Well, it didn’t take long for Rishi Sunak’s conference to be derailed by the fate of the HS2 rail link. Today reports began to emerge that Rishi Sunak would officially announce at conference that the Birmingham to Manchester leg of the route would be scrapped – ending over a week of speculation about his plans for the route.
The reports have been denied by Downing Street, with a spokesman saying that ‘No final decisions have been taken on Phase 2 of HS2’. But the news has already managed to create ructions at conference.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first person to head for the soap box was Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who organised an impromptu press conference in response to the rumours, where he called for the government to ‘end the shambles’, saying ‘It’s no way to do things, it’s no way to run a country.’
The government will be far more concerned though about the reaction of West Midlands Mayor Andy Street, the poster boy of the government’s levelling up agenda. Following Burnham’s lead, Street organised his own press conference outside the Midland hotel, where he called on Sunak to change his mind and keep the Birmingham to Manchester line intact. Street said if Sunak failed to go ahead with HS2, he would be turning his back on a ‘once in a generation opportunity to level up’ and would be damaging ‘our international reputation as a place to invest.’ Street suggested that more private sector investment was needed to make HS2 viable, but Sunak needed to ‘stay the course’.
Sunak now seems to be caught in a pretty uncomfortable position. His original plan to delay the HS2 announcement until the autumn was perhaps meant to avoid a bust-up at conference in Manchester. Instead, ministers have spent every day of conference being pestered about their plans for the line without being able to give an adequate answer. As Isabel says, those questions aren’t going to go away. Now though if Sunak does go ahead with the scrappage announcement, he can expect a furious reaction from Street and other local leaders, which could end up overshadowing his conference speech.
Downing Street will surely be wondering now whether it would have been wiser to make the HS2 announcement last week when the cut-backs were first reported.
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