Cutting back HS2 would make the best of a bad job

HS2 has become like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: the one who carries on fighting, reassuring himself ‘tis but a scratch’ as, one by one, he is relieved of his limbs. First it was the Birmingham to Leeds limb, then the link between Manchester and the North West Coast mainline. The bit between Old Oak Common and Euston has been hanging by a ligament for a while. 

Now it seems that Rishi Sunak is about to swipe his sword through the Birmingham to Manchester arm. That would leave just a truncated line which will speed you from Birmingham to the outskirts of London at 200 mph before dumping you behind Wormwood Scrubs jail. Once you have factored in the time it will take you to travel from there to Central London you may well be better off taking the existing train to Euston.  

David Cameron and Boris Johnson have been scathing of the suggestion that Sunak might cancel the Birmingham to Manchester arm (and it is just a suggestion; nothing has yet been announced). But their intervention merely poses the question: why did they nod through a project whose cost-benefit analysis never really stacked up in the first place and whose estimated costs were spinning out of control from day one? 

By the time that Johnson approved the project in early 2020 estimated costs had already reached £100 billion. At that price it works out at £200 million per kilometre, compared with an average of £25 million per kilometre for other European high speed rail projects.     

I have no doubt that had Rishi Sunak been prime minister when plans for HS2 were first presented to the government he would have said something along the lines of ‘fantastic idea. Now go away and work out how you can do it for an eighth of the cost’.

There would have been ways to reduce the cost: for example by reducing the design speed of the line so that it required less tunnelling, fewer embankments and went around rather than through the middle of expensive properties. Between London and Rugby the project could have used the existing, disused trackbed of the Grand Central line, the last of the great trunk routes to be built at the turn of the 20th century, but which fell victim to the Beeching cuts.

Instead we had Cameron and Osborne leaping on HS2 because they thought it would boost our national prestige to be able to boast of having the fastest train service in the world. But in a country the size of Britain, where the main cities are already within two and a half hours journey time of each other, that makes no sense. The excessive costs have sucked money out of far more pressing public transport projects, such as proper metro networks in provincial cities.

Sunak has been left in the unenviable position of being asked for ever greater wads of cash to complete a line of which the London to Birmingham section is half-built. A truncated HS2 makes little sense, but what Sunak seems to be proposing – finish the London to Birmingham bit and tie it into the existing rail network – would make the best of a bad job. It is Cameron and Johnson, not Sunak, who come out of this bungled project badly.