Rishi Sunak is intent on cancelling HS2 beyond Birmingham on the basis of a right-wing think tank report by Andrew Gilligan claiming that the high-speed line is an elite project, with little public support and benefit for the north, which should be sacrificed to meet targets for immediate public spending cuts.
Leave these tendentious and short-termist arguments to one side for a moment and consider what he is in fact proposing. He wants to leave HS2 half built in perpetuity. It is hard to overstate the crass stupidity of such a policy.
Were HS2 simply a plan, we could debate Gilligan’s assertions about its costs and benefits for the north. But it isn’t. It is an advanced construction project which can only be stopped—now that contracts are let—after most of the line from London to Birmingham is completed.
So if the rest of HS2 is cancelled now, high speed trains—which were intended to run on 330 miles of dedicated track from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, and then on to Scotland on existing tracks—will instead be confined to the first 140 miles of track coming out of London. Except that the HS2 trains won’t terminate at Euston in central London, but instead six miles further west at Old Oak Common, as work has already been suspended on the tunnel from west London to Euston and Sunak is looking at scrapping it entirely.
After this amputation, inter-city trains from London to north of Birmingham would continue to use Euston and the old Victorian tracks going north. There won’t be the capacity for them to terminate at Old Oak Common, even if passengers wanted it. So only a small fraction of the capacity of HS2 would therefore be used at all for high-speed trains—ie only for services to Birmingham. This means that £44bn—about half the total cost of HS2—would be incurred for a far smaller fraction of the benefits. And for virtually no benefit at all to the north of England and Scotland.
This is obviously the worst of all worlds.
There may be a case for slowing HS2 construction to meet short-term spending constraints. But to abandon it entirely is an extraordinary false economy. It is worse than simply eliminating most of the benefits: it would put the north at a permanent disadvantage to the West Midlands, which would be the sole recipient of high-speed services.
If this happens, it will take about four times longer to get from London to Manchester as from London to Birmingham, although the distance is less than twice as great. There will be no improvement whatever to services from Birmingham to further north. And there will be far less reliability and capacity on the Victorian railway serving the north, compared to the new high-speed line serving Birmingham.
This will have the effect of decimating the economy of Manchester and the wider north, as social and business location decisions favour Birmingham with its dramatically better transport links. In due course this will probably force the extension of HS2 to Manchester, and probably to Leeds too, at a cost far greater than that currently being “saved”, and after huge damage has been done to the north.
Because the decision to curtail construction at Birmingham is probably unsustainable, Gilligan’s claim that the north would benefit from alternative transport projects is probably fanciful. But in any case, he is not actually proposing that HS2 savings be devoted to “better” projects for the north. Rather, he wants the savings to contribute mostly to short-term spending cuts to avoid further tax increases.
So the north, already starved of infrastructure, has little to look forward to but further austerity if HS2 is amputated. Airy statements about “Northern Powerhouse Rail”—a new line linking Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford and Leeds—are beside the point here. The outline plan for such a line comes with a price tag larger than the northern section of HS2 which Gilligan wants to cancel, and it has already been dismissed as unaffordable by the government.
By the way, schemes for major transport infrastructure, taking many years to complete, always excite the elite more than the mass before they are realised. But I doubt HS2 will lack popularity when and if fully built. Like London’s new Elizabeth Line, for decades an elite project, it will be hugely popular as it transforms the connectivity between the great cities of England and Scotland. People will just be amazed it took so long to happen.
