Crossrail 2
London’s Crossrail 2 has been mothballed. ANDREW MOURANT explains what’s happened to the £41 billion scheme - and what might come next
With fare income flattened by COVID and passenger numbers down, what are the prospects for the mothballed £41bn project?
Few who follow the saga of Crossrail 2 were surprised to hear that the scheme has been mothballed. The news dribbled out in a statement in November regarding the Government’s bailout of Transport for London ( TfL).
So dire is TfL’s predicament - its fare income and financial planning flattened by COVID-19 - that hard choices had to be made. Halting preliminary work on the grand plan for a tunnelled railway linking London and its suburbs north to south - apart from safeguarding the proposed route - seems an obvious option given that TfL has to find yet more money for Crossrail 1. The Elizabeth Line is now due to open in 2022.
For so ambitious a scheme (C2’s costs were last estimated at £ 41 billion), there’s long been a lack of momentum. Now there will be “an orderly end” to consultancy work. For the foreseeable future, all that will happen is work to “refresh” route safeguarding and those “whose developments are affected”.
Given TfL’s finances, C2 says it’s in no position to confirm when work on seeking consent can restart: “Crossrail 2 will still be needed… the project has been put in good order, ready to be restarted when the time is right.”
Any predictions of future demand have been scrambled by Brexit and COVID-19. Yet C2 seems to have been in the shadows for almost three years. RAIL was alerted to a lack of progress in 2019 as interested parties, MPs among them, sought to discover what was going on.
The findings of a Department for Transport-commissioned affordability review carried out in 2018 and overseen by Mike Gerrard, former managing director of Thames Tideway Tunnel, remain concealed.
Silence about C2’s progress appears to date from Gerrard’s conclusions. Although a notional route with optional variants was established in March 2015, successive Secretaries of State for Transport have failed to reach a decision.
A briefing paper written by transport researcher Andrew Haylen for the House of Commons in 2019 raised questions about C2’s wider economic benefits: “According to the
NIC [National Infrastructure Commission] these are highly uncertain in comparison to traditional value-for-money assessments,” Haylen wrote.
Meanwhile, London Assembly members continued to press for C2. In July 2019, the transport committee’s Caroline Pidgeon tabled a motion of support.
“The capital’s transport network will grind to a halt without Crossrail 2 - 17 underground stations will buckle under crowding pressures and thousands of passengers arriving at
Euston on HS2,” she said.
“Tube stations on the Northern Line will face such severe overcrowding that they will have to regularly close to passengers. Even more pressure will be put upon Clapham Junction and Waterloo. No other infrastructure project tackles so many local and regional challenges while boosting overall capacity on such a scale.”
In October 2019, the DfT’s Board Investment and Commercial Committee considered the updated C2 business case. In March 2020, the Department finally announced that this was “technically robust”, requiring “no further work… and could be used to support a decision at the next… spending review”.
Glimpses of what had been happening dribbled out of a TfL Programmes and Investment Committee in March 2020, just before COVID-19 turned lives upside down. A report from Managing Director Michele Dix’s office referred to “the reduced remit of the 2019/20 business plan”.
This included the latest demand forecasts and impact of C1 on C2’s funding and financing assumptions. Additional design development was required “to confirm the viability of some aspects”, which suggests that past ambitions were being reined in.
Dix has led a TfL and Network Rail Integrated Project Team (IPT) for five years to develop the scheme. However, the report said that “to help minimise costs during 2020/21, measures have been taken to deploy Crossrail 2 staff in support of other business objectives”.
But “critical knowledge… would not be lost… demobilising the [team] and supply chain before a decision on the next steps would create a loss of momentum and project knowledge. Re-mobilising the IPT and potentially re-procuring the supply chain… would introduce additional expenditure and delay scheme development if a positive decision were… obtained at the Spending Review.”
The contents of a supplementary paper were suppressed under the Local Government Act 1972 on grounds “that it contains information relating to the business affairs of TfL”.
And a Freedom of Information request by
RAIL to the DfT, to see a copy of the now-approved C2 business case, was rejected “because the information relates to the formulation and development of government policy”.
Three months on from the meeting, as COVID-19 bit, came warnings of an irreversible decline for office space demand in central London.
Yet one source who worked on C2
The capital’s transport network will grind to a halt without Crossrail 2 - 17 underground stations will buckle under crowding pressures and thousands of passengers arriving at Euston on HS2…
Caroline Pidgeon, London Assembly member
planning in its early days told RAIL that even pre-Coronavirus there was a sense that C2 “wasn’t going anywhere”.
“There was a minority view from TfL that this was the right project for ten years ago, but that it wasn’t [the] right project now. I think that view was… accelerated by the pandemic,” he said.
In December 2020, after the announcement that development work on C2 would halt, London’s Deputy Mayor for Transport Heidi Alexander told transport committee members: “We have to be realistic about what large infrastructure projects we should contribute to over the next decade. We’ve lost 70% of our fare income through COVID-19. If we get back to 80% ridership, that equates to £1 billion in lost fare income.
“Our priority is to keep services running and finish projects under way. We have to focus on that until… a proper funding package is put together for something like C2. We have lost significant income from the GLA [Greater London Authority] and Mayor’s Infrastructure Levy [MIL]… a critical part of the mix for C2.”
Elizabeth Line cost overruns have dealt C2 a heavy blow. The extra £ 825 million being made available by the DfT to help finish the east-west project must be repaid by the GLA via London’s business rate supplement and from the MIL.
Who then will determine C2’s fate? And when? In November, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a National Infrastructure Strategy. The National Infrastructure Commission is embarking on a “a new, comprehensive review of the UK’s evolving… priorities”.
This is due for publication in 2023 and “will also have to assess the longer-term impact of COVID-19… including any behaviour and technological changes catalysed by the pandemic,” Sunak added.
“Government will… ensure a new and better type of rail network emerges. But some
While the government agonises over how to deliver on levelling up, spending another £40bn on London does not seem a particularly attractive idea. C2 for now at least is effectively a dead duck.
Steve Norris, Former Transport Minister
We have to be realistic about what large infrastructure projects we should contribute to over the next decade. We’ve lost 70% of our fare income through COVID-19. Heidi Alexander, London’s Deputy Mayor for Transport
behavioural changes… are likely to endure… people are likely to spend more time working from home.”
A hint that 2023 could be D-Day for deciding on C2? Not necessarily: Transport Secretaries can make decisions independently.
Questions around key aspects raised by RAIL in 2019 remain unanswered. For instance, that of a station at King’s Road, Chelsea - informed opinion believes the idea has been killed off.
The blackout over C2 leaves an information vacuum. What, for instance, will happen with the proposed Euston St Pancras station? According to C2, this would help reduce crowding on the Victoria and Northern lines by 25% and be served by up to 30 trains hourly. The plan is to link the Underground stations of Euston and King’s Cross.
C2 says the new station would reduce overcrowding on the busiest Northern and Victoria services by up to 25% and offer interchange with HS2.
Yet in December, Private Eye reported that “Crossrail 2’s £ 41bn cost estimate was inflated by a dog-leg detour past Euston so that HS2 wouldn’t overwhelm Euston’s meagre Tube services. Now it’s been decided that Crossrail 2 won’t come through Euston.”
When asked about this, a TfL spokesman told RAIL: “The Secretary of State has not made any decisions on the route… and that would include Euston.”
Few are more sceptical about the need for C2 than infrastructure consultant Steve Norris, a transport minister in John Major’s government.
“C2 may have made sense 30-odd years ago when first proposed but makes little commercial sense now,” he tells RAIL.
“The city is a very different place. Postpandemic the likelihood is that the London travel to work area will alter yet again as more firms/employees take advantage of flexible working and commuting patterns change.
“I think part of the problem is that we’ve spent millions of pounds on a route team, but no one wants to say: ‘let’s stop’.
“I’d scrap the whole exercise and sit down with the best planners to decide whether, and in which case where, a new cross-London [line] should go. While the Government agonises over how to deliver on levelling up, spending another £40bn on London does not seem a particularly attractive idea. C2 for now at least is effectively a dead duck.”
Norris has long called for C2 to be re-routed, so that it joins the Northern Line Extension at the former Battersea Power Station (now a housing and office complex). He’s also argued for C2’s south western tip to extend to Chessington South, “where there’s capacity to build 9,000+ homes and create 1,000 jobs… which combined would make a huge impact on the cost”.
Moreover, a north eastern extension up to Stansted “would connect that airport properly to central London rather than leaving it with the pretty drab chuffer to Liverpool Street”.