As if many true blue parts of England didn’t dislike the Chancellor enough, today’s Financial Times adds to his misdemeanours renewed support for High Speed 2. Their splash (£) reports that despite fresh concerns from Treasury officials over the sums, George Osborne is still pushing ahead with the new line. According to the pink ‘un, Osborne sees the project as ‘an emblem of the coalition’s commitment to spread growth more evenly across the country’. I’m sure many of his fellow Tories will be disappointed that he isn’t backtracking instead.
Osborne’s rallying cry doesn’t drown out the scary new figure that the FT has for the cost of HS2. The original estimate was £10 billion, which shot up to £33 billion in 2012, £35 billion in 2013 and to £43 billion in June. The latest figures from Whitehall now put HS2 at £73 billion (including inflation adjustment), below the £80 billion estimated by the Institute of Economic Affairs. To give some context to these numbers, the last round of upgrades to the West Coast Mainline ended up costing £10 billion, with a decade of disruption for only minimal gains.
The question the Chancellor is answering with his commitment is: do we patch and mend our Victorian railways or start afresh with something new? In tomorrow’s Spectator, Ross Clark — who argued last year HS2 was doomed to failure — thinks differently and is explains why any new high speed lines should be rejected here and around the world:
‘It is a conclusion at which other countries are gradually arriving, having themselves invested billions in high-speed rail. Last month the Hollande government cancelled a planned TGV line from Paris to Nice, declaring that the money would be better invested in existing railways, whose poor condition was soon afterwards highlighted by a crash caused by badly maintained rails in the Parisian suburbs. The Spanish high-speed rail system has failed to attract anything like the passenger numbers predicted. The economic case for a proposed line from San Francisco to Los Angeles has been undermined as costs have grown and the planned sections of the line have been chopped, so that it is now unlikely to happen.’
Fraser Nelson and I disagree on HS2 and debated the pros and cons on this week’s View from 22 podcast. This is what we had to say:
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