How should we think of HS2?
A tragedy? Andrew Adonis’ visionary attempt to reverse decades of regional inequality hacked into irrelevance by short-sighted Tories. A cautionary tale? A case study in Britain’s inability to deliver major infrastructure projects amidst chronic mismanagement, NIMBYism, and Treasury Brain.
Perhaps a horror? The wilful butchery of Roald Dahl country so that Andy Street can get from Birmingham to central London half an hour faster. Or a farce? The Dumbo of White Elephants which only persists because too many involved would look a tit if it were cancelled.
Probably a bit of each, in truth. The high-speed railway – once designed to link London Euston with Birmingham, Manchester, the North East, and beyond – has become shorthand for dysfunction. Originally estimated to cost between £35 and 55 billion, it now looks set to cost at least twice that. Having been delayed more times than the Second Coming, current plans would not see Manchester linked to Euston until 2040.
But that’s if it even reaches there at all. Reports in The Times and Sunday Times – no, not that one – suggest that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt plan both to scrap HS2’s northern link between Birmingham and Manchester and to stop the line from terminating at London Euston. It would instead end at Old Oak Common, six miles away. That’s a hell of a long way to go for a Drummond Street curry.
One can immediately see the proposals’ appeal for Downing Street and the Treasury. Reported savings of at least £34 billion could be made, with the Euston move saving £4.8 billion. Hopes of linking the railway to Scotland or Heathrow have long since been abandoned. The line is hugely unpopular with Tory voters. Cancelling future parts might provide room for tax cuts within Hunt’s sainted fiscal rules.
It’s a move that was supported by Andrew Gilligan, Boris Johnson’s former transport and infrastructure adviser, in a Policy Exchange paper last year. He argued that the scheme no longer provided value for money, and those benefits that it did accrue were overwhelmingly in the South-East. Claims that the scheme would create “500,000” new jobs were bunkum. Amusingly, those projections included 37,000 new jobs in Crewe – a place with only 23,000 jobs at the moment.
Furthermore, the outrage of Northern leaders over threats to the project’s future was matched by apathy amongst their own voters. Polling from YouGov suggests public opinion has always been against the project by a margin of about two to one. It is more unpopular in the North than the South. For every Street or Andy Burnham demanding the project be finished, there is a Ben Houchen saying he could spend the money much better.
As costs spiral whilst the public finances are under pressure, why not take this moment to review yet another George Osborne vanity project? Indeed, one of the ex-Chancellor’s passions could be swapped for another.
Sunak apparently wants to pledge to prioritise Northern Powerhouse Rail. Sometimes referred to as HS3, this is a proposal to link Liverpool, Hull, and other Northern cities with their own high-speed line, although the exact specifications have been chopped and changed in recent years. It’s an attractive prospect for both Home Counties MPs looking for payback on their Northern counterparts, and for those longing to finally create Britain’s Ruhr.
Such a proposal would certainly do more to reverse Britain’s chronically London-centric economy than a desiccated HS2. Prioritising local transport links also seems inherently more Tory. Cue misty-eyed references to a network before the Beeching Axe, and the legacy of the Reverend W. Awdry.
Unfortunately, I fear those are fantasies just as potentially expensive as those that drive HS2’s two or three remaining supporters. Simply cancelling the vast chunks of the line now to just plough on with other projects would not only mean Wendover’s sacrifice was in vain, but fails to learn the lessons as to why the project has become so expensive. Why should HS3 be any more financially sound than its older brother?
As Christian Wolmar has highlighted, HS2’s inflated price tag is a greatest hits package of all the conditions and cock-ups that makes building infrastructure in Britain far slower and more expensive than for our competitors. HS2 has been in preparation for 23 years and looks set to cost £262 million per mile. A new TGV line in France, finished by 2017, cost £46 million per mile – and took half the time.
Compared to the French scheme, HS2’s failings are obvious. NIMBYism has meant treating the Chilterns as the Alps and tunnelling underneath them, at ten times the cost of going over land. Chopping and changing of specifications has meant a lack of oversight, and an unwillingness to adjust costs in line with inflation.
Of course, a lot of HS2’s costs – associated with risk, the operating costs of high-speed trains, and the obvious need to buy up lots of land – meant that the good people at the IEA and the Taxpayers’ Alliance were long predicting the price tag could reach more than £80 billion. Only since Lord Berkely, the former Deputy Chairman of the Government’s project review, suggested it could cost around £107 billion have ministers staggered out of Plato’s railway tunnel.
All this was before Covid-19. Since then, inflation has only raised costs further. It has also reduced pressure on the railways: use is only 70 – 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. It has familiarised all of us with working from home. How can 19th century forms of transport compete with 21st century technology?
Even so. Not to sound too much like an ex-Prime Minister with a passion for grand projets, but the value of projects does not lie simply in a cost-benefit analysis. Hobbling HS2 not only shows a lack of imagination on the parts of ministers, but it can be considered the death knell of the Government’s commitment to ‘levelling-up’. Northern voters might be breathing sighs of relief. But what does cancelling a £100 billion project show about Westminster’s willingness to invest in them?
Erasing the North-South divide was always a project on the scale of equalising West and East Germany, on which £71 billion was spent between 1990 and 2014. HS2 might not have been the right way of tackling decades’ worth of warped economic geography. But cancelling it just to find some spare change is a sign shows that ministers are happier than they might admit with Britain being the most regionally unequal nation of its size in Europe and the OECD.
Moreover, what ministers have failed to communicate was that HS2 was never primarily about getting out of the North faster, but capacity. Between 1997 and 2019, the number of journeys on the West Cost Mainline trebled. On both it and its East Coast equivalent, there is insufficient capacity to satisfy the needs of both passengers and freight operators.
Even post-Covid, our Victorian railway infrastructure is under strain. As with building a third runway at Heathrow – or a fourth, fifth, or sixth – or new nuclear power stations, this is a project that should have been undertaken generations ago and has been kicked continually down the road by short-sighted and parsimonious ministers.
Moreover, a new intercity line would be needed to free up more space for other trains in the Midlands and northern England. Those MPs who want to see HS2’s funds plowed into similar projects or to reopen closed lines ignore that it is partially designed to revive the capacity the railways lost with the closure of the Great Central Main Line. Linking up the North cannot be done without building something like HS2.
Hobbling HS2 today would therefore be in the spirit of Dr Beeching: prioritising cuts today over the future viability of the network. We can rightly ask if this was the right scheme if it could be run better, if it had to be anywhere near as expensive as it has become, and what the future of our railways should look like.
But cancelling it now would make a statement of our hobbled ambitions. Britain, a country that cannot build.