For those who think there could never be a worse disaster than HS2, or hope that governments can learn from their mistakes, I have disappointing news. Later this month, ministers will unveil a future platinum medallist in the Fiasco Olympics: a project which even their own infrastructure watchdog calls ‘unachievable’. A new, high-speed line between Liverpool and Manchester which will actually take longer than the existing rail service.
Called Northern Powerhouse Rail, this section alone will cost a claimed £17 billion (in reality, perhaps £30 billion). It will be a high-speed railway on which trains can never reach high speeds, because the stations are too close together. It will leave Manchester via a vastly expensive new eight-mile tunnel in the wrong direction – roughly south, only then turning west towards Liverpool, hence the longer journey time. The official reason for doing it like this is to serve Manchester Airport. But the ‘airport’ station would be almost a mile away from the airport. You’d have to transfer by bus.
The real reason, almost certainly, is that those eight miles in the wrong direction were also slated to carry the now-cancelled northern leg of HS2, between Manchester and the Midlands. The secret plan may be to revive the rest of that scheme, too, for a slimline further £25–30 billion. Ministers may also announce a new high-speed line east of Manchester, across the Pennines to Leeds. On this stretch, there is already a fully funded upgrade of the existing, conventional route, now in construction, which cuts the Manchester–Leeds journey from 64 to 41 minutes and delivers six fast trains an hour. The new high-speed line will reduce that journey by a further (drum roll) ten minutes, in about 20 years’ time. The cost? Another £40 billion, making a grand total of perhaps £100 billion.
These high-speed pipedreams are now a fascinating battleground between Reform and Labour. Last week, the thinktank Policy Exchange published a report saying they were a terrible idea, certain to fail, and that we should use the money for better projects which will help more people, in more places, more quickly – electrifications and capacity upgrades across the north, train lengthening, contactless ticketing, and above all a northern equivalent of London’s Elizabeth line, an underground tunnel across Manchester city centre with a stop at Piccadilly, linking up all the conventional lines either side.
Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, wrote the foreword to the report. The reaction from the north’s political elites was furious. Quivering with anger, the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, said Reform were ‘creatures of the London establishment’ who wanted a ‘second-class railway’ for the north.
But I am certain Reform is on the right side of this argument, both the substance and the politics. Public transport is a network. Creating better public transport means creating a better network – allowing people in thousands of places to travel easily door-to-door, often by connecting from a train to a tram or bus. It does not mean grafting one or two new high-speed lines, serving a handful of places, on to an otherwise still decrepit system.
The north’s main rail capacity problem is not on links (lines between cities) but at nodes – chokepoints, above all central Manchester, where the trains all converge on some of Britain’s most congested track. Northern Powerhouse Rail (eight trains per hour, not connected to any of the existing lines) would, of course, help to relieve this congestion. But an Elizabeth line (up to 30 trains per hour, like its London sister, and connected to most or all of the existing lines) would help far more, at a fraction of the price.
High-speed rail is transport for the establishment, for businesspeople and politicians travelling between the big cities
Trains on the Elizabeth line would serve about 80 stations across the north-west, Yorkshire and Humberside. Northern Powerhouse Rail would be a largely self-contained line serving only around seven stations. Nobody would get anything from it until the 2040s: so not an answer to the country’s growth problem any time soon, or helpful for Labour’s re-election chances in 2029. Even in the unlikely event that NPR is delivered in full, the vast majority of the north gets little or nothing from it, ever. It is NPR which is the second-class railway, despite the premium price.
High-speed rail is transport for the establishment, for businesspeople and politicians travelling between the big cities – while the service to smaller, needier places is often made worse, and the local services which carry 90 per cent of passengers decay for lack of funds.
For most of the last decade, long-distance high-speed rail has dominated, distorted and damaged Britain’s transport policy, at the direct expense of things which matter more. Last year, even on the official figures, the government spent 57 per cent more on HS2 than on local public transport across the entire country.
That’s thanks in part to a hugely effective lobbying campaign by the construction and consultancy industries. The well-known Northern Powerhouse Partnership – endlessly quoted by the BBC and bombed-out local papers as representative of the north – is in fact substantially a lobbying operation for high-speed rail; eight of its ten private-sector directors have commercial interests in HS2. High-speed rail is a terrible deal for the taxpayer and public, but a decades-long buffet for those guys, the only real winners.
The lobbyists’ main advantage is that many politicians do not understand the turkey they’re being asked to buy. They think NPR means better services all round. In response to Tice, the Lib Dem MP for Cheadle, Tom Morrison, tweeted that the plans will be ‘massive for our region’. In fact, if the northern leg of HS2 ever did get built, Mr Morrison’s local station, Stockport, would lose at least two-thirds of its trains to London.
Tice says, rightly, that the political obsession with high-speed rail is one small part of how mainstream politics has lost touch with voters’ real wishes and needs. Ministers and metro mayors now have a choice. They can cling to chimerical high-speed schemes that are ever less likely to happen, given the deterioration of the public finances and of HS2 Phase 1. Or they can get started on something that would work. And if mainstream politicians want to fight Reform on this, I think they will lose.
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