Future generations will look at the creation of the HS2 railway and be as grateful as we are to Victorians for original tracks, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps claimed today.
The Cabinet Minister vowed the huge drop in demand for train travel triggered by the coronavirus pandemic would not derail the £106billion high speech line.
Critics believe the public health crisis, with new working regimes, proves the link is unnecessary.
Labour MP Grahame Morris warned Mr Shapps: “Clearly there will be a major impact – many individuals and companies will be working from home and travelling less.”
But the top Tory vowed to defy critics and plough on with the 225mph project, which will provide high speed services between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.
Mr Shapps, who was speaking to the Commons Transport Select Committee over a Zoom link, denied video conferences would replace face-to-face meetings in the long term.
“I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever for a whole variety of reasons that will need increased transport capacity. Apart from anything else, we all know that being behind a video screen is a poor imitation of actually meeting people,” he said.
“I have absolutely no hesitation and in saying that I think that we when we stand back over the decades and look at this we will still be very pleased – as we are very pleased that the Victorians bothered to build the infrastructure for us, that we built it not just for ourselves but for future generations.”
He insisted “absolutely, unequivocally” major transport schemes like HS2 were “still worth delivering”.
He added: “If you think about other railway lines that were built 150 years ago – the West Coast, the East Coast mainlines – not two World Wars, not recessions, not depressions, not the Spanish Flu – none of these things stopped the inexorable growth in the need for people and good to ultimately travel.
The need for the projects themselves – because they are such long term, we are not talking about what happens in the next five or 10 years, because they will only be starting to be rolled out in that time, we are talking about the next hundred, 200 years – I think that is unequivocal.”
Mr Shapps went on: “If you look at HS2, we're not building it for what happens this year, next year – it won't even be up and running until the end of the decade.”
He believed the recovery in passenger numbers would be so swift and great that the temporary downturn caused by Covid-19 would eventually be hard to spot on graphs. “It's like when you look at one of those charts of the Depression, the stock market falling off the edge, or the 1987 crash,” he claimed.
“If you stand back and look at It from a long-term perspective and it actually becomes quite hard to even identify on the chart because economic activity picks up again.”
