Examination of Witness

Part of High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 10:57 am on 9 July 2013.

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Professor Tomaney: Connectivity is important. What I question is whether the kinds of connectivity gains that arise from HS2 are of the scale which we are asked to believe when we look at the prospectus for HS2. In terms of connectivity and tackling unemployment problems in a place like the north-east, the real issues might be more to do with connecting remote former mining communities to areas of job growth in the centre of Newcastle. These are the kinds of opportunity costs which are at stake in this debate. It echoes in a sense the question that Frank Dobson asked in the previous session: if you had £50 billion, he provocatively said, to spend on regional development and you could spend it on anything you wanted, would you spend it on HS2 or would there be other ways of spending that money that could have bigger regional development impacts? That is the question we are drawing attention to and which has not been satisfactorily answered in the debate to date.