ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN:             David Cameron faces a bit of a high speed headache tomorrow, MPs will have a chance to vote on the government’s HS2 Bill in the House of Commons but as lots of his own MPs plan to vote against it or abstain, he’ll be relieved that Labour are supporting it but will that support come at a price?  Well I’m joined now by the Shadow Transport Secretary, Mary Creagh, a very good morning to you.  There are those within your own party, there are those within your own constituency who don’t think HS2 is a good idea, why would you support the government on this?

MARY CREAGH: Well this is a Labour idea.  We proposed a high speed rail link north of London in 2010.  It’s been a long time coming, in that time it hasn’t been particularly well-served by this government, a strategic review took 18 months, caused costs to rise, property compensation was described as being unlawful so it’s not gone all that well under this government.  With the costs going up we had to look again at it, we had that look and we’re backing the project.

DM: You’re backing the project but you want some changes, you want them to take cognisance of environment issues and things like that, what is the price that the government will have to pay for getting your support?

MARY CREAGH: I think we want to see the cities and regions benefitting, we want to make sure that our transport infrastructure is ready for HS2, that means as David Higgins said in his report earlier on this year we’ve got to make sure that the transport links in the Midlands and the north are ready for this, we’ve also got to make sure our people are ready, the skills are in place so that we can have 900,000 young unemployed people taking those … becoming the new railway engineers of the future and we want to make sure there is proper environmental mitigation put in place as well.  It is very disruptive to large parts of the environment and we’ve got to make sure we get a biodiversity benefit from it.

DM: But you could be here, couldn’t you, if you become a government and you become Transport Secretary, telling me that you have decided to withdraw from HS2.   There are those within your party as I said in the introduction there, Ed Balls Shadow Chancellor saying that it’s got to be good value for money, if the costs go up too much they’ll look at it again, his wife has expressed some concerns, Andy Burnham, the list goes on that are rather lukewarm in the Labour party.

MARY CREAGH: Well there are a lot of my Shadow Cabinet colleagues where it goes through their constituencies and they are absolutely right to raise those local issues.  The Phase Two route consultation closed in January, we’ve got to see what changes, if any, there are to that route and the government needs to get on and spell out what they are but what we’re also saying is we know there is a 2.3 cost benefit analysis so you get £2.3 back for every pound that you put in.  Railways go on for hundreds of years, they don’t stop after 50 or a 100 years, they keep on going as we’re seeing with Brunel’s railway down to the south-west which sadly fell into the sea.  We’ve got to invest in our transport infrastructure but we’ve got to keep costs under control as well.

DM: I said within your own constituency there are those, councillors, you know they have said we don’t want this, we don’t need this, why not spend this huge pot of money on improving so many other parts of our infrastructure and indeed improve the railways if you like but those wonderful ones that already exist.

MARY CREAGH: Well those wonderful ones, some of them are coming to the end of their natural life and we’re going to have to look very carefully at the south-west to make sure that there’s a resilient rail link there.  We are also going to have to look across the north of the country so that the east-west links – Liverpool-Manchester, Manchester-Leeds, Leeds-Hull – there isn’t really a proper railway link across the north and we must make sure that the investment in the traditional railway network is also invested in but don’t let’s forget, we’ve got £37 billion being spent on our railways over the next five years so the money is going in, the key and the trick is to make sure it is put in a way that maximises HS2.

DM: Okay, can I just ask you a quick question about UKIP and their surge in the polls before the Euro elections, it seems according to one of these polls pushing Labour into second place?

MARY CREAGH:     We have an anti-party party with UKIP, their MEPs, there is a variety of them that have had to step down for a variety of reasons and they haven’t had a very good week with their … they have had a variety of scandals.

DM: It hasn’t stopped them.

MARY CREAGH: Well we’ll see.  I think when people hear that UKIP would like people to pay to see their GPs they might go a little bit colder on them and I think most people in this country don’t mind where their neighbours come from as long as they come here to work and play by the rules.

DM: Okay, Mary Creagh, good to see you, thank you very much indeed.  Shadow Transport Secretary Mary Creagh there.