It is death by gangrene. No government seems to have the guts to kill HS2, Britain’s biggest and craziest infrastructure project, so each merely lops off another limb. In 2021, it was Leeds. Now the opening of the Birmingham-to-Manchester and Acton-to-Euston lines has been delayed.
This railway is a southern project on which the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is blowing a staggering £100m a week or £5bn a year. He is paying HS2’s boss £622,000 a year, and its executives in the region of £250,000. After six hopeless chairs, Whitehall last month desperately turned to a civil servant, Sir Jonathan Thompson, to take charge.
Even on present guesstimates, the core HS2 will not reach Birmingham until the mid-2030s. As for the bizarre decision to head for Euston, that cannot be realised until about 2040. By then, the citizens of Camden, who have already lost hundreds of homes to this railway, will have overlooked a wilderness on their doorstep for 20 years or more. The world’s finest contractors will have taken a quarter century to build a project that Robert Stephenson finished in five years with picks and shovels. This is inexcusable.
The inertia of the rest of Whitehall on the issue is baffling. The Department for Transport has been under mounting pressure to find cost savings from HS2 – or let other, non-HS2 rail investment projects lapse. The National Audit Office whimpers occasionally, when it should have wielded the axe long ago. To its backers, HS2 has become like Brexit, the mistake that dare not speak its name.
Railways are going through an agonising period as Britons reassess how they wish to work and travel. Local commuting remains significantly down on pre-Covid levels. Long-distance services are down by over a half, even before the current strikes. These figures destroy even the wildest value-for-money case for what is a duplicate luxury line from Birmingham to London.
On the other hand, they do offer ministers a golden opportunity to cry halt and review rail investment as a whole. Under pressure from the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, Hunt will this week announce a “devolution revolution” in his budget. This will delegate to regional mayors choice of infrastructure priorities, notably in transport. It should be for them to decide what railways their part of the country wants to see.
Local services in south Lancashire and West Yorkshire are now dreadful, and will stay that way as long as HS2 consumes transport’s capital budget. Hunt still has around £50-60bn to spend on HS2, so why not offer it to the northern regions, which this project was supposed to benefit, but will do so no longer? Let them decide what do with it. He could then sell his Camden wasteland for development – or for a memorial park to Robert Stephenson. This year is the 50th anniversary of the unravelling of Whitehall’s last great transport fixation, London’s Motorway Box. The death of HS2 would be a suitable commemoration.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
