Everyone can agree that the delivery of HS2 has been shambolic. The high-speed line from central London (ish) to the north of England, has for a decade been rightly derided as an outrageously expensive endeavour that has already failed in its most basic aim of levelling up England. But while the betrayal of the north of England over HS2 has been well documented, chances are you don’t know this: Wales has been betrayed just as much as the disappointed regions of England, if not more.
I don’t blame you for not being aware of the Great Welsh Train Robbery. Hidden among thousands of impenetrable Treasury papers, the tale takes some unpicking. But unlike the experience on most UK train journeys, it is worth the wait.
In 2015, David Cameron’s government decided to define HS2 as an “England and Wales project”. In technical jargon this means they applied a 0% comparability factor for Wales to HS2 spending. That may seem hard to decipher, but what you need to know is this: though it sounds fairly innocuous, designating HS2 an “England and Wales project” was utterly devastating to Wales because it meant that Cymru did not receive any consequential funding from the project.
Compare this with Scotland and Northern Ireland, which were each treated to a delightful comparability factor of 100%. This meant that for every £1 spent on HS2, they both got a population-based share of all of it. It is hard to put an exact figure on how much this will add up to, because the UK government keeps axing parts of the project and the costs keep rising, but roughly, Scotland will bank in the region of £6.5bn-£7bn. If the same rules were applied to Wales, it would have been on course for about £4bn.
The eagle-eyed will have noticed that the HS2 “England and Wales project” has the significant flaw that HS2 doesn’t actually go through Wales. In fact, not a centimetre of track is on the western side of Offa’s Dyke. So how can successive UK governments justify defining it as a Welsh project? It depends who you ask, and when you ask them.
In 2021, the then under-secretary of state for Wales, David TC Davies, argued that HS2 would benefit Wales because it would get the UK’s “carbon emissions down” and help people in north Wales get to London quicker. Davies has also argued that Northern Powerhouse Rail, which was also defined as a Welsh project, was right to be classed as such because people in Wales would benefit from it when they “go to Leeds”. The past decade of excuses and justifications have been so varied and inconsistent that you almost have to respect their audacity.
But the Great Welsh Train Robbery goes well beyond HS2. Despite having 5% of the UK population and 11% of track miles, Wales has received only 1-2% of rail enhancement funding in recent years. Indeed, Cymru has been stuck in second class for a while. From 2011-12 to 2019-20, the Wales Governance Centre estimates that Wales received £514m less than it would have received under a population-based share of the UK’s rail infrastructure spending.
What does that mean for the service? Only 3.7% of Wales’ railways are electrified, compared with about 44% in England and 33% in Scotland. If you want to travel from Aberystwyth on Wales’s west coast to our nation’s capital in Cardiff, you have to go via England. Meanwhile, getting from Bangor in the north to Carmarthen in the south will take you at least 6½ hours … via Shrewsbury (so another winding route via a neighbouring country). For context, the train from London to Edinburgh is just 4½ hours.
To rub salt into the wound, the Department for Transport’s own figures say that HS2 could cost the south Wales economy £200m a year because of changes that would reduce capacity on the south Wales part of the network. While England gets high-speed rail, Wales’s economy will suffer as a result.
Why does Wales keep getting cheated? It’s simple, really: rail isn’t devolved. It is in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and because of that their budgets automatically receive an increase roughly relative to their population when England spends more on rail. The Welsh government, meanwhile, rejected rail devolution 18 years ago (something it now bitterly regrets).
Though Wales receiving extra money for English rail spending is not automatic (automatic spending is known as a Barnett consequential), there is precedent for treating projects that are clearly for England as solely “English”. For example, when the Elizabeth line was built in the Crossrail project, Wales received a consequential in their budget. In the case of HS2, this has been conveniently (for the Treasury) overlooked.
Everyone can see that this is all extremely unfair. The Labour government in Wales has been apoplectic about being overlooked for HS2 funding for almost a decade. Last year, the then first minister, Mark Drakeford, said legal action was being considered by his government over the issue. In 2022, the now secretary of state for Wales, Jo Stevens, told the House of Commons that because “Crossrail has an England-only classification … HS2 should as well”.
But now Labour is in government in Westminster, this money is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, Stevens has claimed that the money isn’t owed to Wales as “HS2 is no longer in existence” (the excuses continue). Wales’s new first minister, Eluned Morgan, has said that the Welsh government “haven’t given up” on getting the HS2 cash – but then added that “UK Labour [is] helping out directly in a way that didn’t happen under the Tories”. Let’s face it, there is no way this UK Labour government is going to give Wales the £4bn it’s owed. When I asked Keir Starmer directly last year, he refused to commit.
This matters for Wales and for the credibility of the UK government’s policy towards the devolved nations. Wales has entrenched issues of poverty and low productivity. It is near impossible to tackle these problems without investing in infrastructure, and realistically the Welsh government does not have the fiscal firepower to redress generations of underinvestment in Welsh infrastructure. But the Tories’ decision to employ sleight of hand accountancy on HS2 funding, now reinforced by Labour, has made that task far more difficult than it needs to be. It’s a malign Tory legacy that should be erased here and now.
Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics
