We’re on a fast track to £100bn white elephant

The world’s first commercial railway opened in 1830, from Manchester to Liverpool. For over a century, though, the UK hasn’t built a major route north of London.

The case for HS2 – the proposed high-speed link from the capital to Birmingham, then on to Manchester and Leeds – is rooted, perhaps, in a sense of national greatness lost. If France, Germany and Japan can have high-speed rail, why not the UK? Yet over the 10 years since the project was launched, the underlying HS2 business rationale has kept shifting.

With a top speed of 250mph, the main attraction was a near halving of journey times between London and the North. That argument was undermined by growing internet connectivity, facilitating work on trains. The case shifted to capacity – but the London-to-Birmingham route is already well-served, with trains on average only 43pc full.

More recently, HS2 has been sold as a way of addressing the North-South divide. Over the past two months, though, while making a Dispatches documentary to be broadcast tomorrow, I’ve heard much testimony challenging that argument, too. With special track and rolling stock, high-speed rail is hugely expensive.

HS2 cost estimates have ballooned from £33billion to £56billion. Industry insiders put the eventual bill above £100billion, which would make HS2 the most expensive railway ever built. Numerous experts told me there are far better ways to spend public money on trains. Cost-benefit analysis suggests investing instead in better links into and between our big Northern cities – so-called “Northern Powerhouse Rail”. That could promote genuine regional prosperity by creating an alternative UK growth centre beyond the South East.

With passenger dissatisfaction across the rail network at a 10-year high, reflecting near-record delays, higher returns are more likely investing not in high-speed rail but humdrum commuter routes.

Spending on HS2, around £4billion to date, is about to crank up – to £4.2billion a year for the next 10 years as serious construction begins. Amid spiralling costs, I learnt that a growing group of Cabinet ministers are “increasingly minded to kill off HS2”. Their logic is that, given the need to see off Corbyn, quick upgrades to local commuter services used by millions of voters daily are a far better investment than an expensive high-speed route taking a decade or more to deliver.

“HS2: The Great Train Robbery” Dispatches,