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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now HS2 has become a bit of a high speed headache for the government but it is also becoming something of a thorn in the side for the Labour party. Officially they support it still but two Labour grandees, Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson, have said it needs to be scrapped. Well I’m joined now by the Shadow Transport Secretary, Maria Eagle, a very good morning to you. Just follow up on that for me, Alistair Darling was one of the architects of this plan, he’s gone off it, says the money could be better spent elsewhere. Why are you sticking with HS2?

MARIA EAGLE: I took a very close look at this in our policy review process and I think communicating about it to say that high speed is what matters is wrong, it’s actually a capacity issue for our railways well into the future and that was what convinced me. I was an HS2 sceptic, I didn’t have a view when I came into this job but having had a close look it’s about capacity on our railway lines, north south. We are trying to do three different things, we’ve got high speed fast trains running from our northern cities down into London, we’ve got commuter services and freight and there just aren’t enough paths for those trains to use our existing lines. With the increase in traffic, the increase in potential for freight, if we don’t build this new north-south line then over the next 20-30 years we’re going to simply be, as decision makers, deciding how to preside over the failure of our railways.

DM: So that’s you supporting it but Alistair Darling is saying it is a lot of money and it can suck money away from other projects and the Shadow Chancellor has said there are no blank cheques here, if the costs go up you could cool on it.

ME: Well look, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and I are very clear that there is no blank cheque on this, the budget has been set, it’s £50.1 billion …

DM: And it has to stick to that?

ME: And built into that is a £16 billion buffer that is not intended to spend, it is a contingency fund, £2 billion of it can be reclaimed in VAT so we’re good in this country at sticking to budgets and delivering big infrastructure projects and…

DM: Well not always, the Olympics okay, fair enough but there are plenty of others that have gone awry.

ME: Yes, but there is no reason why we can’t do this as well as we’ve done some other projects like the Olympics. I’m very clear, I will not be asking Ed Balls to give me extra money to do this.

DM: So at what point would you ditch it? The Treasury, it depends how you model this, you fixed the prices at 2011 prices so that’s how you end up with the £43 billion or whatever it is …

ME: It’s 50.1.

DM: 50.1 but if you go to the Treasury, I can do a different model, if you add in inflation and VAT, you end up with 73 billion.

ME: No look, the Chancellor George Osborne has made it quite clear that that figure that emanated from the Treasury was not accurate and was wrong so I don’t think the £73 billion figure is fair.

DM: But that would be too much for Labour would it?

ME: The budget is there, it is fixed and I have been very clear, I don’t see any reason why we can’t build it for that and that will be the intention. Now Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and I are committed to this, the legislation that is required for it still hasn’t been produced by the government and they have spent three years dithering and not getting on with it.

DM: So you’d like them to crack on with it?

ME: They need to crack on with it, we need this for the future of our railway system, if we’re not just in due course going to be presiding over the decline of our railways.

DM: You are presumably going to take a close look at the Public Accounts Committee who have been looking into this and we know in advance they are going to be highly critical of some aspects of it and in particular, I mean one of the basic premises of it, the modelling they did that suggested that no business is done on trains and therefore it is downtime, it is non-productive. It doesn’t accept that an awful lot of work is done on trains, new technology is there, if you just make the Wi-Fi work on the trains perhaps you should make the journeys longer.

ME: I’ve been saying for some time, and I’m clear about this, that the way in which both the Labour party and the current coalition have tried to argue for this, about it being about time savings, is not the best way of looking at it. The real case for this is about making sure we have got enough capacity, if you look at the increasing passenger journeys and the projections over the next 20-30 years. We already have thousands of people standing on commuter services that they pay thousands of pounds a year to get on by the way, into our main cities. We can’t go on with the projected increases in passenger traffic without having a new north-south rail line which this would be, it would enable us then to take the growth in long distance travel on to the new service, use the freed up capacity on all of our north-south lines, not just the West Coast Mainline but the Midlands Mainline and the East Coast Mainline, we would be able to use that for new services, new commuter services, get more freight onto our railways. This is the future for our railway industry in this country and if we don’t have the courage to do this, of course with proper cost controls, then we are going to be presiding over the decline of our railways over the next 20-30 years. That will not help with sustainability, it will not help us meet our climate change targets and it certainly won’t help people get to work.

DM: Okay, Ms Eagle, can I just ask you about this row brewing with the Unite union, particularly over Falkirk, the report now which has cleared the union of doing anything wrong in terms of the selection of a candidate, do you think now that Mr Miliband, that the Labour leadership owe the leadership of Unite and Mr McCluskey an apology?

ME: No, I don't think there is any requirement for that at all, indeed Ed Miliband has been clear that he is not going to be giving an apology. When the Labour party receives complaints about the conduct of its rules and business in one of its constituency parties, it has an obligation to investigate that and as I understand, if evidence is then withdrawn which had previously been given and the result is as it is, I think the investigation has been proper and I think what Ed Miliband is focusing on now is trying to make sure we have a new and better relationship with our trade union partners and within individual members of …

DM: Isn’t an apology likely to improve that relationship?

ME: I don't think there is any issue about that, I think we are now all focused on how to make sure that the millions of trade unionists who in the past have been affiliated to the Labour party without them knowing, actually choose to join us and I think if we can deal with that and get that going properly, we’ll be a much stronger, more vibrant party, more in touch with the lives of the people that we seek to represent.

DM: Okay, Shadow Transport Secretary, thank you very much indeed, Maria Eagle there.