In April 2020, the then chancellor Rishi Sunak gave his approval to a new railway to Birmingham, expected to cost £44bn. Contracts were promptly signed. The overall HS2 project is estimated at £100bn. An infuriated Whitehall official told me at the time: “Never let that man say he cannot afford any item of public expenditure.”
The ambition was soon trimmed. HS2 will no longer go to Yorkshire, only to Birmingham and Manchester. A 10-year-old plan for Euston station, on which more than £100m has already been spent, must be radically redesigned. Rail passenger numbers even in the Midlands have fallen, leaving HS2 largely to benefit commuters into Birmingham and from London’s home counties. .
This enormous sum is, eerily, not far off the annual “black hole” in British borrowing that the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, says he must fill in this week’s budget. The roughly £7bn a year to 2029 is more than is planned for all England’s school buildings and only a billion short of last year’s NHS capital budget. It would more than meet the social care uplift promised by Boris Johnson but not yet awarded.
Sunak’s chancellor claims he wants to crack down on “outrageous” waste of public money. Yet in 2018 it was revealed that £4.1bn had been spent before work even began, with “consultants” getting £600m. The extravagance of the project has been condemned by Whitehall economists, public accounts committee chairs and project assessors galore. Its backers now claim it is too far advanced to cancel, with giant boring engines deep under the Chilterns. Yet those with noses firmly in the public trough always claim this. A New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, famously halted a rail tunnel under the Hudson river by simply ordering the contractors to fill in the hole.
If terminated, HS2 will have cost some £8bn, though many of its London acquisitions – including the land of 400 destroyed Camden homes – must be worth a fortune. But stopping it would save gigantic sums. In addition, billions of pounds could be diverted to rail projects that are really needed, in the north and in Wales, and are being sidelined by the Treasury to pay for HS2. Cancellation would release an army of 26,000 building workers into Britain’s chronically short-staffed construction industry.
Johnson’s Cabinet Office minister, Kit Malthouse, once dubbed HS2 the “killer whale” that stalked spending debates during his term of office. Its lobbyists fought for its survival as a totem of the glory days of Tory statism under David Cameron and George Osborne.
Since then the only question asked of successive prime ministers has been, “Will they have the courage to kill it?” This week £44bn is going begging. It could be spent on public services. As it is, HS2 has nothing to do with trains, only with political guts. We are about to learn if Sunak has any.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
