On Thursday The House of Lords will debate HS2 during the second reading of the HS2 Phase 1 Hybrid Bill. Many of them do not know much about HS2, and the only real scrutiny the Lords have conducted was the highly critical report from the Economic Affairs Committee. As HS2 is a Government Bill proposed in the manifesto there will not be a vote at second reading, but there will be an opportunity to submit amendments.
As such, we’d like to tell them what you think about HS2. We’ve compiled an excel spreadsheet with all the available email addresses and twitter handles for Lords, and a little bit about them if there is anything relevant. We’d very much like you to contact them, as many as you like and tell them what you think about HS2. Column E on the spreadsheet says a little about them, maybe their interests, their job or where they are from, so we’d very much hope you can look at this and contact ones who you think might be receptive to whatever argument you’d like to make.
Obviously there are masses of arguments against HS2, but also there are things to be saying in terms of potential amendments to the bill, such as the need for independent scrutiny of HS2 Ltd, following the report by PACAC which was sneaked out the same day as the vote in the Commons. Details of that can be found at:
The spreadsheet is here:
https://stophs2.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/lords.xlsx
And if you want to write to a Lords who doesn’t have a published email address, you can use http://www.theyworkforyou.com/peers/ or email contactholmember@parliament.uk.