The British tortoise which proved no match for the French hare

In 1986, Thatcher and Mitterrand finally gave the go-ahead to the construction of the Channel Tunnel after more than a century of false starts. It took the French a mere seven years to build a high-speed link from Paris to the tunnel, whereas Britain’s equivalent has only just opened. It had taken five years for Michael Heseltine to force Whitehall to accept the sensible route proposed by the engineers at Arup. It runs through the desolate Thames Gateway lands in north Kent and east London which Heseltine was hoping to regenerate.

By contrast, British Rail’s route passed through the heart of ‘NIMBY’ land in Kent and south-east London. It took a further three years before a hybrid bill came before parliament.

Previously there had been only a single debate on a subject which involved dozens of MPs in London and Kent — and that was on a private members bill debated on a Friday morning in May 1990, when the newly-appointed minister, Roger Freeman (now Lord Roger Freeman) had to admit that it represented a ‘five-hour seminar.’

The parliamentary timetable allowed a generous two years for passage through parliament and five years for construction, with the opening due in 2001. Recognising the ‘national importance’ of the project, it included ‘outline planning permission’ as part of the package.

By this time MPs were already fed up with the slow progress on the route. As one of the MPs affected, Sir John Stanley, put it: ‘By my calculations it has taken six years, six months and two days to go from 14 July 1988 when BR first announced its three alternative routes for the scheme, to 6 January 1995 and the second reading of the Bill. In the process we have had four secretaries of state for transport’ — the whole saga involved fifteen.

The parliamentary scrutiny was concentrated on the Commons select committee which took 320 hours of evidence in seventy sittings, the longest such proceedings since the mid-19th century on another railway bill involving Brunel’s Great Western Railway. As Bernard Gambrill, who was acting for the builders, put it: ‘I sensed the historic continuity of railway bill committees as both George and Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kindom Brunel were asked that same kind of questions by petitioners’.

The proceedings seemed to have been relatively relaxed and sympathetic, Gambrill felt that there was an ‘atmosphere of mutual respect and [...] none of the members of either committee were unreasonable or ill-advised at any time’. Unfortunately, ‘in the Commons it was sometimes difficult for the clerk to make the committee quorate (although only three members were required) and he was often having to go into the corridors and corral another member so that the hearing could proceed [...] In general the Lords select committee were better attendees but they do not have constituency interests to deal with. Lord Ampthill, the chairman, apologised that one member was having to take a day off to move (castles, perhaps)’

The freedom allowed to individuals threw up some oddballs. Gambrill’s favourite came from Barking. He complained that ‘his breeding canaries, right next to the three existing lines of the Tilbury Loop at Eldred Road, would become barren with the introduction of two lines at 225km/h opposite his aviary’.

Gambrill felt that there was an element of ‘pork-barrelling’ in some of the demands, above all from the local authorities who were looking for ‘most ‘goodies’ from the new railway [....] in terms of road improvements and additional mitigation against the impacts occasioned by the new M20 motorway’.

Farmers and land owners expressed concerns over the amount of land being taken by the project and returned not to agriculture but as set-aside or environmental treatments.

The biggest victory, however, was claimed by the supporters of Stratford, who had been fighting for six years to house an international station. The select committee was convinced of their case when its members were shown the view from Holden Point, a tall block of flats near the proposed station, and realised how close Stratford was to the City of London.

In the end the promoters gave no fewer than 645 undertakings which were included in the Bill at a cost of well over £100m. They included £20m to avoid housing estates at Thurrock, a 2.5km extension to a tunnel under Barking and a longer tunnel, costing £55m, on the approaches to St Pancras to satisfy the burghers of Camden.

Freight was not forgotten, with two sets of loops constructed in Kent, each 2.5km long to allow two freight trains to stop while the Eurostar trains thundered through.

Largely ignored at the time, but important when the route came to be built, were the environmental elements inserted into the Bill, the strictest ever imposed on a major scheme.

The whole story clearly demonstrates the value of the select committee system. This was even more crucial here, since parliament — and successive administrations — had so badly failed in its duty of discussing the country’s biggest infrastructure scheme for a generation — £6.5bn worth of it.

This very short Bill is the last piece of the Whitehall and parliamentary jigsaw. It modifies the regulations affecting the rail link and the powers of the secretary of state, so that they now apply to the oversight of an operating railway line — as across the rest of the UK rail network — rather than one under construction. The key power for the secretary of state relates to financial support for the train operators using the railway — presently LCR, but also SouthEastern Trains whose trains will use the line from 2009.

Nicholas Faith’s book The Right Line is published by Segrave Foulkes at £20.