Unless time turns out to be Whovian, it seems likely the select committee hearing evidence on the HS2 high-speed rail link must conclude at some point in the future. When, though, is another matter. The longer it goes on, the further away any conclusion seems to get. The committee first sat in April last year and will continue well into the next parliament. And, if current progress is maintained, the one after that. Forget the government’s promise of a completion date of 2026 for HS2’s first stage – it will be a miracle if work has even started by then.
Monday’s session nudged the start date back still further by getting under way 10 minutes late due to the non-appearance of several committee members. With just a hint of a smile, chairman Robert Syms explained their absence. “There have been some, ahem, holdups on the trains,” he said. “So maybe we should start without them.”
First to give evidence was Alex Rukin from Balsall Common in the West Midlands who, at nine years old, became the youngest person ever to appear before parliament. While it was entirely right for the committee to hear evidence from someone who might actually be alive when HS2 is operating, it turned out Alex had actually been invited to the Commons because he had posted a video online detailing his objections to the current proposals. These objections almost exactly mirrored those of his father, Joe, who sat alongside Alex and is the campaign director of Stop HS2. Fittingly, this nimbyism had started in his own backyard.
After various people had failed to accurately locate where he lived on a map – “You see that red line in the corner? Well, it’s somewhere to the left of that” – Alex began to speak. “They … mmw … hmm … grrrn,” he said, before Joe gave him a nudge not to speak with his hands in front of his mouth. “They really, really need my help with maths,” he said only slightly more audibly. Alex had come holding a cuddly toy elephant and wearing a cub uniform covered with badges for everything from cycling and map-reading to camping and traffic awareness, but it was his 93% in his year 5 maths test that was at stake here.
“I pointed out that their figures were out by £8.7bn,” he said. James Strachan QC tried to suggest Alex had confused the contingency payments for phase one and phase two, but Alex was having none of it. As far as he was concerned, the muddle was not his. “They hadn’t read my document at all,” he insisted. “They really, really, really need my help with maths.” Or his dad’s, possibly. Strachan did not argue the toss; in a battle with a nine-year-old, he was always going to come off second best.
Alex was on less strong ground in his complaints that the new cycleway would be a bit more up and down than the old one. Someone with a cycling proficiency badge should be able to cope with a few bumps and, besides, he’ll be driving by the time it’s built. But everyone heard him out politely and by the time Strachan tried to explain the compatibility of “low adverse impact with moderate adverse effect” he and everyone else had had more than enough. “I really don’t think HS2 are good at anything,” Alex concluded. A chip off the old block.
