WILL HS2 HIT THE BUFFERS?
Is Britain’s biggest infrastructure project coming off the rails, asked the Daily Mail. HS2, the controversial high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, is projected to cost a whopping £56bn. But last week the PM’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, referred to it as a “disaster zone”, and days after that remark Boris Johnson ordered an “independent and rigorous” review to determine whether HS2 is an economically viable solution to the UK’s transport needs or, as some say, just a preposterously expensive vanity project. Announcing the review, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said that a panel of experts, led by former HS2 chairman Douglas Oakervee, would judge whether the £56bn budget was realistic or more likely, in Johnson’s own words earlier this year, to end up “north of £100bn”. And the panel would then examine all options: to “reprioritise”; to “descope”; even to cancel.
The review is welcome, said Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. No one disputes that our railways are outmoded, nor that HS2 would create thousands of jobs. But even if it did succeed in “shaving half an hour off journey times”, would this really serve to bridge the “North-South divide” or provide the “massive boost” to growth that ministers claim? If the project had kept within its initial budget, possibly so, but the budget is now spiralling out of control and at some point, you have to cry halt. That we’ve been hoodwinked by bogus costings isn’t in doubt, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. From the off, HS2 has been a “masterpiece of fake news, courtesy of the British state”. The more we saw of its blossoming extravagance, the more officials insisted it remained on budget. Now the scale of their “mendacity” is apparent: this week it was revealed that then transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin raised concerns as far back as May 2016. It’s not a question of whether it should be killed but “whether Johnson has the guts to kill it”. Quite the contrary, Britain urgently needs HS2, said Will Hutton in The Observer. Only by building a high-speed rail network can the UK hope to achieve its ambitious target of becoming Europe’s number one economy.
Well, the good news for those in favour of HS2, said Patrick O’Flynn in the Daily Express, is that with a former HS2 boss as its chair, this review is unlikely to recommend “pulling the plug”. But you can see the PM’s logic in “dangling the idea” of reconfiguring or even scrapping it entirely. It will dramatically help his prospects in an autumn election, proving popular both in Tory seats appalled by the prospective environmental damage to their neighbourhood and in Labour marginals where voters feel the money would be far better spent on local schemes – a new line from Manchester to Leeds, for example. Having a review in progress means Johnson won’t have to make any manifesto commitment about it in a forthcoming election. Whatever you think of HS2, it’s smart politics.