Labour “making decision“ over whether to back HS2 next spring

New shadow transport secretary Mary Creagh says "we are in the process of making that decision" when asked if Labour will support the High Speed 2 bill.

By George Eaton

I noted yesterday that new shadow transport secretary Mary Creagh had made some strikingly sceptical comments about High Speed 2, warning, in an echo of Ed Balls’s conference speech, that “we need to ensure it is the best way to spend £50 billion for the future of our country”.

Today, in another significant intervention, Creagh has revealed that Labour is “in the process” of deciding whether or not to support the HS2 bill next spring. While her predecessor, Maria Eagle, declared in her conference speech, “we support High Speed 2”, Labour has now moved to a position of genuine agnosticism.

Here’s Creagh’s exchange with Adam Boulton on Sky News earlier today.

Adam Boulton: The situation is going to be again, we are talking about 2015, talking about Labour coming in are they in favour of it or not?

Mary Creagh: The Bill is going through Parliament we are going to have it on the 31^st October, the paving Bill, we are then going to have…

AB: Which you are going to support?

MC: We are. And then we are going to have the big hybrid Bill coming forward in March or April next year so there is a lot of work to be done and we will be going through the government’s figures with a fine tooth comb.

AB: Can you pledge whether you are going to support it or not?

MC: Well we are in the process of making that decision and when we make it you’ll be the first to know.

Creagh later added:

It would be, you know, it would be easier if they’d done more work on it, we are still actually at the very beginnings of it. I was at the Department yesterday, I looked at the proposals for the line to go from Birmingham to Leeds, there are going to be a lot of communities that are looking at it and making their input on what the line could do and of course as soon as you start to introduce tunnelling it is £100m per kilometre, that is very expensive.

Based on that, the odds are against Labour backing the bill in March/April. If the party does U-turn, the choice facing the coalition will be whether to persist with the project in the face of opposition, or to argue that it is not viable without cross-party support (due to the time frame involved) and to find its own way of spending that £50bn.