Tory heavyweight Lord Heseltine has cast doubt on the railway industry’s ability to come up with the best route for a new high speed network in the UK.
Heseltine has urged the government to consider a broader selection of views before any firm decisions are made. He is pushing for a high-speed rail link with Heathrow as its main hub, something most railway industry-inspired studies have ruled out.
Heseltine said history showed that the railway industry often had a lack of imagination when it came to new rail developments. The Tory grandee was environment secretary when the various proposed routes for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link were being considered in the early 1990s. He opposed British Rail plans to carve through the suburbs of south London into Waterloo, opting instead to build the line through the declining industrial marshlands alongside the Thames Estuary and east Kent.
Heseltine said similar short-sightedness by the rail industry was being risked again. “The route chosen for High Speed 2, between London, Birmingham and onwards must not be just left to the rail industry, though their expertise and opinion is important. Many other considerations must be taken into account, such as how best can we move people from air to rail …and how can it deliver a genuine integrated transport strategy.”
Heseltine supports a report published by the centre right think-tank the Bow Group, which insists that HS2 should be directly linked to Heathrow Airport through the construction of a hub interchange station combining HS2, the Great Western Main Line, Chiltern Line and the new Crossrail services. The report claims that that without direct connection to Heathrow, traffic congestion and pollution around the airport and the M25 will continue to be among the worst in Europe. “A non-direct high speed link with Heathrow, represented by a loop or spur, would represent folly in Britain’s ambition to develop a truly integrated transport policy,” it claimed.
Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, is set to publish his plans for the high-speed link in the spring. Most of the studies from the railway industry that have fed in to the consultation process have suggested avoiding a direct link to Heathrow on cost and journey time grounds.
© PE Publishing, 25 January 2010
