HS2 is a blueprint to ruin land and lives

At least one person involved with HS2 seems, at some level, to regret what they want to do.

One section of the parliamentary Bill and consultation documents issued last week reads like a romantic paean to the threatened Chiltern landscape.

“The flower-rich chalk downland contributes to the area’s character and natural beauty,” writes the anonymous bureaucrat. “The old farmsteads are often bounded by historic hedgerows, ancient woodlands and sunken lanes.”

Normal service — and language — is, alas, resumed on the next page, when he or she explains how the area’s residents — sorry, “residential receptors” — will still be suffering “moderate adverse effect” in 2086 — 60 years after HS2 opens.

Up to 310 miles of those hedgerows will have to be ripped out, page 75 of the “route-wide impacts” document explains, along with 19 areas of ancient woodland, one registered battlefield, one scheduled monument and 18 Grade II-listed buildings.

Some 92 million tonnes of earth will be excavated, 20 million tonnes of concrete poured, 600 miles of security fence erected, 1,180 buildings demolished, businesses employing 8,430 people forced to move or close and new temporary small towns erected for the workforce along the line.

The consultation documents themselves do not quite weigh 92 million tonnes, but it feels like it. There are 603 of them, running to 53,000 pages. Even the price list goes on for 16 pages. If you want hard copies of them all, it will cost you £13,673.25 — still probably slightly less than a peak return to Birmingham on the new line.

Some of the parliamentary documents have sub-biblical, capitalised titles, such as the “Book of Reference”, which turns out to be the full list of property owners whose lives will be ruined. It seems appropriate: there really is something biblical about this project.

A one-page “Estimate of Expense” (the first of those words almost certainly the operative one) tells us that HS2 is planning to spend £6.1 billion on tunnels and bridges alone, 50 per cent more than the annual subsidy for the entire the national rail network.

The most biblical thing about it, though, is the almost God-like powers the Government wants to assume over life, property and normal legal process. As you would expect, the hybrid Bill just published grants HS2 total control over the strip of land needed for the line itself, and its various impedimenta such as construction compounds and maintenance depots. Rivers can be diverted, roads permanently closed, ancient common land seized, the very dead dug up and reburied.

But the powers being sought cover far more property than that, and will affect potentially millions more people than the few thousand unfortunates named in the Book of Reference.

HS2, it turns out, creates a sort of mini-dictatorship over a far wider area than that needed for the line. Under clause 47 of the Bill, for instance, ministers will be able to order the compulsory purchase of any land whatever — and wherever — if they believe HS2 creates “an opportunity for regeneration or development” on it.

An “impact assessment” published with the hybrid Bill says that HS2 is a “significant opportunity to make transformative, potentially regenerative changes to the areas around its stations”, but ministers need the power to seize the necessary land and property because local councils “may be reluctant” to do it.

Some of this, of course, will be much-needed regeneration on brownfield sites such as Birmingham’s Eastside or Park Royal in west London (although HS2 has actually scuppered existing regeneration in both places, putting it on hold until after the line is built.)

But some of it, too, almost certainly involves massive new building on the green belt, particularly around the new “interchange” station just south of Birmingham.

Speaking in Derby in March last year, Andrew McNaughton, HS2’s chief engineer, said the countryside around the new Birmingham interchange station, near Birmingham airport, could become a “new city”, joining up Coventry with Birmingham. Much of the land is green belt, but Justine Greening, the then transport secretary, said that HS2 gave it an “opportunity to have more jobs, growth and more businesses coming in”.

This idea horrifies many people in the area, who treasure the “Meriden Gap” separating the two cities. Under normal planning processes, there seems no chance whatever that it could be approved. But under HS2-lite planning, developers have a much better shot.

The Government insisted last night that any land seizure would still have to go through a local public inquiry — but the Bill makes explicitly clear that even that is only advisory, and that ministers could still ignore it.

Clause 51, meanwhile, establishes a new “right of entry” for anyone nominated by HS2 to enter any property within 500 metres (546 yards) of the line, presumably in order to survey it for redevelopment, seizure and demolition. This also applies, by the way, to any property near any potential future high-speed line, even if no separate Bill for it has been published, let alone passed.

Clause 56 establishes a new power to seize land in London’s Royal Parks, such as Regent’s Park and Hyde Park, for HS2. No such works are proposed — at least not publicly — but why put in such a clause if you’re not going to need it? The builders are also given the power to override special legal protections for London squares contained in the London Squares Preservation Act.

New powers are taken to cancel tree preservation orders, ignore restrictions on heavy lorries, including the London night-time lorry ban, and reduce legal protection from noise for any work deemed necessary for HS2.

Most interestingly of all, clause 39 completely scraps the normal legal procedure for closing any existing railway line or station if ministers deem its closure “necessary or expedient” for HS2.

One of the key fears of the scheme’s opponents has always been that it will devastate the existing rail network, with services to towns not on the route slowed down or scrapped, connections made more difficult and many journeys actually becoming slower.

This clause appears to suggest those fears are not only justified, but that something even worse — complete closure of some services — may be coming down the track. Under the Railways Act 2005, any proposed closure of a passenger line or station must go through an expensive legal process, involving long notice periods, transport assessments and consideration of hardship. In practice, this has made it almost impossible to close any line. The new summary procedure means that lines could be closed at the stroke of a pen.

The Department for Transport insists that no “intercity or commuter line” will go, but buried deep in the documents is the admission that one passenger line — from Paddington to West Ruislip — is already for the chop. It is little used at the moment, though an important diversionary route when the main line is closed. It could be the first of many to go.

One of the most interesting powers contained in the Bill is in clause 31 and schedule 20, which override some key legal safeguards that protect public water supplies. These protections may have been removed because the consultation documents explicitly admit that there is a high risk that the so-called “mid-Chilterns chalk” drinking water table will suffer deterioration in its “chemical status” as a result of “sub-water table activities” — mostly tunnelling and bridge piling — planned during the construction of HS2.

The non-technical summary of the documents says the effects on public water supplies may be “significant” and “adverse”, although it claims they will also be “temporary”, occurring only during the six-year construction period.

However, several of the more detailed area “water resources assessments” make even more alarming reading.

The assessment for the Colne Valley, which will be crossed by a new two-mile viaduct, describes HS2’s impact on water supplies as “major”, the effect as “very large” and the duration as “permanent”. It is particularly concerned with a “very high-value” public water source numbered TH177, under the viaduct, whose disturbance could give rise to a “very large effect” to consumers over a wide area. In total, four of the 26 sections of route — comprising about 15 miles from Ickenham, near Ruislip, to Wendover — would have their drinking water affected.

The documents say that the Environment Agency and the local water company, Affinity Water, are working on “mitigations” including possible temporary supplies. When asked whether that meant bottled water or something similar, Affinity did not answer, though it said it would “maintain high standards of due diligence to make sure that public supplies of water are not affected”.