UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be
published as HC-499-v
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
TRANSPORT COMMITTEE
FUTURE OF AVIATION
Wednesday 8 july 2009
MR
TONY DEIGHAN, DR ALAN JAMES, MR RICHARD ECCLES
and
SIR DAVID ROWLANDS
Evidence heard in Public Questions 401 -
478
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Transcribed
by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament:
W B Gurney
& Sons LLP, Hope House, 45 Great Peter Street, London, SW1P 3LT
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Transport Committee
on Wednesday 8 July 2009
Members present
Mrs Louise Ellman, in the Chair
Mr David Clelland
Mr Philip Hollobone
Mr John Leech
Mr Eric Martlew
Ms Angela C Smith
Sir Peter Soulsby
Graham Stringer
Mr David Wilshire
Sammy Wilson
________________
Witnesses: Mr Tony Deighan, Director of Strategic
Projects, Eurostar, Dr Alan James,
Chief Executive, UL Ultraspeed, Mr
Richard Eccles, Head of Route Planning, Network Rail and Sir David Rowlands, Chairman, High
Speed Two, gave evidence.
Chairman: Good afternoon, welcome to our meeting. Do Members have any interests to declare?
Mr Martlew: Member of the GMB and Unite Unions.
Graham Stringer: Member of Unite.
Mr Clelland: Member of Unite.
Chairman: Louise Ellman, member of Unite.
Sir Peter Soulsby: Member of Unite.
Q401 Chairman: Could I ask the witnesses to identify
themselves, please, for our record?
Mr Deighan: Good afternoon. I am Tony Deighan, I am Director of Strategic Projects for
Eurostar.
Dr James: I am Alan James, I am Chief Executive of UK
Ultraspeed.
Sir David Rowlands: I am Sir David Rowlands, Chairman of High
Speed 2.
Mr Eccles: I am Richard
Eccles, I am Head of Route Planning for Network Rail.
Q402 Chairman: Thank you very much. Would high speed rail reduce the demand for
short-haul flights or would it add to the numbers of people travelling?
Sir David Rowlands: There is clearly potential for a high speed
railway network - and I think it would have to be a network from London up to
Scotland - to take people off domestic flights down to Heathrow. The extent to which it transfers may depend
on what the connection with Heathrow is, and there is clearly some potential to
take passengers off short-haul flights into continental Europe. Again, I think that potential is related
fairly directly to the distance you would travel on a high speed network down
through London on to HS1 and into the continent. There will be some journeys which are clearly still easier to
make by short-haul flight because of the time it would take by comparison with
a longer journey, even by high speed rail.
So I suspect that some flights, for example Newcastle across to the
continent, would still have passengers who would choose to go that way rather
than by high speed railway network.
Q403 Chairman: Do you think that high speed rail would be an
alternative to connections for passengers going to hub airports?
Sir David Rowlands: It is certainly an alternative for domestic
flights down to Heathrow as a hub airport and it offers some potential to
displace Paris or Amsterdam as a hub airport for people travelling either from
the southeast or the Midlands - less so as you get further north, I think.
Q404 Chairman: Do you have any idea by how much?
Sir David Rowlands: You are asking, in a sense, for an answer to
the question we ourselves are still addressing because this will keep us
occupied through to the end of the year when we give a report to Government. On the basis of earlier work done for the
Strategic Rail Authority their modelling by their consultants, Atkins,
suggested that passengers from Scottish airports down to Heathrow, for example,
would be reduced by 25% and they did not include a Heathrow connection in their
modelling, whereas we are looking at one.
So there is clearly potential.
If you look at the actual numbers last year, about 43% of people flying
down from Edinburgh were interlining; the rest were just doing a point-to-point
journey. About 49% of people flying
down from Glasgow were interlining and the rest were point-to-point. You would expect certainly all the
point-to-point traffic to transfer on to a high speed network, given that the
journey time from Glasgow or Edinburgh down to London would only be about two
and a half hours. You would expect some
- probably not all - of the interlining traffic to shift as well, but that will
depend partly on the pricing policy and partly the ease which is offered to
people who are making that interlining connection. If you have to check in to a railway train in Glasgow or
Edinburgh or Manchester and carry your own bags through to terminal wherever in
Heathrow, that is not a particularly attractive option if you can just check
them in at the domestic airport. So
some of this is to do not simply with the building of a high speed railway
network, it is to do with the pricing policy and with the service that is
offered to people who might otherwise choose to fly.
Q405 Chairman: Will we see it strengthening Heathrow as an
airport?
Sir David Rowlands: I see a high speed rail network as
potentially complementary to Heathrow - I do not see it detracting from it
overall - and it has the potential to improve Heathrow in terms of its
accessibility to help ease the strain in terms of slot usage there. Although I think you need to be clear that
the numbers are still relatively modest, the number of people actually flying
and, therefore, using slots for domestic services into Heathrow are relatively
small. You are talking of a dozen
flights a day in each direction or thereabouts for the Scottish airports and
Manchester and rather less for places like Newcastle.
Q406 Chairman: Would any of our other witnesses like to
comment on this? Dr James.
Dr James: We did some early numbers on this and the
magic number is three hours - I think that is generally accepted - which is if
you are on a high speed ground transport vehicle for three hours or less you
are usually competitive with a point-to-point air journey. Our maglev plan has been built to largely
replace domestic aviation. There are a
couple of other points I would like to bring out but I am generally in
agreement with what Sir David has said.
If you have a 27 minute journey time from Heathrow to Birmingham
International Airport there is a potential to use some of the capacity at
Birmingham to do some of the job at runway 3.
With maglev also - and this is a distinction between maglev and high
speed rail - with an east-west link across the Pennines everywhere between
London and Newcastle is within a 60-minute journey time of Manchester
Airport. That makes Manchester a viable
hub for a larger catchment than is currently in London and the southeast and
enables that two-runway airport, which already exists, to take away some of the
strain of London and the southeast.
Just to put some numbers on the table, if two of us were to leave here
today and progress by the fastest available transport to the north, if one of
us takes the train and another were to take a maglev, using the Jubilee Line to
access maglev at Stratford and using Heathrow Express to access a plane at
Heathrow, by the time your plane with its 180-odd seats on board has taken off
from Heathrow, maglev, which has anywhere between 500 and 1200 seats, has
called at the M25, Birmingham Airport, Central Birmingham, Manchester Airport,
Leeds and is just approaching Teesside.
By the time you have flown to Manchester and then exited through the
terminal the maglev has stopped at Tyneside, Newcastle Airport, Edinburgh
Airport and Glasgow. So what maglev
does is put on the ground a vehicle with at least twice the passenger capacity
of the world's largest aircraft, BA 380, and gets you to Edinburgh in two hours
40 minutes, stopping at all the major centres of population of the traditional
west and east coast routes in less time than it would take you to do a single
point-to-point journey.
Q407 Chairman: Dr James, we will come on later with some
more detailed questions on that level but what I am seeking is assessments of
the impact of high speed rail on the airport and on passengers travelling.
Dr James: It takes 80% of Manchester's air traffic and
roughly 66% of Newcastle's.
Mr Deighan: If I may add the Eurostar dimension. I obviously cannot speak for air travel but
I can say that if you have a two-hour journey time you roughly pick up 70% of
the market share, and typically if you are around three hours you pick up about
50%. The emerging news from SNCF, from
the President, Guillaume Pepy, is that passengers will actually stick a journey
of about six hours and then you pick up about half the alleged traffic that may
be on offer. I hope that gives you some
idea of our experience.
Sir David Rowlands: If I may, is it worth looking at some real
numbers? Look at the impact of the West
Coast Main Line upgrade, which is not a high speed railway in the sense that
HS2 is looking at one. Last year the
split between rail and aviation, 70% of people from Manchester went down to
London by rail, 30% by air. Go back
five years and it was a 50-50 split, so bringing the West Coast Main Line
upgrade through to the speed it now is has taken the rail share from 50% to 70%
of that air/rail market. I think that
demonstrates the potential, but you do need to keep in mind the numbers who are
actually flying and they are relatively small; the daily number of flights in
passengers from Manchester is about 1,200 passengers a day flying down from
Manchester to Heathrow. These are still
relatively small numbers of people, it is about one and a quarter train loads
on a high speed railway train or about one maglev train in terms of numbers.
Q408 Chairman: Mr Eccles, do you want to add something?
Mr Eccles: Yes, please. We have just about completed a piece of work
that we have called the New Lines Programme that we have been working on for
about nine months. Effectively we have
been developing a strategic business case for a high speed line that serves the
markets that the present West Coast Main Line serves, and we have been looking
at a new high speed line to see if it is the value for money way of creating
the capacity of the system that we believe is going to be required into the
future. We have looked at the business
case as far as Edinburgh and Glasgow and we started off with the core route to
Manchester and Birmingham. Whilst we
are validating figures, at the moment the draft findings - I have them in my
memory - say that in 2030 we will abstract 3.6 million passenger air journeys
from Scotland a year. I would agree
with Sir David's figure that demonstrates what has happened on the west coast,
and I would have said that 74% is now by rail but we are near enough. The interesting thing is why the other 26%
do not transfer, and I guess the answer is that the benefit they get from air
travel is not satisfied simply by journey time, or is not satisfied simply by
the journey time on the core route and perhaps generalised journey time is
still an issue. Will we ever abstract
those people who fly from Scotland to Heathrow so that they can avail
themselves of the massive opportunity at Heathrow to transfer to anywhere else
in the world, or who simply are going for a meeting in Reading? There are those issues to consider as
well. So that figure I quoted is less
than 20% of what we forecast the total Anglo-Scottish domestic air market to be
in 2030. We have tried to be
conservative in our strategic business case so that we can demonstrate
robustness; so that when there is challenge to the assumptions we have made we
can always demonstrate that we have erred on the side of caution, but at the
moment it is a strategic business case.
If that is helpful, that is where we are.
Chairman: It is.
Q409 Mr Clelland: I would like to pursue the maglev concept
that Dr James was referring to earlier.
I have been interested in this ever since I was in an engineering
apprenticeship in the early 1960s and learned about the linear model around
which maglev technology is built, the Government argues that maglev is
considerably more expensive than high speed rail and that the system is
unproven. I do not know if Dr James
would like to comment on that?
Dr James: Lest I forget, quite a number of things have
been said about maglev in the last couple of years and there really is no
alternative than to experience the thing for yourselves. I would very much like to invite the
Committee to come and ride the test track in Germany, where we can levitate you
at 250 miles per hour, and allay some of the myths. Going back to the question of costs, in the documentation
supporting the 2007 Rail White Paper a number was quoted. It took one of our own numbers, which was an
estimate of total capital cost, including land, quoted our own cost but
misquoted it as excluding land, which led in the fullness of time to the
doubling of our estimate which, because we are talking about a big project, is £31
billion. Adding £31 billion to the
price tag of anything has a material effect on the inclination of any playing
field. We have, of course, written to
ministers to point this out.
Q410 Mr Clelland: So the actual cost is £15 million?
Dr James: The DfT upped our number of around 30 to
around £60 million.
Q411 Chairman: Have the DfT accepted that it was an error or
are you disputing their figures?
Dr James: That figure has not been withdrawn and we
would seek the Committee's assistance in getting to the bottom of that and
getting that factual matter corrected.
On that basis we have done plenty of very detailed work since, some of
which with public sector partners, including between Liverpool, Manchester and
Leeds, some of the most difficult bits of the system, including the Pennine
transmission. The average cost per
kilometre for maglev comes out at £30 million per route kilometre. That compares to £56.42 million for
Britain's only high speed railway, which was the Channel Tunnel Railway and
High Speed 1. Clearly High Speed 1 had
some very difficult work to do getting into London, but therein lies the
point. If you want to build a TGV line
that goes fast into cities you have essentially to tunnel it, which is what
High Speed 1 does. Maglev is
fundamentally different; it is basically an elevated structure. We are 100% confident on the basis of
independently validated work done to date that maglev can produce obviously
faster journey times over any of the routes in question than high speed rail,
but can produce those faster journey times with lower capital costs, lower
whole life operational costs, less land take and per passenger kilometre lower
carbon emissions. There is a lower
noise issue as well.
Q412 Chairman: But maglev cannot travel on conventional
lines, can it?
Dr James: No, absolutely not, it requires new
infrastructure, and I would like to address that issue. A number of people have said that one of the
advantages of conventional high speed rail, Shinkansen or TGV, if you like, is
that you can build it incrementally and you can run off the new high speed line
on to existing classic infrastructure.
That is indeed the way that the TGV network has been built up in
France. It just does not work in the
UK; it is a complete red herring.
Professor Rod Smith wrote a paper in 2006 for DfT in which he said that
incremental build of high speed rail lines in the UK does not work.
Chairman: Dr James, I want to ask you about maglev as
your particular area of expertise rather than going into some of the other
areas because we have a lot of questions to ask you.
Q413 Mr Clelland: In that case can I ask Network Rail, have you
produced any estimates of the costs involved in building a maglev network?
Mr Eccles: We have not looked
at the costs of building a maglev network, no.
Q414 Mr Clelland: Why?
Mr Eccles: On the basis that
we were looking at a strategic business case and we did an evaluation of
various forms of high speed rail around the world and had the cooperation of
the UIC and other places and looked at the Transport Study, we rather found
ourselves at the position you expressed to begin with, that it looked to be
very expensive and unproven.
Q415 Mr Clelland: It looks to be, but you have not actually
done any work on it.
Mr Eccles: As I say, we were
looking at what we thought was a value for money way of providing additional
capacity on the existing network. So we
did not just look at high speed rail, we also looked at the more traditional
ways and clearly we had to take a judgment on what was likely to produce the best
business case and then follow it up. So
I would not contest the unit costs, we have not looked at them. We have looked in detail at what we believe
would be the unit costs of building a conventional - if I can call it that -
high speed railway in this country and they are not too different from the
figures that have been quoted for maglev, and we include 66% optimism bias at
this stage. As we have said, the High
Speed 1 is two parts. It does look to
be the most expensive high speed railway in the world and I fear that High
Speed 2 might turn out, with 66% optimism bias, to be the second most expensive
high speed railway in the world.
Q416 Mr Clelland: Is it the case that Network Rail is taking a
rather blinkered view then, that really they are sticking to what they know,
that hundreds of tons of metal thundering along on steel rails is really what
you know and that is what you will stick to?
Mr Eccles: I guess you could
say that, but I would not express it in those terms! We were sticking to what would serve our purpose in looking at
this whole issue and we are responsible for the operation, maintenance, renewal
and enhancement of the existing rail network and need to make sure that we do
that at the optimum whole life cost. So
with the assets lasting - signalling systems 40 years, tunnels however long,
100, 150 years - we need to be looking to see what the future might hold so
that we can make the most efficient decisions in the meantime. Looking at what we could see to be the
deliverable, tested way of supplying additional capacity - not just capacity on
the high speed line but what you do with the capacity that is liberated on the
classic network by moving - as we were talking about the west coast - the
Birmingham, Manchester, Scotland services on to the high speed line, that that
answers the question that we want to ask.
Q417 Chairman: Mr Eccles, Network Rail has been criticised
for its costs on the renewals, has it not?
Mr Eccles: Indeed it has.
Q418 Chairman: It has been alleged that Network Rail's costs
are significantly higher than other European comparators. Are you getting those costs down?
Mr Eccles: In the last Access
Charges Review the Office of Rail Regulation did make that accusation and we
contested it through evidence of our own.
We do need to get our costs down.
We have reduced costs of running the railway by £1 billion a year in the
last five years but we need to do more of that and we acknowledge that; and the
Access Charges Review and the settlement that we have for the next control period
challenges us to do that.
Q419 Mr Clelland: Just to finish this off. The Chairman did refer to the inoperability
of maglev with the traditional line and I wondered how Dr James would answer
that. How is it going to integrate with
traditional rail and other transport mediums and what about maglev in terms of
its visual intrusion as it passes across the country?
Dr James: Clearly we are a physically separate
infrastructure to rails. We are not a
railway, we do not have rails, maglev levitates a centimetre above its guideway
and it is that lack of friction that enables us to do what a TGV cannot, which
is go at 300 miles per hour for roughly the same carbon cost as the TGV
straining at its limits at 200 miles per hour.
We cannot run off on to existing rail networks. That cannot be done by TGVs into many cities
in the UK anyway due to the lack of capacity on the existing rail network. However, we have designed the network to integrate
with the key points in the UK's transport system, that is Heathrow, Birmingham,
Manchester, Newcastle and the Scottish airports, as well as serving the
cities. So we are performing a
city-to-city function and a feeder distributor function that will abstract
significantly from domestic aviation.
Maglev's key advantage is journey times, we simply go faster than
traditional high speed trains. That
enables us to offer a faster journey to the near continent for anybody living
in Manchester or boarding a high speed system in Manchester than a simple
extension of the existing high speed rail line to that part of the world. So people would get to Stratford quicker
than even allowing for the time penalty of a change and would get them to parts
of the continent quicker. To pick up
then the visual intrusion point, two points need to be balanced here. Because maglev is by preference an elevated
system. You can build it in a tunnel if
you wish, you can also build it at grade, but building it elevated has several
advantages, namely you can keep it straight and level while the landscape does
the wobbly stuff underneath. There is a
precedent in the UK for elevated automated mass transit and that is the DLR;
DLR does it with a couple of hundred people on at 30 miles per hour. We get into the heart of cities using
elevated guideway with up to 1000 people on board at 125 miles per hour, making
less noise than the urban background, so there is very much less intrusion
there. There is also less intrusion in
terms of land take. Typically, a linear
metre of a TGV line will take somewhere around about eight or 12 square metres
of land; we take two square metres of land where built elevated, and the land
under the guideway remains useable for its original purpose.
Chairman: Can you give shorter answers, please, because
we have many questions.
Q420 Mr Wilshire: I have three things, but let me take maglev
as my first point. Let me say I accept
its advantages. It is wonderful, it
will do everything you say, but when will I be able to buy a ticket for it?
Dr James: You can do so now.
Q421 Mr Wilshire: In China, because I have been on the one in
China. I mean here; when will I be able
to buy a ticket at Heathrow and go to Birmingham on it?
Dr James: I think part of the challenge is to you as
legislators. What I can tell you is
that from signature of contract to VIP run in China, i.e. the pure engineering
of building it, was 22 months.
Q422 Mr Wilshire: That is fine, but when are we going to sign
the contracts in this country?
Dr James: Clearly the Hybrid Bill or whatever new
planning framework process needs to proceed would need to proceed in parallel
with engineering studies. If you
allowed, say, three years for parliamentary process - and we would be guided by
yourselves on that obviously - from the point of Royal Assent and financial
close, there is no technical or financial reason you could not have it running
within 36 months, and that would be the London to Birmingham bit.
Q423 Mr Wilshire: You are really saying that within five years
we could have this working, is that what you believe? Do you believe that will happen?
Dr James: I certainly believe that, yes.
Q424 Mr Wilshire: You believe it could be done. Do you believe it will happen like that?
Dr James: We believe we can deliver our side of it,
which is the engineering.
Q425 Mr Wilshire: That was not actually what I asked, but never
mind let us move on. Let me accept
entirely that Heathrow is desperate for decent railways, it needs them
urgently. What I have heard this
afternoon is adding to my confusion.
One minute I am hearing that there are not actually all that many people
who will be displaced on to the railways when you come to think about it; the
next minute I am hearing what a wonderful improvement it would make. Which is the correct way to look at that, that
it does not make much difference because there are not many people or it will
make a huge difference and, if so, how many people?
Sir David Rowlands: The numbers flying domestically from other UK
airports into Heathrow are relatively small.
Some of those flights will continue because there is water in the way
from the two Belfast airports and from Jersey, and I think you heard from
earlier witnesses basically six mainland airports from which there are flights
into Heathrow. So the number of
airports is quite small and the numbers making those journeys are quite
small. If you look at the total number
of people flying between Edinburgh and Heathrow last year it was 1.3 million,
it was 1.1 million from Glasgow down to Heathrow - that is in both directions -
Manchester was 910,000, and the numbers are smaller still when you get to
places like Newcastle. Those translate into, as I have said, about 12 or 13
services a day each-way between Heathrow and the Scottish airports and
Manchester about five a day up to Newcastle, in each direction. A high speed railway or, indeed, a maglev,
if that is what the government so decided to build, would have more than enough
capacity to carry all of those passengers should they wish to travel by surface
mode, but the numbers are relatively small in terms of the overall capacity you
are putting in place, either with the new high speed network or, indeed, with a
maglev alternative. Those numbers out
of Edinburgh translate into less than two full trainloads a day; from Glasgow
about one and a half full trainloads a day; about one and a quarter from
Manchester; and less than a train a day from Newcastle. On a high speed railway, depending on design
characteristics and so on, you can run somewhere between 15 and 18 an hour, every
three or four minutes. There is no problem
with capacity, the issues will be journey time, but either of these systems
will vastly improve on the existing surface transport times and would match, I
think, allowing for transfer times by air.
The issue is how easy the transfer is.
You will remember I said earlier on that there were issues around what
do you do with your bags, for example, which are non-trivial issues for people
who are interlining.
Q426 Mr Wilshire: If I understand that answer correctly, if you
are going to make the journey by train you go, "Whoopee! What a great
improvement," but it is not many people and the actual impact from the number
of passengers going through Heathrow is pretty minimal. It is highly desirable, therefore, but it
does not actually help much of Heathrow's problems, does it?
Sir David Rowlands: That is a fundamental characteristic of the
numbers. I do not think you can change
the numbers. In round figures there are
60-odd million flying into Heathrow every day and about five million ---
Q427 Graham Stringer: Not every day!
Sir David Rowlands: Sorry, no!
Q428 Mr Wilshire: But you are encouraging me to believe are you
not, then, that although this is highly desirable, with which I agree, and
although it will help some people it will not do much to help most people at Heathrow.
Sir David Rowlands: Let me be very clear: I am not encouraging
anybody to do anything; I have been asked to do a job of work by the Department
for Transport and that is the job I am doing.
I am not proselytising for high speed rail, though we are seeing what
case there is for it.
Q429 Mr Wilshire: The World Wildlife Fund said to us that if
you were to build these railways at Heathrow you would free up 12% of
Heathrow's slots. Do you agree with
those figures?
Sir David Rowlands: I do not know because we have not done the
modelling work to see what numbers we think would actually transfer off
domestic flights on to the high speed railway offering or the numbers that
might transfer on to high speed railways from further north for a through
journey to Paris or Brussels, for example.
So you have to forgive me, we still have a lot of work to do and I
really do not want to give answers to questions I should not give.
Q430 Chairman: When do you expect to have answers to that
question?
Sir David Rowlands: We expect to deliver to the Department for
Transport a comprehensive report by the end of 2009. It will be for the Department to decide what it wishes to do with
that report and when to publish it.
Q431 Mr Wilshire: When you actually come up with figures,
whether you agree with 12% or not, will you also be coming up with a figure of
what percentage of slots currently in use need to come out of use in order to
improve the quality of the service at Heathrow?
Sir David Rowlands: No, because we are not asked to look at the
quality of the service.
Q432 Mr Wilshire: The other thing that concerns me is your
reference to Birmingham. At the moment
Birmingham has no rail links to Heathrow and it has no flights to Heathrow. Have you any idea how many people are flying
out of Birmingham to, let us say, Schipol, to transfer to intercontinental
flights?
Sir David Rowlands: Yes.
Q433 Mr Wilshire: How many?
Sir David Rowlands: If you allow me to turn the page I will try
to find the numbers for you.
Q434 Chairman: Do you want to let us have that figure?
Sir David Rowlands: I can let you have it. The numbers are measured in hundreds of
thousands in terms of two ways, so you are looking at, from memory, the order
of 300,000 or 400,000 in both directions from Birmingham to Paris and to Amsterdam.
Q435 Mr Wilshire: When you let us have those figures, could you
let us have your estimate for how many of those people who are currently flying
out of Schipol to Charles de Gaulle, to Frankfurt, will actually go by train to
Heathrow to get a better quality of service from more routes.
Sir David Rowlands: I cannot give you that answer until the end
of the year.
Q436 Mr Wilshire: But you will give us the answer?
Sir David Rowlands: Yes, and be very clear that all of this will
be in the report that we give the Department at the end of the year.
Chairman: We would like any information that you can
give us now.
Q437 Mr Wilshire: Would you therefore accept that by linking
Birmingham to Heathrow by train, whatever sort it is, you will actually
increase the number of passengers using Heathrow to fly somewhere?
Sir David Rowlands: If you link the two together with a viable
high speed rail offer you have certainly the potential for some people to
choose to go down to Heathrow to fly out rather than to go to Paris or to Schipol
to interline. There is a point here
that is not generally recognised. For
connecting passengers flying out of Birmingham or Manchester, for example, into
Paris or into Schipol, they are offered very attractive prices by the airline
into which they are interlining and you do not get those prices at
Heathrow. So it is not as simple at
simply looking at numbers and speeds, it is about price, it is about
service. This is quite a complicated
problem.
Chairman: But price is in the equation as well.
Q438 Mr Wilshire: That will be a matter for the airlines to
decide whether they believe in competition or whether they do not. The last
thing I would ask you, if I may, is one of you said that if Birmingham were
linked to London by this high speed rail we would have a new hub in Birmingham.
What routes do you imagine it would have in Birmingham and what would be the
attraction of creating another hub?
Dr James: I was more particularly interested in
Manchester where there was greater capacity.
Birmingham could be connected to Heathrow and our journey time is 27
minutes and yours would be 35 or thereabouts.
It is Manchester that we are particularly interested in. If you take any point from the M25 to
Tyneside it is roughly 45 minutes from those points by maglev to
Manchester. That would enable
Manchester to take much of the strain off Heathrow by creating a viable hub in
the north and for the north. What that
does is connect Manchester to a population that is larger than Heathrow's
catchment and thereby support more international services directly from the
north to the south. To come back to the
slot ---
Q439 Chairman: Could you just answer that question because
we are coming to all these other matters.
Dr James: We would take the view that Manchester
becomes a significantly more viable international hub with a high speed
connection to roughly 60% of England's population.
Mr Wilshire: I cannot remember which of the four of you it
was, but when you see the record of the evidence you have given this afternoon
- because I wrote down what was said - the rail link to Birmingham would enable
people from Heathrow and London to make use of Birmingham's capacity. That is what I heard said; I will apologise
if the record does not show it.
Q440 Chairman: Is the answer yes or no?
Dr James: It was me who said that and you could use
Birmingham as integrated with Heathrow's operation. I apologise if there has been any misunderstanding.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q441 Graham Stringer: Public expenditure is going to go off a cliff
edge some time in the next 18 months, I guess, I cannot believe that anybody
does not accept that. If you have £30
billion to spend, which may or may not come about, what is the cost benefit
analysis of putting that £30 billion into roads, maglev, high speed or, in the
case of the north of England, dealing with the capacity problems generally
known as the Manchester hub? Has that
work been done by any of the groups, either parts of it by different groups or
in totality?
Mr Eccles: For our part, one
of the core outputs in the business case that we have done is the business
benefit cost ratio, but all that will tell you is whether it clears a hurdle
rate that funders might want to set. It
really is not for Network Rail to decide what the priority is on funding schools,
railways, whatever.
Q442 Graham Stringer: I am talking about those four areas of
transport and the cost benefit analysis.
Mr Eccles: Again, as long we
all use the same appraisal methodology, which certainly rail and road do now,
it is for funders, government principally, and they could then compare the
BCRs, the merits, the benefits of the investment, but it does not mean to say
that they have sufficient money ---
Q443 Graham Stringer: I understand all that, I just want to know
what the difference is between the different cost benefit analyses between
those four areas. We were told last
week, for instance - I think it was last week - by a professor of transport
that the money would be much better being put into the road system in terms of
the cost benefit analysis. Because life
is going to be difficult financially and you are in a competitive situation
with these different projects I would just like to know your figures on cost
benefit analysis.
Mr Eccles: I have seen that
quoted in the RAC report, but I guess, thankfully, decisions are not made that
way. Individual projects are appraised
and decisions are made on individual projects and there is an overview of
government policy that will hopefully integrate that.
Q444 Chairman: But these may be the questions asked at a
time of difficulty. Sir David, do you
want to comment?
Sir David Rowlands: I will try not to play pass the parcel here,
and you will have to forgive me but I cannot quote you BCR numbers for a high
speed railway, whether it is the West Midlands or as a network because that is
the work that we are doing and we will not know that until the end of the
year. Does it help if I say that we
have agreed with the Department for Transport that in the report we produce in
looking in detail at London and the West Midlands and then at a corridor level
beyond up to Scotland, for London and the West Midlands we will produce full
costings for a high speed railway link between those two localities. We will also produce costings for a
conventional rail solution on the same corridor so that there will be a new
conventional rail rather than a high speed line, and that will need to capture
both cost benefits and environmental impacts, so at least you will have the
beginnings of a comparison for part of it.
We have agreed - because it is necessary in the end for the strategic
environmental appraisal - that the Department themselves will look both at the
alternative of a further upgrade of the existing West Coast Main Line - and I
am going to say nothing about whether that will be a sensible thing to do - and
at the road alternative as well rather than doing any of those three railways
things, and what would you do if the road solution were adopted and what would
that cost and its benefits. That is not
the full answer to the question because it does not answer what about the
entire network to Scotland, I think that is too difficult a problem to crack in
any case, but it will address in your terms for at least London to the West
Midlands and will allow that comparison to be made. It is a 2010 answer, I am afraid, rather than a 2009 answer.
Q445 Mr Martlew: Are you really saying that the possibility of
actually going faster on the West Coast Mainline ---
Sir David Rowlands: No, no, perhaps I have misled you. Because particularly for a strategic
environmental appraisal you have to work through at a sensible level of detail
all of the options, that is not just a high speed or a conventional new
alignment to the West Midlands, but if you did not want either of those what
could you do with the west coast, that would not be higher speed. Remember where all this started; it was a
view taken by Government and Network Rail back last year and at the start of
this year that the West Coast Main Line will be full to capacity again south of
London by 2010 or thereabouts. So
looking again at the west coast and further up it is about capacity and not
speed.
Q446 Mr Martlew: They are both the same thing. The Pendolino will do 140 miles an hour.
Sir David Rowlands: Not on the existing network.
Q447 Mr Martlew: If you had the proper signalling in place, if
you have block signalling, it will do 140.
Sir David Rowlands: The division of labour is for the Department
to look at the west coast. That may
encompass higher speed but, again, they would have to put the costs in for
that.
Q448 Mr Martlew: Which would give you extra capacity. Block signalling will give you extra
capacity anyway.
Sir David Rowlands: Yes.
I do not yet know of any railway system that is using block signalling
successfully on such a complicated railway as the west coast railway.
Q449 Mr Martlew: It is a pity that Railtrack did not realise
that.
Sir David Rowlands: Or London Transport on the Jubilee Line
extension.
Q450 Graham Stringer: Just to turn to the cost side of the cost
benefit, it has been acknowledged that High Speed 1 is the most expensive high
speed rail system in the world. Why is
that and is there anything in terms of building High Speed 2 or High Speed 2
Plus that can be done to lower the costs?
Sir David Rowlands: The answer, I think, is in several
parts. Some of it is a consequence of
the design solution that was adopted for High Speed 1. High Speed 1, as it was taken through to
closing out the design, progressively introduced more and more tunnelling into
London, so eventually you hit tunnel in Barking and kept going in tunnel. That is hugely expensive - urban tunnels
cost a fortune. What it did give this
country - whether it was value for money I will leave others to decide - is the
only bit of high speed railway in Europe that comes into a city centre at high
speed because everybody else goes on to conventional tracks and trundles,
basically. So one of the consequences
for cost was the decision to put so much into urban tunnel into London and that
is very expensive. But it is not as
simple as that. I think it is also the
case we have talked to SNCF and, indeed, to many others and it is very clear
that if you talk to SNCF in France they knock high speed lines out like peas
from a pod, it is standard, and the next one looks basically like the last
one. They do not go into engineering
fantasies where they say, "Let us start fiddling with the design concept", they
keep the cost down by replication.
There was an issue with High Speed 1, which was the first time we have done
it, so there were some costs there. I
think some costs attached to High Speed 1 are not attractive to these quoted
costs of some continental high speed lines.
The land costs cannot be kept.
But, all that said, it still looks too expensive so there is a real
issue for HS2, which is to try and get to a place that produces an answer that
is cheaper in the end than High Speed 1 was.
Q451 Chairman: Mr Eccles.
Mr Eccles: May I add
something? It is a little bit of a
misrepresentation, and I referred to HS1 because, if you recall, HS1 was done
in two parts. There was the part that came from the Channel and across the
Medway, so some significant infrastructure.
If you just take the cost of building, that by itself is way down the
league of cost of world high speed railways.
It was the second part that pushed the average cost up so high for many
of the reasons to which Sir David has alluded.
If it would help the Committee I could perhaps supply a note because I
have the comparison costs per kilometre of high speed all over the world and I
would happily send it in.
Chairman: That would be very helpful.
Q452 Graham Stringer: Can I just follow up Mr Wilshire's question
about the numbers likely to transfer from aeroplanes on to trains. If you follow the logic of your answer on
that, would it not be more sensible to build High Speed 2 straight into the
centre of London and would you not get more benefit in doing that than taking
it to Heathrow? It has come at the end
of the debate about whether there should be a third runway out to Heathrow, has
it not, and so would it not make sense to just say that there is relatively
limited benefit, as there is in the rest of the rail system going city centre
to city centre?
Sir David Rowlands: Would it help if I tell the Committee the
options we are looking at? I cannot go, as I think the Committee knows, into
the detail of options because of potential blight issues for people who might
live next to some of them. We will
produce a report at the end of the year that sets out one, and probably more
than one, option for a city centre solution for London. That railway will then - because this is
what we are asked to do - as it goes towards the West Midlands, offer an
interconnection with Heathrow, so it will leave the city centre solution in
London going via Heathrow. There are basically three generic options for
Heathrow, as we see it. There is the
high speed railway that runs through Heathrow with a station in the airport;
there is a rail line that runs past Heathrow with a spur coming off into the
station in Heathrow; and the third would be an interchange facility where you
got on to something else to go into Heathrow. The ones in the public domain at
the moment - because they are not a secret - include things like Old Oak Common
where you can get on to Crossrail or the Harrow-Heathrow hub concept between
West Drayton and Iver where you can use the Great Western or Crossrail. It then goes north up to the West Midlands. I am sure we will produce options that
include a city centre solution for what would be Birmingham. We are looking quite hard at a parkway in
the West Midlands and the reason for that is on the assumption that this is the
first stage of a network that goes on further north, including to
Manchester. We have been talking about
aviation, but if you look at car traffic and modal shares between Birmingham
and Manchester, though currently Birmingham is well served by rail from London
and Manchester is well served, the rail connection as such between Manchester
and Birmingham is not good and only has a 4% modal share and the dominant mode
is motor car. We are looking at least
the potential for a parkway that would actually attract significant elements of
that car traffic and get modal shift that way.
I cannot tell you what the answer is but we are looking at that. Does that give you a feel for the
options? It would be a mistake to think
that we see Heathrow as some sort of terminator - not at all.
Q453 Sammy Wilson: Can I come back to the numbers of people you
see travelling on high speed rail and the capacity, and I take it that how
close you get to capacity will reflect the cost of journeys. The capacity of 18 trains per hour certainly
is well above the kind of predictions that you are making, even if you captured
all of the transport at present from the figures you have given. Given the huge difference between the number
of people who potentially could travel on high speed rail and the capacity of
the rail, how likely is it if cost is going to be a factor that high speed rail
could actually become competitive with air travel?
Sir David Rowlands: Can I start in a marginally different
place? You are quite right, if
government decides to build a high speed railway network from London to
Scotland, taking in Manchester, Yorkshire and the North East then they will
have put in place, once fully built, twice the existing capacity of the East
and West Coast Main Line long-haul traffic.
This is a huge capacity increase, which is why I said much earlier on
that there is no issue about capacity for people switching out of
aviation. That is a very small part of
what would be the traffic on any high speed network. You would not justify building a high speed network because it
transfers people from aviation on to railways.
That may well be beneficial and would be part of the business case, but
if you look at the work that was done for the Strategic Rail Authority - and we
are doing our own work - the largest part of the traffic on a high speed
network came from the existing long distance services, the Virgin services, and
they come off - I think it is still called National Express Services - on the
East Coast Mainline. The next largest
category is actually generated traffic based on the work that was done for the
SRA. The next largest traffic element
is transfer out of motor cars and that grows with time because of congestion on
the road network. The smallest
contribution actually comes from aviation because that is where the smallest
numbers are. You cannot dodge the
arithmetic. The business case we will
be looking at will model all of those different flows and build them up to see
whether the demand is sufficient from all of those sources, given the costs to
produce acceptable benefit cost ratios.
I probably ought to say that this may well be a business case that is
quite complicated and some parts of it will not be conventional. The original
Jubilee Line extension was justified in part by so-called agglomeration
benefits; what are the benefits if you draw the people together in what is now
Canary Wharf. That was very ground
breaking at the time although it is now rather conventional. We will need to look, with help from the
regional players, at issues to do with inter-connectivity between both Scotland
and English regions and London, and we contemplate a business case that will be
a bit like a layer cake, if I can call it that: the bottom bit will look very
like DfT conventional appraisal methodology; some of it will get a bit beyond
it; and the stuff at the top of the cake, which is a cherry or the icing, may
well be very unconventional and that we are still working through. What that means in BCR terms, I think, is
some of that cake will have a number to it.
The bits at the top, particularly things that may be to do with regional
interconnectivity, which is relatively groundbreaking stuff, may be more
qualitative than quantitative and it may be an area where politicians want to
take judgments.
Q454 Sammy Wilson: That is the difficulty once you have to
resort to that kind of subjective evaluation for any project.
Sir David Rowlands: It depends whether just doing the stuff at
the bottom that has numbers attached to it gets you over the starting line in
terms of an acceptable cost benefit ratio, what more do you get beyond that if
you look at some more novel aspects.
Mr Eccles: We will be
publishing all our work on 12 August and so on that day, or before, I will
supply the Committee with our business case, if that would be helpful. I cannot promise you the icing or the
cherry, I am afraid we have just stuck to the substantive cake because we need
to compete on the level playing field funding, so we have just stuck to the DfT
criteria and no agglomeration benefit.
You may find that helpful. We
have BCRs that we believe in some cases do clear hurdle rates. Your first question about the capacity, the
original question was will high speed rail abstract from domestic air
travel? Yes, to a degree. Or will it add new journeys? Yes, most certainly. As Sir David has said,
one of the big sources of demand in the demand forecasting models is from
generated journeys. If you bring
Edinburgh to the relative same distance from London that Manchester is now you
will get more journeys from Edinburgh to London than you do now.
Q455 Sammy Wilson: There is a substantive gap to fill if you are
working in the capacity of 18 journeys or 18 trains per hour and a fairly
limited capacity as far as air travel is concerned. Indeed, the evidence that we were given by the British Chamber of
Commerce was that even the removal of passengers from road to rail would be
fairly limited - that was the information which they had given us based on
their modelling. So even with the
additional generated traffic there is a huge gap between what is envisaged at
present and what the capacity of the line is.
Sir David Rowlands: Could I add a point just quickly? I think this is work still to be published
by Network Rail and certainly work still to be done by High Speed 2. We should not forget that if you are
creating a very substantial tranche of new capacity the consequence in part of
that is to release a lot of capacity on the existing West Coast Main Line. You effectively release two tracks on the
existing West Coast Main Line.
Q456 Chairman: How much of that could be used for freight?
Sir David Rowlands: That is a substantial increase in West Coast
capacity. It has two potential uses:
one is new commuter flows to fit in with housing development along the
corridor, for example; and, two, it offers potentially a lot of extra tracks,
stocks for freight as well in which we are in discussion with the rail freight
industry as we go through that.
Q457 Chairman: Mr Eccles, do you want to say more about
that?
Mr Eccles: 71 million freight
vehicle kilometres by 2030 taken off road by the capacity created by a high
speed line in Scotland, created on the conventional level.
Q458 Ms Smith: I wanted to ask whether or not there had been
any measurement of the wider economic impacts of high speed rail in France, for
instance, and whether it would be possible to do that, to find out, just so
that we can compare, for instance.
Sir David Rowlands: There has been work done. There is an academic at the University of
Kent who specialised in looking at some of the land use and other impacts of
the French TGV network. He is part of
our technical panel and we would expect to be publishing that sort of analysis
together with some further work that is being done at the moment at the end of
the year. So the short answer to your
question is yes, we are looking at it and we hope to address it.
Q459 Ms Smith: When I say "wider economic impacts" I mean
things like agglomeration benefits and that layered cake you were talking
about.
Sir David Rowlands: Yes, exactly.
Q460 Ms Smith: Absolutely, not just the DfT view of these
things?
Sir David Rowlands: Not.
I need to be careful; I used to work there, but not just the DfT.
Q461 Ms Smith: Is HSR2 going to look at options which would
leave Heathrow out altogether?
Sir David Rowlands: No. I
can only do what the Government has asked me to do and for HSR2 I am
specifically asked to produce a report at the end of the year that includes
something which in the January document that DfT produced was called a Heathrow
international or Heathrow interchange, so that we will include. What I hope we can do, and please do not
read this as meaning we have a view either way on Heathrow, is produce
something that is sufficiently comprehensive so that everybody will be able to
see what we have done, what options we have put to one side and why we did it,
and to display in detail how costs were built up. We do not intend to produce a single number for a railway from
London to the West Midlands. You need
to be able to see how it was all built up, how much tunnelling, how much plain
line, how much cuttings, what they all cost, to allow a government in the end
to do some mixing and matching between options. Do not read that as saying we are deliberately including or not
including Heathrow. The only other
thing I would add about Heathrow is that we have agreed with the department
that we will model Heathrow with a third runway because that is government
policy, but as a sensitivity we will also model it without a third runway so
you can see what, at least in our modelling terms, the consequences would be.
Q462 Chairman: So all the options will be there and costed
in accordance with the directions?
Sir David Rowlands: We will take through to a final report very
detailed work on quite a number of options.
There are a lot more options we can think of that are rather more
expensive than something else or just do not work but they too will be there in
the final report so you can see what we have done. Lord Adonis and some of our people went to see the Dutch recently. One of the lessons from the Dutch was that
they missed an option and they spent two years revisiting it and lost two
years, so we are trying very hard to have every option we can possibly think
of.
Q463 Ms Smith: In other words, it will be possible for any
reasonably intelligent analysis of your report to make judgments about whether
or not one particular route or option is in many senses less affordable or less
sensible in economic and cost terms?
Sir David Rowlands: I hope you will be able to see both the costs
and the benefits of particular alignments, particular options, and be able to
see what high speed rail means with Heathrow, including with and without a
third runway.
Q464 Mr Leech: First of all, as a follow-on from your last
point, whose decision was it to do a model based on with a runway and without a
runway?
Sir David Rowlands: It was a proposal made by HS2 to the
Department for Transport with which they have agreed because we need to agree a
lot of assumptions with them to drive the modelling.
Q465 Mr Leech: You said pretty much at the beginning, and
forgive me if I get the words wrong, that it would be "inevitable" that High
Speed Two would eventually go to the north and to Scotland. You may not have used the word "inevitable"
but that was the impression that I got of your view. Does high speed rail to the West Midlands stack up without a
guarantee that it is going to go further north and to Scotland?
Sir David Rowlands: I will give you the po-faced answer and I
will give a personal view as well. The
po-faced answer is that we will produce a detailed analysis and proposition for
the West Midlands and broad corridors with an outline business case for the
stretches beyond that to Scotland, and we think it likely that some of the
business case for the West Midlands may be dependent upon building further
north. That is the po-faced
answer. The personal answer, and this
is me; this is not High Speed Two -----
Q466 Chairman: So this is the one we should really listen
to?
Sir David Rowlands: It is quite simple. If all a government wanted to do was build a high speed railway
to the West Midlands and never go any further I am not sure it is a very
sensible thing to do. If your problem
is capacity then it might be more sensible simply to build a conventional railway
on a new alignment in the West Midlands, if that is all you are ever going to
do.
Q467 Mr Leech: Is there a danger that because of lack of
resources and a determination to show some enthusiasm for high speed rail that
is what we might end up with?
Sir David Rowlands: That is a political question.
Q468 Chairman: What are your personal views?
Sir David Rowlands: I can give you the po-faced answer, I
think. What we will set out is what I
have described and that will include advice on funding, financing, delivery
structures and also a timetable, and that is timetable to opening through to
the West Midlands and then potentially a timetable for thereafter. No government can bind its successors and
therefore I suppose there is always a danger that somebody might stop, but what
I detect at the moment is cross-party consensus that a high speed railway is an
attractive proposition, and certainly it is the case in other countries that
although governments have changed they have continued to build their high speed
networks. That is true of France and it
is true of Germany, for example.
Q469 Mr Leech: Does Mr James want to add something?
Dr James: Could I just answer on the point of
connectivity in the north as well as to the north? If you are building a high speed system to and from London you
are doing effectively what the French have done with the TGV, which is connect
Paris to other cities. There is a risk
of economic drain from those cities to the centre. If, however, you create a piece of infrastructure which, say, for
the sake of argument, goes east/west,
Liverpool/Manchester/Leeds/Teesside/Tyneside, effectively creating the Northern
Way, if you like, then you are doing something different but you absolutely
need to ensure that the technology and the business plan that you put in place
enables you to use the same infrastructure, the same vehicles, to do two quite
different jobs. One is to cruise at
maximum speed where a lot of people want to go very fast, which is Birmingham
to London or Birmingham to Manchester, but you also need to be able to
accelerate extremely rapidly on the very dense sections, say, Manchester to
Leeds, and then finally, in order to keep the costs down, you need to find a
system that can get over the Pennines to give you that east/west connectivity
without a massively expensive base stop.
That is one of our core advantages in that we can follow the M62
corridor without digging a big hole to go straight from Leeds to Manchester.
Q470 Mr Leech: My final question is to do with economies of
scale. How cost effective would it be
to do a network all at one go rather than do it incrementally, going to the
West Midlands, then to the north and then to Scotland?
Sir David Rowlands: I think the reality is that even if you
decided to do it all in one go it is still a phased project. You would build in sections, though there is
an issue, and certainly you hear it in Scotland, which is called if you are
building a bridge you start building from both banks at once. There is an appetite in Scotland to start
building from their end as well as starting from the London end. That, I think, is an issue for the two
governments to decide between themselves and for the politicians to take a view
on, but I do not think in reality there is a lot of difference between saying
we would build this in phases and we would build it all in one go. It would have to be in phases.
Q471 Chairman: Mr Eccles, do you have a view on that?
Mr Eccles: I think the key issue is not to take the
decisions incrementally. The key issue
is to decide how far you are going, not to decide to go to Birmingham and then
decide to go further, because you can see how difficult that becomes in terms
of construction but with regard to rolling stock sourcing you really do not
want to start off with a small order for rolling stock and pay the costs of
that if at the end of the day you are going to end up with a fleet five times
bigger. In terms of staging, there will
be a sensible way of doing it to maximise benefit early and minimise cost early
so that you get the best overall business case, but, crucially, you need to
have a plan for the whole job, not increments of it.
Sir David Rowlands: There is one final point on this which I
think is relevant. All of this has to
be got through a planning process and that again will be for government to
decide whether it is a hybrid bill solution or some version of the Planning Act
2008. Whichever planning process you go
through you have to be able to tell people down to a metre where you are going
to be because you have to be able to tell people, "It is your back garden that
I want to take ten feet out of". To try
and do all of that engineering design in one go all the way from London to
Edinburgh and Glasgow would take you about a decade to do the work. It is something else that drives you to do
it in phases but I do take Mr Eccles's point.
There is a distinction between, "We will decide to go to the West
Midlands. We have nothing further to
say. We will come back to this in the
fullness of time", as distinct from, "In principle we have decided to do this
whole thing", whatever that might be, perhaps up to Scotland, "of which the
first bit is -----"
Q472 Chairman: It is the difference between decision and
implementation.
Sir David Rowlands: Yes.
Q473 Ms Smith: I am slightly perturbed that the only
northern city not mentioned so far is Sheffield, but I leave that to rest.
Sir David Rowlands: Avid readers of correspondence between me and
Lord Adonis will notice that we were asked to look at strategic corridors
beyond the West Midlands and I think the quote was, "taking in in principle
Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland". We regard that as a minimum
requirement. We are looking more widely
and we are looking at approaches which may well include Sheffield. Please do not read that as Sheffield will be
there but we are not excluding Sheffield.
Q474 Chairman: Could I ask you has Liverpool been mentioned
in it?
Sir David Rowlands: You have just mentioned it.
Chairman: I hope you will note that, Ms Smith.
Q475 Ms Smith: Another point I wanted to make is exactly
this. In terms of the integration of
the national economy I think high speed rail has got a lot to offer. I also think that there are alternatives to
the M62 corridor which would make use of the old Woodhead route to put a
Trans-Pennine link in potentially. The
question I wanted to ask though is this.
Will there be any special planning by HS2 around the Northern Way
concept of two high speed lines in the long term, not in any immediate phase,
of course, with a Trans-Pennine link?
The potential benefit of that to the UK economy is going to be something
in the region of £10 billion.
Sir David Rowlands: Two points if I may. We have as a member of our strategic
challenge group David Begg specifically there representing the Northern Way
interests and we envisage producing a report at the end of the year that will
basically set out all the legs of any version of a strategic network going
north that you can think of, and that includes the reverse "S" that goes to
Manchester, through the Pennines to Leeds and then up. It includes the so-called inverted "A" where
you have two lines, one going up to Glasgow, one going up to Edinburgh and a
piece through the Pennines, and also the route that goes straight up and dives
off in one direction to Manchester and another to the North East. We intend to put all of that in there to
allow a government to decide what it would like to do.
Q476 Chairman: Mr Deighan, what are the lessons of High
Speed One for High Speed Two in terms of passenger growth and economic impact?
Mr Deighan: I think the biggest growth issue we can quote
from the Eurostar case is that the London-Paris-Brussels market has doubled
since we started operation in 1994. A
lot of that has been generated traffic.
There has also, obviously, been transfer from air. There has been relatively little from road
because, obviously, there is not a viable road alternative. The other issue is that a fair amount of
work has been done by SNCF looking at how the TGV Méditerranée performed
against its original objectives and they broadly concluded that the transfer
from road was about 26%, which was what they anticipated in the original
business case and which I think is reinforced by a number of other numbers you
hear in academia about high speed routes over similar distances, so I think
there are a number of experiences from Eurostar and from our sister companies,
as it were, that say that you can generate traffic, you can generally move
people from other modes of transport to high speed rail.
Q477 Chairman: Thank you.
Sir David, could you give us a date when you think High Speed Two could
be operational?
Sir David Rowlands: That really is a question for government but
I will try and answer it. The likeliest
early days for the opening of what might be the first section to the West
Midlands would in my view be in the latter part of the next decade. I am being slightly unspecific because I do
not want to say 2016 or 2017 or 2018.
It is that sort of order but it does depend on how quickly a government
wants to get on with this. It will
depend on affordability and it will depend on how easily a government can take
a proposal through public consultation.
We have not touched on the environmental impacts of a high speed railway
line and they are not non-existent. It
is highly likely that a high speed railway line that takes in Heathrow and then
goes to the West Midlands will impact upon the Chilterns and it is an area of
outstanding natural beauty. It will be
a huge challenge for HS2 and I think that tells you that despite the support
for a high speed railway solution it ain't easy but that is what a likely
timetable looks like. I am aware of one
of the parties who have said they would open in 2015. That is a doable proposition if literally everything went your
way and you never paused for breath at any point, but having done High Speed
One on and off for about --- I started in the early nineties and finished in
2007 and was involved in Crossrail, I am slightly seared by the notion that
everything happens at the drop of a hat.
It is a bit of a struggle, so the reality, I think, is the latter part
of the next decade for a network, if it were to be built, through to Scotland,
that I think is the work of a generation is the truth of it.
Q478 Chairman: So the latter part of the next decade?
Sir David Rowlands: I think the latter part. To get it started and opening in the early
2020s, which fits in with the lack of capacity by then on the West Coast
Mainline.
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming and answering
our questions.
