Choose your expression: ‘stuck between a rock and a hard place’; ‘I wouldn’t start from here if I were you’; or simply ‘this is the biggest omnishambles in history’.
All these apply to HS2 as Louise Haigh, the Secretary of State for Transport, attempts to come up with a coherent strategy for a project that has now run for 15 years and has worked its way through around £35 billion – but is still only less than half-completed. Worse, on its way it has shed most of its sections, such as running to Manchester and Leeds or connecting with HS1, that would at least have made the end product a worthwhile addition to the country’s railway infrastructure.
Certainly, completing these two sections will at least invest some ultimate purpose in this deranged project
Instead, we now have a 135-mile-long line that has been dubbed the Acton to Aston shuttle, starting some five miles from the centre of London and ending up a mile from Birmingham’s New Street station, necessitating a tram ride to connect with it. In this form, few people will use the service, given it will cost more and not save any time city when travelling between two city centres. The cost is now accepted to be in the order of £100 billion and according to my sources will not open until at least 2033 rather than the originally planned mid-2020s – and that’s if no new problems arise. There are already rumours that major previously undiscovered gas and water mains on the site marked for the initial terminus at Old Oak Common will severely disrupt progress there.
Haigh is now reportedly considering a fix: a new ‘HS2 light’ railway line between Manchester and Birmingham, which would be slower than the original HS2, but faster than the existing West Coast Main Line.
But before we consider this suggested escape route, let’s examine how we got here – because any proposed solution has to recognise the errors of the past in order to be viable. There is not space to outline all of them but they mostly emanate from several wrong decisions made at the outset of the project, not least: creating HS2 Ltd as a separate organisation with very little ministerial oversight; designing the railway for 400 kilometres per hour, the fastest in the world in a relatively small country; building the railway to European gauge for tunnels and other infrastructure, meaning it would be incompatible with the rest of the UK network; specifying very vague contracts that allowed contractors far too much leeway; not using proven cheaper building techniques as other countries have done; and never having a clear overall budget.
The list goes on and on and any new approach must address these issues. So now, in desperation – and one must have sympathy with the local and national politicians faced with sorting this out – there seems to be a consensus that Euston must be reached and that the tunnel boring machines should start digging. The second big question is what to do about the section between Birmingham (or rather a junction of the existing line called Handsacre) and Manchester. Certainly, completing those two sections will at least invest some ultimate purpose in this deranged project.
Scrapping the section north of Handsacre was a piece of political theatre by Rishi Sunak to please the audience at last year’s Conservative party conference but it never made sense from a transport point of view. Not only would it have been, per mile, far cheaper to build than the London-Birmingham section, but it would also be the most beneficial part of HS2. As Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: ‘There is no alternative. You either build a parallel road to the overcrowded M6 or you revive this section.’ He points out that the route approved by Parliament for the line north of Handsacre would be the ideal one for a new motorway and that this is the likely outcome if the line is not built.
Which is where the ‘HS2 light’ proposal comes in. A consortium of contractors, supported by northern and Midlands mayors, as well as Andy Street who was the Tory mayor of the West Midlands until May, has put forward a scheme to revive this section by involving private sector investment. The plan is to use the line previously envisaged – as this has parliamentary approval and work could start quite quickly. Finding a new route would require a delay of several years as a further Bill would have to be passed.
There are some savings that could be made to the design, by, for example, running the trains at a lower speed and using conventional ballast for part of the route rather than the more expensive slab track which has been specified for the whole line. But it will still cost billions – for which there is no budget. However, supporters of this new plan argue that it is the involvement of the private sector that would be crucial, as the investors would be required to take the risk of ensuring that a set budget was adhered to. Moreover, if as expected Treasury rules are changed to allow extra borrowing for investment schemes, the line could remain as a public asset with the government simply buying it off the consortium that builds it. Alternatively, it could remain privately owned with the operators of HS2 paying for track access. Either way, for a Transport Secretary who is delighting in ‘renationalising’ the railways, this type of remedy for HS2 may be hard to stomach.
Murison emphasises that at this stage the plans have to be set out in more detail and for that cooperation is needed from HS2 Ltd which must share the technical and environmental knowledge it has obtained for this section of the route.
But it’s the government that will have to decide between further considerable spending on HS2 or leaving it as a fairly useless and poorly connected route between west London and the West Midlands. It again bears repeating: this is not where any government would want to start.
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