STEPHEN GLOVER
HOW seriously should we take the Government’s decision to set up a review on the viability of the highspeed HS2 link between London and Birmingham, and on to the North?
This review will be completed at breakneck speed. A final decision about whether or not to go ahead is being promised before the end of the year.
I don’t know about you, but I’m sceptical. The Tories are in election mode. Boris Johnson knows that some Conservatives living along the proposed HS2 route are so vehemently opposed to the project that their votes can’t be counted on.
This is true of Boris’s own Uxbridge constituency, through which the proposed line will pass. There is a lot of unhappiness about it in the Prime Minister’s back yard. And Uxbridge, though not quite a marginal, is certainly vulnerable. Imagine if he lost it!
Maybe the plan is to appease disgruntled voters by giving them the impression that the scheme is genuinely being re-considered. Once an election were out of the way, it would be all systems go.
A particular concern is that heading the review is Douglas Oakervee, a civil engineer and former chairman of HS2, who is wildly in favour of the enterprise. Yet his deputy, Labour peer Lord Berkeley, also a civil engineer, is almost equally passionately against.
Have they been appointed by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps in the expectation that they will never agree a joint recommendation, and so will produce a divided report which will then enable the Government to press ahead, assuming the Tories win an election?
I hope I’m wrong, because a thorough review of the whole illadvised idea is urgently called for. The truth is that HS2 looks like one of the biggest white elephants in history.
It is a ruinously expensive vanity project, conceived in the dying days of the last Labour government, and then developed by the Tory-led Coalition without much intellectual rigour ever being applied to it.
LET’S start by examining the cost. Originally, the envisaged price tag was £33 billion. That figure then rose to £43 billion before jumping to £56 billion, where it has rested for the time being.
But no one believes this will be the end of it. The current chairman of HS2, Allan Cook, has reportedly written to the Government recently, suggesting it could bust its budget by up to £30 billion.
If the final bill were £85 billion, that would make HS2 about 12 times more expensive per mile than the high speed TGV in France. The main explanation is that England is a much more densely populated country.
Hundreds of houses have already been compulsorily purchased to make way for the line, although this process has not always been fair and transparent. Many homeowners who live close to the proposed track, but who are not entitled to compensation, have been left embittered and unhappy.
Huge extra costs will also be incurred by building 22.5 miles of tunnels along the 140-mile route to Birmingham plus 56.5 miles of cuttings. The purpose is to shield the sight and noise of the train as much as possible — often from Tory voters.
This is a fantastically costly undertaking. And what benefits will the rail traveller receive? According to the Government, the journey to Birmingham will be cut by almost half an hour when the new line is finished in 2026.
But wait. This is the time saved going to a new station that will be called Birmingham Interchange. To then actually get to the centre of England’s second city, you will have to board another train or tram. It’s possible that, by the time you arrive, your journey will have taken as long as it does now.
This looks very much like madness. It’s true, of course, that the line to Birmingham is supposed eventually (that is, by 2033) to be extended to Manchester and Leeds, though this has not yet been approved by Parliament.
But there is a racing possibility that the money will run out, and that the extensions will never be built. In which case, an enormous amount of money will have been spent, causing huge environmental damage and creating a terrible impact on people’s lives, to get you to the centre of Birmingham in roughly the time it takes at present.
And even if the new lines to Manchester and Leeds are built, what would be the benefit? It seems likely that HS2 will just increase the unhealthy economic dominance of London, as the business community races to the capital to do deals.
If the Government is serious about regenerating the North, it would be far better if it first improved the pathetically slow rail links between major cities such as Manchester and Leeds. The average time of a rail journey of about 44 miles between them is one hour nine minutes.
That is fast by some standards. It takes an average of one hour 18 minutes to travel the 31 miles by train from Newcastle to Middlesbrough. Driving should be quicker, but that is not an option for most commuters.
DURING a recent charm offensive in the North, Boris pledged a new trans-Pennine rail link between Manchester and Leeds, which will cost untold billions. It sounds a good idea, but the upgrading of many other woefully slow lines is no less important.
Incidentally, such schemes would help to increase capacity, which is one of the supposed — and to my mind rather dubious — bonuses of HS2 often trotted out by its advocates.
The kind of improvements I have mentioned would almost certainly do far more to boost the Northern economy than HS2 — if it ever reaches that far. But to the political mind attracted by large scale grandiose projects — and Boris is one such person — they are comparatively dull beer
Could HS2 be cancelled? One argument against doing so is that £6.6 billion has already been lavished on it without a single section of track being laid. If the plan were scrapped, people would justifiably complain that these wasted resources could have been put to good use. Imagine how many new hospitals might have been built.
But there is no virtue in throwing good money after bad. If it is unfortunate to throw away £6.6 billion, it is positively reckless to jettison the best part of £100 billion on an ill-conceived vanity project.
My fear is that the new review will shirk any decisive recommendations, though it may recommend fewer trains travelling at slower speeds in order to save money. To my mind, that would undermine the case for a new high-speed line even further.
Boris, I suspect, may listen to political advisers who will tell him that keeping HS2 is necessary in order to make the North fonder of the Tory Party. It is certainly true that figures such as Labour’s Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester, would bellyache if the idea were killed off.
Against that, a commitment to improve rail links throughout the North — which, by comparison to London, has been starved of infrastructure improvements in recent years — could be fairly represented as evidence of Conservative commitment to the region.
The argument for pulling the plug on this half-baked proposal is surely unanswerable. The question is whether Boris Johnson, when the almost inevitable election has passed, will have the courage to do so.