Full speed ahead
A green light for HS2
Boris Johnson ended months of speculation on Tuesday by confirming that the HS2 highspeed rail project will go ahead. Building work on the line’s first phase, linking London to Birmingham, will begin next month, to be completed by 2031. Its second phase, linking the line to Manchester and Leeds, will be put on hold pending a six-month review and will be renamed High Speed North. “The Cabinet has given high-speed rail the green signal,” said Johnson. “We’re going to get this done.”
In an attempt to “restore discipline” to the programme – which has been beset by delays and has seen projected costs balloon from
£32.7bn to £106bn – a new minister will be appointed to oversee it. And HS2 Ltd, the governmentowned company created to deliver the 345-mile line, will be given a downgraded role: it will be stripped of the power to run the second phase and will lose responsibility for redeveloping Euston station, the main London terminus.
What the editorials said
“There can be no excuse for further delays,” said The Times. Britain hasn’t built an intercity rail line in more than a century; our railways are creaking under the weight of capacity and our roads are overcrowded. HS2 – Europe’s largest infrastructure project
– is “vital” to improving connections and productivity outside London. Like most megaprojects, it has been poorly managed, said the FT. Costs have spiralled, and delays have been many. “But the long-term benefits which could be felt decades from now are worth the risk.”
Criticisms of the scheme are well-rehearsed, said The Daily Telegraph. Don’t local improvements offer better value for money? Can’t longer trains provide extra capacity? Must we really “desecrate the countryside to shave a few minutes off travel times”? We share those reservations, said the Daily Mail. But the Tories won the election with a pitch to “level up” Britain; abandoning the project now would have been a “massive climbdown”. Even so, the scale of opposition both inside and outside his party means this is a “bold statement of purpose” from the PM.
What the commentators said
HS2 will “rival the great engineering enterprises of the Victorian era”, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. It will create about 50,000 jobs and boost Britain’s economic output by £15bn a year, while trains with a top speed of 250mph will slash journey times. Johnson is building a legacy which will “remain on track for generations”. The project is absurdly expensive, said Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph. France, Japan and Spain have all built high-speed lines for a tenth of HS2’s projected cost. In Britain, though, infrastructure schemes are hobbled by woeful management, onerous planning rules, a shortage of engineers and the high price of land. Even so, this one will be worth its massive price tag, transforming Britain for centuries to come. “Let’s get on with it and once more exhibit the can-do spirit that seems to have deserted us.”
So the “blank cheque on wheels” has the green signal, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. It remains a highly dubious project. Who knows if, by the 2030s, the advent of driverless cars will leave high-speed rail “looking a bit last-century”? Or if it will end up being, like many such lines, prohibitively expensive to run? What we do know is that Johnson has strange ideas about how to invest in northern England. “If economic rebalancing is your thing, who’d start HS2 at the London end?” The North won’t get anything for decades. The only guaranteed line is Birmingham to London, “sucking more people into the capital”. Johnson must do better than this if he wants to “level up” Britain, agreed Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Northern voters didn’t back the Tories for “faster trains to London”; a £5bn package for bus and cycle links, announced alongside HS2, is little consolation. In the meantime, commuters in Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham are stuck with “knackered, overcrowded” trains the Tories have long promised to fix, said Dean Kirby in the I newspaper. If it really wants to win over northern voters, it should promise “long-overdue improvements to their daily commute”.
What next?
Building work on the route from London to Birmingham will begin by the end of March, almost a year after it was supposed to start. The 140-mile section, which includes 25 miles of tunnels, is due to be completed between 2028 and 2031.
A new delivery body, called High Speed North, will be created to deliver the second leg of the line, which is subject to a six-month review by the National Infrastructure Commission. Ministers have already conceded, however, that trains on the tracks may be limited to “conventional” speeds of up to 125mph .