Rishi Sunak’s high-profile announcement of projects to be apparently funded by killing the northern leg of HS2 is a gem of political cynicism. He has made the announcement twice before, on 4 October and 17 November last year. He seems to have forgotten.
Each time the sum appears to shrink and delivery grows ever more distant. October began with £36bn for a schoolboy wishlist of engines, trains, trams, buses, roundabouts and even potholes. In November, £8bn was announced, mostly for mended and improved roads. This week, the sum is just £4.7bn for transport projects in general, apparently outside big cities. Funding won’t start until April 2025 and won’t finish until 2032. Meanwhile, Sunak was totally silent on his transport white elephant. At the same time, he would spend £67bn on the single HS2 line from Birmingham to London. The comparison is obscene.
The promised money is not cash sitting waiting for the wishlist of projects announced by Sunak last October. That is because it is not real money. It is that most vacuous of currencies: a political pledge. It is money yet to be borrowed, let alone budgeted, for an unbuilt vanity project. Also, by postponing its start until 2025, Sunak is dumping the pledge on future, presumably Labour, chancellors, and defying them to cancel it.
The schemes mooted at Sunak’s party conference last October were mostly covered in cobwebs. They included a West Yorkshire tram/trolley bus that was cancelled in 2005 and 2016 and announced in 2021. There were murmurs of a Bradford upgrade that had been axed by Sunak himself the previous year. Manchester airport was to be “linked”, which it already was. Electric trains would speed across north Wales. There were to be an assorted 50 new train stations and 70 road schemes. Where are they now?
This time, prudence appears to have taken hold. The notional cash will go into a fund for which northern council leaders can make “proposals”. They will then be “empowered”, in Whitehall speak, to distribute it to “communities”. How this distribution will take place is not revealed, but we can assume the centre will decide.
Sunak says he will hold local authorities to account for spending the money “appropriately”. This is hypocrisy from a prime minister who has lacked the courage to cancel the remaining HS2, a project he derided in October as “[trapping] enormous sums of money that could be far better spent elsewhere”. Today, HS2’s budgets are worthless, its documents redacted, its accountability zero. It is typical central government.
The core HS2 remains the only project whose cancellation might yet free resources for Britain’s most acute transport need: a drastic upgrade of road and rail infrastructure linking the great cities of the north across the Pennines. This link has been rejected by successive Tory governments – and Labour oppositions – dazzled at the glamour of an upmarket railway carrying Britons enticingly to London.
That dazzle continues to distort Britain’s regional economy. There is only one question. Has Keir Starmer the guts to reverse it?
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
