Another £43bn for HS2?How about some austerity instead

There is a big glaring problem for anyone trying to accuse the government of ‘austerity’ – a charge that is continuously laid by virtually all opposition parties. Just where does that charge fit in with HS2? True, the nation’s roads are full of potholes, the bins in some places are being emptied only once every three weeks and the NHS is trying to wriggle out of offering hernia operations – something it seemed to manage perfectly well to perform in 1948. But still it is a little hard to square the charge of austerity with a government planning to spend £56 billion of public money on a single railway line, to be built at a cost, per mile, of more than four times what the French paid for their high speed line from Paris to Strasbourg.

And it won’t be just the £56 billion either. Today, Sir John Armitt, Chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, argues for an extra £43 billion to ensure that HS2 plugs into efficient transport networks at either end. He has a point: at present the line is proposed to pass the western outskirts of Nottingham, with some talk of a possible tram to the City Centre. It is planned to run directly under the runway of East Midlands Airport – but without a station. Services will run into a new station in Birmingham several hundred yards from New Street, where all connecting services will arrive.

The other way to look at it, though, is to say that Armitt’s proposals show up many of HS2’s fatal flaws. But don’t be surprised if the government nods it through. In fact, as the extra £43 billion will only bring the overall cost to £99 billion, why not spend an extra billion on some gold-plated buffers at Euston just to bring it up to a nice round £100 billion.