New plans to resolve the rail capacity issues created by the cancellation of HS2’s northern legs are years away, the Observer has been told, amid claims that passengers will have to be priced off the railways to tackle congestion.
Experts said the decision to cancel phase two of the project, which took it north of Birmingham, would have knock-on effects for the rest of the century. One said Rishi Sunak’s decision to cancel was like “taking a body and ripping out the backbone – you’re left with a wobbly amoeba”.
It comes as Network Rail confirmed to the Observer that since the decision to cancel HS2’s second phase, it had begun a huge project examining how best to avoid major congestion along the west coast mainline. HS2 had been regarded as the long-term solution for dealing with the pressures on the line. However, industry insiders said that completing the review would be “years away”.
A Network Rail spokesman said: “For over a decade the long term strategy for dealing with the growth and capacity constraints along the [west coast mainline] has been the completion of HS2 to Manchester.
“Now the government has changed course, our strategic planning team are starting a large piece of work to look at what interventions will now be required in the decades ahead to deal and address those growth and capacity issues and pulling together modelling and plans and proposals which will eventually go to the government to seek funding to implement.”
There are serious concerns about a busy corridor between Birmingham and Crewe, with insiders warning the cancellation of HS2 could see the rationing of services, higher fares and more traffic jams on the M6 as freight is forced onto the roads. Ministers have suggested that travel patterns have changed since the pandemic, reducing the need for the new line. That assertion is also being questioned, however.
Andrew McNaughton, the former HS2 technical director, said the government had created a “growth reduction scheme” by axing the route. “We probably bought four more years by having a pandemic,” he said. “Travel patterns were depressed, but they are back with a vengeance. On the east coast, the route between London, the north, the northeast and Edinburgh where there’s a decent service, the number of people travelling is already back well above pre-Covid levels. On the west coast, instead of running out of capacity about now, it will be out of capacity by about 2030.
“For 15 years, the whole strategy for connecting the north and south of England was HS2. Any other plans were all predicated on HS2 creating the new capacity either directly or indirectly for the next 100 years. If there is nothing to replace it, you would need to ration. What’s the rationing on the railway? You have to price people off. That’s how it’s always been done as the only way of managing demand.”
He added: “There is no alternative. All the previous work on the development of HS2 demonstrated it was by far the best solution, unless you were happy to live with congestion for the rest of the century, and choke off economic growth. It was the only big intervention that was going to work.”
A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “High speed rail between London Euston and Birmingham could nearly double capacity along the most congested part of the west coast mainline with industry already using the £500m set aside as part of Network North to look at options to upgrade infrastructure on the line. This is in addition to redirected funding from Phase 2 being used to support a raft of transport projects across the country, benefitting more people in more places, more quickly.”
