The case for HS2 has been derailed

Wander around Birmingham and you are hit by the sheer amount of building work the city has seen in the past decade. But among the new towers sits a forlorn Victorian cube, the former Curzon Street station, isolated on a tract of empty land and waiting for the future to catch up with it.

The site has been earmarked for the Birmingham terminus of High Speed 2, a gleaming new train shed; the old Curzon Street, which last saw off a train in 1966, will become a visitor centre.

Reports that Boris Johnson, the new incumbent of No10, is going to review HS2 will have caused Birmingham some unease. Johnson is apparently contemplating building the northern stretch of HS2 first, believing the southern leg, from London to Birmingham, doesn’t offer good value.

Well, good. Any review of the financial black hole that is HS2 must be welcomed. The budget has officially been set at £56bn but there is now talk of £30bn on top of that. Johnson – an equivocal backer of HS2 – has suggested it could top £100bn. Infrastructure projects have a habit of getting away from you. Indeed, if it weren’t for Brexit, we’d all be talking about what a disaster major projects in this country have become.

Take Crossrail, the cross-london tunnel labouring with a two-year delay. The project was allocated £14.8bn in 2010, but the estimated cost has now swollen to £17.8bn, according to a written statement yesterday from Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary.

Or Heathrow’s third runway, backed

by the Government, and by the airport’s owners (most recently yesterday), but likely to run into myriad challenges. Many believe HS2 is a done deal. The building work has begun at either end with a completion date of 2026 for the first section. But the debate is not dead. There are solid arguments in favour of less flashy projects, such as overhauling the rickety Transpennine route.

The case for such projects must start with the data. On Transpennine, studies have questioned how many people commute across the region. Huddersfield, for example, is ideally situated between Manchester and Leeds but passenger stats suggest the flow of commuters going either way is small. Most northerners work and live within the same metropolitan area.

But surely if the trains were better people would commute further? Not necessarily, according to a new report from the Centre for Cities think tank, out next week. Champions of the “Northern Powerhouse” point to Holland and Germany to show the benefits of good infrastructure. Yet here too the figures show people do not commute heavily between cities; intra-city transport is more important.

Moreover, the “push-pull” effect of high wages found in the South-east isn’t much of a factor in the North; people only commute if the wages are higher at the other end of the line, as they are in London.

So, if Johnson wants to move the dial on the nation’s productivity, he could look at building trams and metros in major cities of the North. An even cheaper option is to hand elected mayors more control of bus services to make them more frequent and joined up. This would go some way to reverse the long-term decline in bus use outside London. All of this will help businesses, because it boosts the pool of people from which they can recruit.

None of this is particularly eye-catching stuff. It goes against the politician’s natural instinct to want to cut ribbons on giant projects. Johnson, who once admitted “it takes an awful lot to put me off a jumbo infrastructure project”, would have to draw a line under his championing of the wasteful and wacky schemes that have defined much of his career, from garden bridges to island airports. One characteristic of a Johnson premiership will be this fight against his better nature; the Churchillian yin battling the more familiar Boris yang.

But it could be politically expedient, helping Johnson build bridges in the North and redressing a London-skewed economy. And let’s not forget that he likes buses, too, declaring during the leadership campaign that he paints them on wooden boxes. Though the less said about Boris Buses in London, the better. When it comes to transport, Johnson may have to learn that a little goes a long way.

‘People only commute if wages are higher at the other end of the line. As in London’