The Guardian view on HS2 cancellation: mind the north-south gap
Flying into Granada for the European political community summit on Thursday, Rishi Sunak may have noticed that the Andalusian city is well served by high-speed trains. Granada is not alone. Spain now has the largest high-speed rail network in Europe, with more than 4,300km of track in operation and a further 1,370km under construction. Britain, by contrast, has 113km in operation and, before Mr Sunak’s cancellation of the northern arm of HS2 this week, a further 220km under construction. High-speed rail is an infrastructural triumph for Spain, but a disaster for Britain.
True, Spain is much larger and emptier; Britain is smaller, more crowded and more built-up. But the contrast in the governance and management of the respective projects matters too. Spain essentially gave its state railway infrastructure company the money to build the lines. Britain did not do the same. Instead, with HS2, it started, stopped, started, stopped, hesitated, re-examined, dithered, rethought, cut back and, finally this week, cancelled. It has been a systemic failure.
It did not help that HS2 was started at the wrong end. Rather than beginning work in the north, where the project was principally aimed, it began in the south-east, where the most difficult and most expensive engineering was required in order to carve a route from the centre of London out through the Chiltern hills. One upshot of the cancellation is therefore that HS2 has become another project that will principally benefit the richest part of Britain. Instead of levelling up, HS2 extends the inequality gap.
In his conference speech and interviews, Mr Sunak claims that this will benefit the north. He says spending “every penny” on a range of rail and road upgrades means a better deal than HS2 would have delivered. This is nonsense. The simple truth – as Spain illustrates – is that the two are not alternatives. As originally conceived, HS2 was part of a UK-wide transport modernisation, to be integrated with the socalled HS3 of new and upgraded rail lines in the north. The one depended on the other. But the upgrades announced by Mr Sunak on Wednesday as an alternative to HS2 are not confined to the north and Midlands. So the north will lose out twice.
Mr Sunak tried to promote himself this week as a long-termist leader. The debacle over HS2 tells the opposite story. The cancellation is not merely a piece of short-term thinking, leaving the project half finished. It is also a choice made in a strategic vacuum. It leaves the transport capacity building that was the core reason for building HS2 high and dry – and unsolved. The result will be more crowded roads, more accidents, increased delays and worse pollution. Any benefits are likely to be years away.
The cancellation exposes Britain’s crippling lack of an industrial strategy, a term of which Mr Sunak positively disapproves. Its political and market consequences are likely to be dire. The decision is bound to deter future governments from promoting other infrastructure projects for fear of cancellation, and to discourage future investors from investing in them either. Just at the very time when other countries, most prominently the United States and China, are showing few qualms about building infrastructure for the future and attracting the investment that such plans require, Britain has again set itself apart.
HS2 was never an easy sell, especially environmentally. In the end though, and as David Cameron said after the cancellation, HS2 was also about investing for the future, bringing Britain closer together, creating a more balanced economy, and strengthening the north. These were big goals, worth having, and they have now been thrown away. The verdict of history on what Mr Sunak did this week will rightly be harsh.