Following the general election, the National Audit Office (NAO) released a report that offered a tragicomic epitaph to successive Conservative governments’ spectacular mismanagement of HS2. Scrapping the northern leg of the project, said the NAO, could lead to an actual reduction of capacity between Birmingham and Manchester, because custom-built Hs2 trains travelling on existing tracks would carry fewer people. It may be necessary in future, judged the report, to incentivise people not to travel the route at certain times “or to not travel by rail”.
The Labour-commissioned rail and urban transport review, published last week and launched in Bradford, is a quietly radical call for a strategy to free the UK from the legacy of such incompetence. Led by Juergen Maier, the former chief executive of Siemens, the review makes a clear case for the centrality of public transport to driving economic growth, achieving environmental goals and improving social wellbeing.
