Major projects won’t benefit us

I must say our MP puts up a good fight on our behalf but for all his and others efforts in opposing the scheme, it seems to me that we are experiencing a reaffirmation of the definition to ‘railroad’ a project through.

Our MP makes a sterling case on our behalf in a lengthy response.

The most striking to my mind is that there are to be up to 18 trains an hour each way carrying up to 200,000 passengers an hour! Where are all these passengers supposed to come from?

We perhaps need to accept that there is a shortage of capacity at peak times for passengers travelling between Birmingham and London but to add the cost and capacity of HS2 looks like massive overkill, when there are feasible alternatives.

Perhaps our ‘far sighted establishment’ envisage our population swelling not to 70 million but perhaps to 100 million to justify such an increase in capacity?

I very much doubt that, much as I doubt the idea that this project will bring great benefits to those living in the Midlands and North rather than, or at least equal to the benefit to London.

It seems to me that historically the current rail network and indeed the M1 and other motorways have strengthened London’s position, as the ‘hub’ of the country. Why should HS2 be any different?

Besides which, London is overheating already, arguably to the detriment of all. I do not pretend that there are easy solutions but we do need to work towards more regeneration of the rest of the country, rather than pandering to more and more peak demand for people to travel to London.

In a week when George Osborne announces a plan to build a garden city in Kent, with at least 15,000 homes, I am not impressed, merely ‘depressed’.

This grand scheme would seem to pale into relative insignificance against the joint proposals to build around 24,000 homes in Warwick and Stratford District Council areas in about the same time scale.

Are our ‘lords and masters’ fulfilling our needs as a county and nation, or are they programming us all to go to ‘hell in a hand cart’?

J H Pearce, Church Lane, Lighthorne, Warwick