HS2’s completion is as likely as King Harry’s coronation

Seven years ago, when HS2 was still officially costed at £33 billion, I wrote that I was looking forward to using my pensioner’s rail pass on it ‘early in the reign of hugely popular, three-times-married King Harry, in whose favour his elder brother will abdicate after his 50th birthday’. Now HS2’s upper cost estimate has reached £106 billionand the northern spur of the track may not reach Leeds until 2040, when my pass and I will surely have expired. There’s still a possibility all this will happen — high-speed rail and Harry’s coronation, that is — but both look less likely by the day. And after a decade of defending HS2 against all-comers, I fear I must review my position.

On the one hand, I believe, as Boris apparently does, in the economic and morale-boosting value of grands projets. On the other, I’m influenced by failure at Crossrail and stalemate at Heathrow into thinking that we’ve become hopelessly incompetent at making them happen — on budget, on deadline, or at all. And I observe how many of my fellow passengers now say they’d like the on-train broadband to be faster, but not the train itself; that what they really want are more departures, more comfort and better punctuality across their regions, rather than this sometime-never north-south showpiece.

Time, money and technology have overtaken the HS2 concept, so that the question now is not whether it should be scrapped, but how. Ministers should come up with a bold spending list for the original £33 billion to give voters what they actually want — and imaginative new outcomes for the £8 billion already spent on sites and tunnels. Affordable housing, entrepreneur hubs, underground mushroom farms, perhaps even a Sussex Royal theme park: we could celebrate them all as the HS2 dividend.

Farming isn’t park-keeping

‘You’d think we were park keepers, not vital food producers’ was the reaction of my Yorkshire farming neighbour to first reports of the new Agriculture Bill, which sets out the government’s approach to farm subsidies after the sector is liberated from the EU Common Agricultural Policy.