How HS2 has blighted my parents’ lives

Waiting to appear before a Commons select committee, my father turned to me. ‘This was not on my bucket list,’ he said.

My father should be enjoying his retirement. Instead, he and my mother are still working full time in their seventies because they cannot sell their home due to the blight of HS2. And here they were now, about to present themselves to Parliament to petition the High Speed Rail Bill.

Theirs is one of more than 1,900 petitions brought by people whose lives have been so adversely affected by the planned rail link that they will need to be heard in person by MPs before the Bill can be passed.

Because of their age, I decided I would be the one reading a statement to the cross-party committee examining the effects of the Bill. The way I felt, standing outside committee room five of the House of Commons, I would need a bucket list myself soon.

Our appearance was the culmination of months of wading through mountains of paperwork, poring over endless maps and gathering evidence that went into such minutiae about our lives that it has all too often felt like we are the ones on trial, not the government’s controversial rail project. I don’t know how anyone fights these battles. No. Let me put it another way: I know exactly how governments and big corporations wear people down so that objections to infrastructure projects by the poor helpless sods caught in the middle are seldom any problem for the guys at the top.

For the past five years my parents and I have been living in the shadow of a rail link that many, including some senior members of the government, believe will never be built. Its cost is spiralling, and now estimated to be the better part of £100 billion.