward legs to Manchester and Leeds and the connection to Heathrow. The capital cost at 2011 prices of building the complete Y network is £32.7 billion. At present values, it will generate benefits of up to £47 billion and fare revenues of up to £34 billion over a 60-year period.

The benefits of HS2 will extend beyond the network itself; links to current lines will enable direct trains to run to cities such as Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh and, with long-distance services transferring to the new network, space will be freed up for new commuter, regional and freight services on other lines, opening up new opportunities for Britain’s existing railways. Links to key urban transport networks, such as Crossrail, will help to spread the benefits further still.

HS2 is entirely consistent with the Government’s objectives for carbon emissions. Electrified rail is a comparatively low-carbon mode of transport, especially with the continued decarbonisation of the grid. Speed increases power consumption, but also makes HS2 more attractive to those currently flying or driving. The faster journeys on HS2 - Edinburgh and Glasgow will be just 3.5 hours from London - could transfer around 4.5 million journeys per year who might otherwise have travelled by air and 9 million from the roads. HS2 will also create more rail capacity on existing conventional speed lines for freight – removing lorries from our busy trunk roads. HS2 is therefore an important part of transport’s low-carbon future.

In securing these benefits for our country, I am committed to developing a network with the lowest feasible impacts on local communities and the natural environment. I have been mindful that we must safeguard the natural environment as far as possible, both for the benefit of those enjoying our beautiful countryside today and for future generations.

People living along the line of route highlighted particular concerns and provided constructive and thoughtful comments about the London to West Midlands route proposed at consultation. Following careful study by my engineers I can announce a package of alterations to further reduce the route’s impacts. The changes mean that more than half the route will now be mitigated by tunnel or cutting and there will also be a reduction in the impacts on people and communities, ancient woodlands and important heritage sites.

The changes include:

•A longer, continuous tunnel from Little Missenden to the M25 through the Chilterns;

•A new 2.75 mile (4.4 km) bored tunnel along the Northolt Corridor to entirely avoid major works to the Chilterns Line and impacts on local communities in the Ruislip area;

•A longer green tunnel past Chipping Warden and Aston Le Walls, and to curve the route to avoid a cluster of important heritage sites around Edgcote; and,

•A longer green tunnel to significantly reduce impacts around Wendover, and an extension to the green tunnel at South Heath.

The revised route offers considerable improvements to communities, with the number of dwellings at risk of land take almost halving and the number experiencing increased noise levels reducing by a third. Despite these improvements to limit the negative impacts of the line, HS2 will inevitably affect some homeowners, communities and businesses. To help those affected, we will bring in a package of measures, which are over and above what affected homeowners are already entitled to under law. These include:

•A streamlined purchase scheme to simplify the statutory blight process for property owners;

•A sale and rent back scheme to give homeowners within the safeguarded area more flexibility;

•A streamlined small claims scheme for construction damage which will allow individuals and businesses who are entitled to compensation under existing law to claim it more quickly and simply;

•A package of measures to reinforce confidence in properties above tunnels. Homeowners will be offered before and after surveys, a thorough assessment of the impact of similar tunnels, an explanation of the measures that will be taken to prevent perceptible vibration impacts, financial compensation for the compulsory purchase of subsoil, and a legally binding promise that HS2 will be permanently responsible for resolving any related settlement or subsidence issues; and,

•A refreshed hardship-based property purchase scheme.

Finally, we will work constructively with local authorities along the line of route to minimise the negative consequences of HS2 and maximise the benefits.

In November I announced the Triennial Review of HS2 Ltd, and in making my decision I have accepted the finding that HS2 Ltd is the appropriate body to continue undertaking this work.

Today I have presented to Parliament a full account of my decisions titled High Speed Rail: Investing in Britain’s Future – Decisions and Next Steps. My Department has published a series of supporting documents which set out in further detail the basis on which I have reached my decisions.

All material is available at www.dft.gov.uk/highspeedrail

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RedKite

Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 11:33 AM

WELL ADDED JR : FOR THE BENEFIT OF THOSE WHO CAN'T WORK THE LINKS.................High-speed rail: A £250m lesson for Britain's rail enthusiasts As the Government prepares to give the go-ahead to its hugely controversial London-Birmingham high speed rail project, its closest equivalent in Europe has had to be saved from bankruptcy with a £250 million government bailout. Many routes including most commuter lines are over capacity, campaigners say scarce money should be spent on relieving problems that already exist. The new “Fyra” high-speed service in the Netherlands — opened just two years ago — is close to financial collapse with passengers shunning its premium fares and trains running up to 85 per cent empty. The line, between Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Breda, cost taxpayers more than £7 billion to build but is losing £320,000 a day amid disastrous levels of patronage. A Dutch passenger pressure group, Voor Beter OV (For Better Public Transport), is now taking the national rail operator to the Netherlands’ competition tribunal after it slowed down services on the regular network in an apparent attempt to drive passengers on to the high-speed line. “The high-speed line has been a very, very bad result for taxpayers and passengers,” said Rikus Spithorst, VBOV’s spokesman. “The taxpayer paid for it and the idea was that the money would come back from the train company. But that isn’t going to happen.” The Dutch infrastructure minister, Melanie Shultz van Haegen, announced the bailout late last year after the line’s operator, High Speed Alliance, ran up a debt of Euro 2.4 billion (£2 billion). “Given the situation, action on my part is necessary,” she said. The new 103-mile route, also running to the Belgian city of Antwerp, is almost exactly the same length as Britain’s proposed “HS2” line between London and Birmingham. Like Britain, the Netherlands has a dense network of conventional rail services and relatively short distances between major cities. The high-speed line’s 25-minute saving between Amsterdam and Rotterdam is similar to the 35-minute saving promised by HS2. But it has not proved enough to tempt passengers away from the existing service, which is about 20 per cent cheaper. In several respects, however, the Dutch line has better prospects than the British one. Its construction costs were relatively low because it crosses largely flat countryside. It is also used by the successful Thalys international service from Amsterdam to Brussels and Paris, helping to offset some of the losses on the domestic trains. The British line, by contrast, cuts under west London and through the Chilterns, needing many expensive tunnels, viaducts and cuttings, and is budgeted to cost more than twice its Dutch equivalent. Nor is there any prospect of significant international traffic along it. With the Transport Secretary, Justine Greening, set to announce the formal go-ahead for the £17 billion HS2 project this week, key claims by HS2 campaigners can today be exposed as grossly misleading. A claim on the website of the Campaign for High-Speed Rail, the main lobbyists for the project, that HS2 will “create a million jobs” is described as “outlandish,” “patent nonsense” and a “lie” by transport experts. The claim. or variants on it, was repeated last Friday in a series of letters by economists, business leaders and trade unions which received widespread media coverage. The million-job claim is based on a report last year by the Volterra economic consultancy for the “Core Cities” group of the largest English provincial cities. However, the report, in fact, admits that there is “relatively little information available that specifically quantifies the economic benefits that can be generated through high speed networks.” Close examination of the report shows that almost 250,000 of the million jobs supposedly “created” by HS2 will be in and around Bristol and Newcastle, cities more than a hundred miles from the proposed high-speed line. At a seminar last January, attended by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, the Core Cities group described the million-job figure as an “upper best case scenario” dependent on “global economic trends,” “improved export performance,” a “rebound in consumer spending,” “more modest public expenditure cuts” and “improved business investment.” No mention was made of HS2 in the published summary of the event. The Volterra report says that HS2 would merely “underpin,” not create, any new jobs, since “investment in transport infrastructure” would be needed to move all the extra commuters. However, HS2 will be a long-distance, not a commuter service. The report claims commuters would still benefit because HS2 would release space on existing lines. The report claims that there is a “very high correlation” between rising numbers of rail passengers travelling to a city and employment growth in that city. However, Birmingham, which has seen a 60 per cent rise in rail passengers over the last ten years, has seen only a 0.2% growth in employment. Experience from the only British town to have been given a fully high-speed service to date suggests that claims about the economic benefits of high-speed rail are false. Ashford, Kent, has had a half-hourly high-speed service to London, using the new tracks built for the Eurostar, for more than two years. The journey time has fallen by almost half, from more than an hour to 37 minutes. The local council has claimed that the new service has proved an “economic boon” for Ashford. In fact, the town’s unemployment rate since the line opened has fallen more slowly than the South-East England and British averages, and more slowly than in many other parts of Kent which are not on the high-speed line. Data from France and other countries with developed high-speed networks suggests that they suck economic activity into the capital more than they push it out into regional centres. Even many of HS2’s strongest supporters say that the jobs created will be only a tiny fraction of the million claimed. Centro, the transport authority for the West Midlands, the region supposedly benefiting the most from the project, says that HS2 will create just 10,000 jobs in its area. A further 12,000 jobs could be created if it is accompanied by a wider package of regional transport improvements, Centro says. Greengauge 21, another HS2 lobbying group, estimates that the scheme will create no more than 42,000 jobs nationally. Many more neutral experts doubt even these figures. “The evidence that HS2 will have a positive impact on rebalancing the national economy, to use the current jargon, is not really there,” said Professor John Tomaney, of Newcastle University. Another expert, Chris Nash, professor of transport studies at Leeds University, described the evidence for wider economic impacts as “uncertain.” The transport expert Christian Wolmar described the million-jobs claim as “outlandish,” “patent nonsense” and “basically a lie.” Another element of last week’s publicity blitz for HS2 was the claim that Britain had “slumped behind Morocco” in high-speed rail mileage, with 70 miles of operational line against Morocco’s 422. The claim made front-page news. In fact, however, Morocco has no high-speed lines at all. It is building one, but of far less than 422 miles in length. In approving the scheme, Ms Greening will claim that HS2 is necessary to solve potential future capacity shortages on the London-Birmingham route. However, many other routes — including most commuter lines — are over capacity now and campaigners say scarce money should be spent on relieving problems that already exist. HS2 will, in any case, create its own capacity problems north of Birmingham, where its trains will have to use the existing lines. Government sources also cite a new Network Rail review which will reportedly dismiss alternatives to HS2, such as upgrading the existing line. The report does not yet appear to have been published, but research for the Transport Select Committee found that previous comparisons between a line upgrade and HS2 had been skewed to favour the new scheme. A spokesman for the Campaign for High-Speed Rail admitted that the Morocco claim was “loosely-worded.” However, he defended the million-jobs claim, saying: “We stand by the Volterra report. It was accepted by a large number of people as being a fair reflection of the contribution to the economy that HS2 could make.”

Sponsored by Read transport secretary Justine Greening’s HS2 announcement

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RedKite

JR

BarryBob

rb

RedKite

JR

RGM

ColinJones

WhatsThePoint

Ben Caspersz

1000km

downbutnotout

RGM

Ben Caspersz

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Sponsored by
Read transport secretary Justine Greening’s HS2 announcement