HS2 short-sighted short cut or the best it can be?

Our guest bloggers today are Colin Wilkinson, Senior Conservation Officer for the Midlands and Melanie Coath, Senior Policy Officer in our Climate Team.

Today, MPs are debating the future of High Speed Rail in the UK. The Hybrid Bill for HS2 faces its first serious scrutiny as Parliament decides whether or not the scheme should go ahead.

What do we think? Well, in principle, the RSPB is in favour of High Speed Rail. Compared to motorways or short haul flights, it is a substantially lower carbon option. But much as we might like to, we don’t feel we are currently able to support the HS2 scheme as proposed.

When the HS2 Environmental Statement was published before Christmas, a perceptive partner of ours said it “was like having 50 major planning applications being dumped on your desk all at once, and every single one of them affecting important wildlife.”

The fact that a proposal of this enormous scale and complexity might well affect important species, habitats and sites surely comes as no surprise to anyone.

The Government has made its commitment to delivering High Speed Rail for the UK abundantly clear. Given such clear backing it is reasonable to expect that where impacts are possible or likely, and the science is unclear, the assessment in the project’s Environmental Statement should allow for every eventuailty.

Given the nature of this massive development, we should expect that the impacts are assessed accurately and thoroughly, and we should see the best possible job of mitigating those impacts by applying everything we know about nature.

And when you can’t be sure, be precautionary.

Then, where unavoidable impacts remain, they should be properly acknowledged and dealt with through the best compensation package we know how to put together.

Instead, what we have is an assessment that mounts a series of conjuring tricks. For example, the Environmental Assessment suggests:

• Parts of two SSSIs (Sites of Special Scientific Interest – nationally important homes for nature) can be destroyed and the rest fragmented, but amazingly with “no residual damage”.
• “Irreplaceable” ancient woodland can, we are assured, be replaced speedily, by planting new woodland and moving some soil around.
• Colonies of rare bats can be induced to cross HS2 safely, using a handful of green bridges located perhaps hundreds of metres from their normal flight routes. These same bats will, apparently, happily hang on in a landscape bisected by HS2, for a gap of 20 years or more while the new woodlands and hedgerows planted as mitigation grow tall enough actually to be useful to them.

HS2 is the kind of BIG PROJECT governments love to leave behind as a legacy – but the Government must not allow the sheer scale of HS2 or the real challenges of assessing and dealing with complex local and cumulative impacts on nature to be an excuse for shoddy workmanship.

Frustratingly, the HS2 scheme also fails to deliver on its carbon promise. The proposed scheme will result in less pollution than an equivalent road or air alternative but we need to keep in mind that climate change is one of the greatest threats to humans and to nature and we need to be reducing carbon emissions very rapidly. It is therefore unacceptable that the overall impact of the scheme over 60 years is an increase in carbon emissions.

It needn’t be this way, however. The RSPB and others commissioned research to understand how HS2 could be a genuinely low carbon scheme. There is no shortage of options: for example emissions could fall substantially if HS2 Ltd minimise construction carbon, maximise the transfer of freight from road to rail, site city centre stations close to existing transport networks, and modify the top speed of the high speed trains.

Meanwhile Government needs to show how it will make it easy and attractive for people to use high speed rail instead of getting in a car or on a plane. We also need it to ensure that the electricity that runs the line will be carbon-free as soon as possible: if Government can guarantee an ambitious route to decarbonisation for the UK’s electricity supply this could reduce emissions by an incredible 92% per passenger by 2050.

At every stage of the process, which is today passing, a major milestone with the Hybrid Bill Second Reading, we’ve defined two clear tests we want the Government and HS2 Ltd to meet:

• assess the impacts on nature thoroughly, deal with them openly, avoid harm where you can, provide the best possible mitigation, and provide compensation that is clear, accountable and delivered in perpetuity.
• deliver a package of practical and policy measures that enables  HS2 to deliver on its promise to be part of a low carbon transport future.

Honourable MPs and Ministers, the train is about to depart. Please get on board now.