Northern Powerhouse condemns Adam Smith report

The Northern Powerhouse Partnership has criticised a paper on High Speed 2 by the Adam Smith Institute, which claims that the new railway will deliver “limited benefits”.

Written by Adrian Quine, Don’t Railroad it Through argues that HS2 is poorly managed, excessively complex, “unnecessarily fast”, that its motivation is political, and that some Northern cities could lose direct trains to London.

The report recommends the upgrading of existing routes with new signalling and doubling the number of tracks, reopening mothballed lines, and building new sections of “conventional high speed” railway, as well as targeting bottlenecks at key junctions.

It also advocates upgrading the Chiltern Main Line and reopening the southern section of the former Great Central Railway between London and Rugby.

However, member of the Northern Powerhouse independent panel review Sir Howard Bernstein dismissed the conclusions, saying: “Just because this commentator thinks this is a poorly managed project does not mean its essential purpose is wrong.

“He at least has the good grace to admit what many opponents of HS2 fail to recognise - that there is an impending capacity problem which has to be addressed. His solution, however, is so typical of the professional or expert establishment largely based in the South East - give them some capacity uplift by modernising a few junctions. Just like the West Coast Main Line several years ago - years of misery for a marginal benefit.

“Sorry, this won’t do. The North deserves better and will continue to campaign to ensure we secure a proper share of national resources and meet our ambitions so that we achieve our full economic potential.”

Northern Powerhouse Partnership Director Henri Murison added: “The North is not going to stand for cancelling HS2 in order to pay for a list of schemes which go nowhere near increasing capacity to the extent we need, and which certainly don’t address the challenges of travelling between the Midlands and northern cities like Sheffield and Leeds.”