L

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 6 January 2026

Debate

Channel Tunnel Infrastructure: Reliability

Contribution

I share my noble friend’s concern about the disruption caused to travellers, in particular those whose holidays were spoiled or at least delayed. There is appropriate compensation made by Eurostar and Getlink, which are private companies, for that. I take a particular interest in the noble Lord’s last point about ownership and proper maintenance, because there have previously been similar incidents and they do seem to take a long time. I am not sure that I can distinguish between incidents that take five hours on our side of the tunnel and, for instance, one last summer that took seven hours on the French side—but all that time is too long. My concern in this review, which is why I specifically mentioned the review of previous recommendations, is that it is not currently clear to me that all the previous recommendations for better maintenance, fewer incidents and for dealing with incidents when they occur have been followed through to completion by any of the parties that the noble Lord mentioned.

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