Why we’re all in for a bumpy ride on the HS2 journey
The fraught political game of chess behind the future of the rail network
east-west high speed links that has been talked up by government, but hasn’t actually been signed off.
They want it all to be one project, while the Northern Powerhouse Partnership has been explicit in calling for it by delivered by the north itself, through a body separate to the Department for Transport.
“The clowns who have got them into this mess, we shouldn’t assume they are going to be the same people who come up with the answers Boris is asking to be found for him,” says one senior figure sympathetic to that argument, who concedes there are probably efficiencies to be found.
“Would you trust the DfT to do anything right? Everything they’ve touched has been wrong.”
Nevertheless, getting that one giant rail project designed and delivered will be the real test for northern political consensus and for its ability to stop the government exerting divide and rule tactics.
There are certainly big question marks hanging over both elements of the scheme.
In the case of the northern stretch of HS2, there are suspicions in many quarters that the eastern leg to Leeds could yet be dropped, not least because there were briefings to that effect in the autumn. Even though transport secretary Grant Shapps has insisted both legs will be built, as one insider says, ‘it would be naive to assume that the eastern leg was 100 per cent nailed on’.
This fear is heightened by the potential that the Manchester to Leeds stretch of Northern Powerhouse Rail – which Boris Johnson was notably quick to green light within days of entering Number 10 – could be treated as an alternative. That would in effect mean Leeds would still be on the HS2 network, via the NPR extension from Manchester, but it would abandon South Yorkshire and the East Midlands.
There are also suspicions that this is quietly Greater Manchester’s current game. The city council recently commissioned a report by the consultancy Bechtel to draw up a new design for an underground station at Piccadilly, which would integrate HS2 and NPR together. Its new proposal would do that so smoothly that some fear it could undermine the argument for the eastern leg of HS2 further down the line.
This tension was not helped at the weekend by the intervention of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who told Sky News that while he still wanted to see both HS2 and NPR built, perhaps NPR could be ‘prioritised’ first.
This went down like a lead balloon among some northern figures and led a number to speculate privately that Burnham’s allies had been ‘thrown under the bus’. One scathingly described the comments as ‘erratic behaviour’ so soon before the government’s announcement, while another said that the ‘symbolism’ of the timing and the tone meant the mayor had ‘tiptoed’ into territory that could