This week there are to be two HS2s. The first is a truly rotten infrastructure project. The second is a political icon of awesome potency. They have absolutely nothing in common.
From its conception in 2009, HS2 was a dud: a Labour government glamour project revived by the Cameron government in the hope it might counterbalance its plans for extreme local austerity. The coalition eventually landed on a proposal bizarrely linking two dead-end terminuses, Birmingham’s Curzon Street and London’s Euston. It failed to link with Scotland or with Eurotunnel and the continent through St Pancras. The chief beneficiaries would be Midlands commuters and Manchester executives travelling to London. It would do next to nothing for the north, whose need for investment in local railways and particularly roads was, and remains, chronic.
Since going ahead, this incarnation of HS2 has been criticised by every reputable assessor, from Whitehall economists to the National Audit Office and the official Infrastructure and Projects Authority, which last month formally labelled it “unachievable”. Every Treasury inquiry into its ever-rising costs ends by frantically cutting it back. It is now unlikely to reach either Manchester or Euston, let alone Leeds. Meanwhile, six chairs have come and gone, and the company has now lost its £622,000-a-year chief executive, Mark Thurston, Britain’s highest-paid civil servant. Last autumn’s budget imposed £50bn of cuts to government spending, but allowed HS2, with an estimated price tag of £100bn, to continue. As its costs soar, completion is ever more delayed – now into the 2030s.
HS2 is the most expensive infrastructure project in Europe. It is also the most outdated. Rail use in Britain has returned to a slow decline. A mere 1% of British journeys are now made by rail – 7% in terms of distance – and that is mostly commuters. The chief curb on capacity just now is staff shortages, not track, while better signalling would probably do as much to improve journey times in the north. When even the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, a longstanding backer of the project, has to admit as he did last week that its management is “out of control” the project has to be challenged. Hospitals are bursting at the seams, schools crumbling and local services failing. For a government to be spending currently £135m a week, year after year, on a white elephant is indefensible. It is obscene.
That is the reality. The politics is quite different, as politics always is. Politicians, irrational and insane, know that defending infrastructure projects and jeering at any opposition plays well with voters. The gargantuan budgets attract lobbyists like moths to the flame. HS2 is declared – without an ounce of evidence – to be the future of the north, the beacon of levelling up, the custodian of national pride. Forget value for money. This is about patriotism. Don’t criticise.
More to the point, HS2 has become a golden knife to plunge into Rishi Sunak. Predecessors who lacked the guts to cancel or even control it, such as David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, have all lined up in its defence. Keir Starmer and the Lib Dems are in favour, though to his credit, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, has shown some scepticism. The West Midlands and Greater Manchester mayors, Andy Street and Andy Burnham, are still dazzled by getting to London fast, despite knowing they should have first demanded investment for their own commuters. Now they claim oddly that HS2 holds the key to their regional economies.
This must be rubbish. HS2 was a terrible mistake, one that history will not forget. Sunak will have little to be proud of when his premiership probably ends next year. But he could at least win credit for having had the guts to stop this nonsense now. He should cancel HS2 and recoup billions by selling the land. At the same time he should ask northern leaders how else they might invest £100bn. I bet they would jump at it.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
