How will the great HS2 flip-flop look from abroad? Consider the history of this project. It was planned for a full decade and, despite projected costs rising with every update, the Conservative party leadership and parliament backed it all the way. Sceptics (including this column, often) who thought an east-west link in the north offered more bang for fewer bucks had to concede that HS2 had broad cross-party support.
Then in 2020, when the bills were about to bite as serious work started on the ground, ministers took another look. The outcome? Another green signal. The government recommitted in the knowledge that its own reviewer, Sir Douglas Oakervee, had said only a full Y-shaped design, with two northern legs, made economic sense.
Barely 18 months later, the Leeds leg was chopped. Now, with £25bn spent already in the south, the other northern branch to Manchester is being axed. The verdict from overseas will probably range from hilarity to derision. The fifth Tory prime minister since HS2’s inception disagrees with the “old consensus” endorsed by the other four and so the UK – at an eventual cost of £55bn-ish – will build only the pointless and most expensive southern section.
The reality may be more nuanced, because it’s a fair bet that chunks of a Birmingham to Manchester section will end up being built in some form if Rishi Sunak is serious about upgrading rail links between the two cities. The government’s “integrated rail plan” from November 2021 – written in light of the pandemic’s effect on travel patterns – was crystal-clear about congestion on the west coast mainline and crowding into Manchester.
“Journey times between Birmingham and Manchester are currently poor compared with speeds to the capital,” it said. “No improvement is possible without additional track capacity into Manchester, given the need to serve intermediate towns as well.”
Sunak says the facts about HS2 have changed, but some engineering challenges presumably endure. The project should always have started in the north.
Even now, it’s not obvious how the £36bn of supposed savings from scrapping northern HS2 arise. A new “Network North” will replace the previous “Northern Powerhouse Rail”, but the two schemes have many common features, such as rail electrification projects. One difference is that a new station at Bradford, which once was in the plans and then out, is now back in again. Local people may reasonably ask if this parade of “long-term” plans simply delays the day when they see new infrastructure.
The obviously sensible part of the plan is to proceed to Euston in central London. Stopping at Old Oak Common, six miles to the west, would have piled absurdity upon absurdity. A new development body at Euston could also be a positive, even if doesn’t alter the basic problem that the Department for Transport “still does not know what it is trying to achieve”, as the public accounts committee put it in July.
“As a serious G7 country we have to do the difficult stuff well,” said Andy Street, the mayor of the West Midlands, this week. You don’t have to share his zeal for full-fat HS2 to agree on that point. The shambles will indeed “damage” the UK’s reputation with international investors.
It doesn’t much matter if one blames HS2’s gold-plated design (150mph, not 225mph, would have been fast enough), tunnels and cuttings to appease voters in the shires, or bad project management. They all come down to an ability to find an affordable plan and deliver it. Since the same party has been in office for 13 years, it should not be this hard. At this late stage, the main sense is shock at the lack of competence.
No international investor has lost a penny directly in HS2, of course, because the project is funded by the state. But there is a long list of other infrastructure projects that require external capital, which inevitably arrives more cheaply if investors trust a government’s ability to deliver its part of the bargain.
Upgrading of the power grid by 2035 will cost £54bn, a sum that will eventually find itself on to bills but still needs somebody to put up funding. Or try the £20bn Sizewell C nuclear station, where an international whip-round has been launched. Is everybody confident in those plans and the timetables?
One fixed-income fund manager puts it this way: “Why would I put more money into the long-dated debt of a country with an ageing population whose highest aspiration is to fill potholes?”
The good news is that we’ll eventually get something more substantial than smoother roads. The bad news is that, yes, loss of credibility has a price.
