This is your fast train to lunacy

Costs ballooning to £106bn. Grandstanding political hubris. And a feeding trough for rapacious consultants – yes, it’s time to kill off the HS2 white elephant, argues ROSS CLARK

PICTURE this: a tradesman gives you a quote to do some work in your house and then comes back weeks or months later — without having so much as lifted a spanner — to tell you the price has leapt by more than 200 per cent.

What would you do? You’d tell him to get lost, of course.

Yet this is something the Government seems incapable of doing when it comes to HS2, the proposed high- speed rail link from London to Leeds and Manchester via Birmingham — the biggest, most controversial infra-structure project ever undertaken in Britain.

But if ever there was a moment to bin this vanity project, then it is now.

In 2012, it was slated to cost £34 billion — enough to build perhaps 70 new hospitals.

Then, in September last year, we were told that the cost had soared to £88 billion.

Yesterday, a leaked draft report from Doug Oakervee, the former chairman of HS2 whom Prime Minister Boris Johnson had asked to ‘independently’ review this potential white elephant, suggests it could reach a frankly obscene cost of £106 billion.

This colossal sum should act as a wake-up call to everyone involved in what has become a shameful monument to grandstanding political hubris.

Lavished

From the moment Gordon Brown’s government first mooted HS2 in 2009, it was clear it would prove to be an out- of- control gravy train for contractors and consultants.

Sure enough, more than £8 billion of taxpayers’ money has been lavished on the project with little to show for it. It has been beset by delays, poor management and allegations that Parliament was misled on the cost of land and property purchases to build it.

An initial planned completion date of 2026 is now forecast to be as late as 2031 — and even up to 2040 for completion of Phase 2 of the project: the Birmingham to Leeds route.

To go ahead now we know the costs would send a ruinous message to contractors bidding for future giant infrastructure projects: just keep bunging the taxpayer new and ever-soaring bills.

As some said of the banks after the financial crash: some projects are too big to fail. Well, sorry, not any more. On HS2, Boris Johnson needs to make a stand.

I am a rail enthusiast. I am in favour, too, of the Government’s ‘levelling-up’ agenda which prioritises investment in the regions after a long history of imbalanced over- spending in London and the South-East.

But HS2 isn’t the way to deliver levelling-up.

The vast sums that have been allocated to it would be better spent on improving rail journeys between cities either side of the Pennines and transforming public transport within northern cities where commuters face a choice between late, overcrowded, expensive trains and gridlocked roads.

The inadequacy of existing services was vividly illustrated earlier this month when TransPennine, which runs services linking Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, the North-East and Scotland, said it was cancelling 40 per cent of its services until the end of January due to a delay in the delivery of new carriages.

And this from a company that was managing to run only 38 per cent of its services on time anyway!

Downing Street, quite rightly, condemned the situation as ‘totally unacceptable’.

It may come as no surprise that cancelling HS2 isn’t what is recommended by the Oakervee Review. As former Chairman of HS2 Ltd, the government-owned company set up to deliver the project, some may think he was never going to say that HS2 is misconceived and a waste of money. Unlike Lord Berkeley — the former Labour minister was deputy chairman of the Review until he resigned, unable to support the farce that is HS2 any longer.

This month the peer said that the business case for HS2 has been hugely overstated and that it is likely to deliver just 60p of economic benefit for every £1 of public money spent on it.

And he identified the essential problem with HS2: it is over-designed. The proposed maximum speed of the trains — 225 mph — seems to have been arrived at not by analysing the geography of Britain or the needs of its citizens, but from our politicians’ desire to boast that we will have the fastest longdistance trains in the world.

Damaging

In a compact country such as Britain, 150 mph for inter-city trains is quite fast enough.

London and Birmingham, for example, are already within 80 minutes of each other by train. Shaving another 25 minutes or so off that journey (according to the Department of Transport, the journey could take 52 minutes) simply isn’t worth the billions involved.

For trains to travel at 225 mph means lines have to be much straighter, requiring extra earthworks.

This is more environmentally damaging — in terms of train carbon emissions and because it is harder to divert the line around ancient woodlands and marshes. The Wildlife Trusts movement warns that, because of HS2, ecosystems will be permanently damaged, irreplaceable habitats destroyed, with ‘ wildlife extinctions at a local level’.

Moreover, at 225 mph the trains can’t stop so frequently. As a result, HS2 bypasses several towns and cities it surely ought to be visiting, such as Coventry, Stoke- onTrent and Nottingham.

Daftest of all is the plan to burrow the line beneath the runway of East Midlands Airport — but not even have a station there. Still not convinced? In Birmingham, most intercity trains stop at New Street station. HS2 would stop at a new station, Curzon Street — a 20- minute schlep away for those requiring onward connections to other destinations in the Midlands. So much for all that time saved!

Defenders of HS2 tend not to bother much with such details. Instead, they talk loosely about the dubious economic advantages and accuse their opponents of ‘negativity’.

Ignored

But, as Lord Berkeley has argued, we could spend money far more sensibly by upgrading lines so that they integrate better with planned improvements to commuter services in the North.

In some cases, it wouldn’t even require extra land — just doubling the existing lines to four tracks.

As for a new inter- city line, the priority should be between Manchester and Leeds, not London and Birmingham.

If London commuters think they have it bad, they should try commuting into Manchester. Last year, a train arriving into this major city at 8.24am was named the country’s most overcrowded, with an average of more than 400 people in carriages with only 191 seats.

Just over a month ago, voters across the Midlands and the North put their trust in the Conservatives to end the London- centric politics that have led to their communities being ignored for decades.

By dumping HS2 and reinvesting the money saved on better public transport between and within cities in the North and the Midlands, the Government has a chance to make a real and lasting difference to business investment and the quality of life in the new Tory heartlands there.

The question is: does Boris have the courage to do it?