HS2 was never the north’s salvation

We have to abandon our obsession with this sinkhole of hope and money.

Photo by Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

It’s the spectre that seems fated to haunt British politics forever. Late last week, rumours began to circulate that HS2, the long delayed and perennially over-budget high-speed rail line first floated in the dying days of the last Labour administration, was once again to be extended beyond its present terminus of Birmingham. Even if not a full resurrection, there were rumours of a cut-price “HS2-lite”: a new, slightly slower line running to Crewe, put out to private tender rather than being overseen by the government’s own HS2 ltd, with a further extension on to Manchester coming sometime later.

The government has now slapped down the claims. In addition to renewing efforts to control the project’s endlessly growing costs, they declared yesterday (21 October) that the extension would not be revived, putting an end to a few days of delirious excitement among commentators and politicians. For LBC’s Shelagh Fogarty, Rishi Sunak’s originally scrapping of phase two last October was both “anti-growth” and “anti-doing something about the north of England”. Andy Street, former mayor of the West Midlands, had gone further, saying that the scheme’s potential revival would ensure the country gets “something fit for the century ahead”.

HS2 has long been spoken of in these near messianic terms. And the way that the nation hangs on to every scrap of news about the project, following its tragic progress like some sordid celebrity divorce, is representative of how much doomed hope has been invested. HS2 has come to be seen as not just a train line but a salve to Britain’s entire industrial anachronism – expectations it was always doomed to disappoint.

Beyond such bluster, HS2 would have done the north few favours, even before the extent of its spiralling costs became clear (the London to Birmingham section alone has risen from an initial estimate of £19.4bn to around £66bn). Though it would have eased some capacity issues, the new line would have cut journey times between London and Crewe by around half an hour, while London to Manchester would have had an hour taken off its current 2 hours and 10 minutes travel time: small change for most travellers. Its green credentials were equally inflated – even on the government’s own calculations, and across its 120-year lifespan, its carbon savings were due to be more than offset by the project’s emissions. But, most importantly – given its vaunted symbolism – far from fixing the country’s grossly unequal economic geography, HS2 would only intensify current trends.

Britain’s service-led economic model has accentuated its already highly uneven regional development. The country’s lopsided economic geography is skewed towards finance and property, clustered around its large cities. Its former industrial heartlands are dominated by low-paid and insecure work in retail and logistics, pocked with food banks and homelessness, intergenerational unemployment and poor health. Rather than rectify this, rebalancing the economy away from the wealthy pockets in the south-east, HS2 had the potential to turn swathes of the Midlands and the north-west into dormitory towns for London and the City: Crewe and Nantwich the new Croydon and Penge.

Here I must admit a personal investment. Despite now living in affluent Zone 1, I was born and raised to a railway family in Crewe, one of the country’s great railway towns. My great-grandfather died while laying tracks for the London and North Western Railway. And his son – my grandfather and namesake – spent his early years in the town’s Webb orphanage, named for Francis Webb, the famous rail engineer who rose from a draughtsman to become the “autocratic ruler” of Crewe Works during both it and the town’s rapid expansion in the late 1800s. After a spell in the army in North Africa and British-mandated Palestine, my grandfather returned to Crewe, working for the rest of his life as a guard on the West Coast Main Line.

He was, like many of the town’s sons, passionate about the railways. In the words of another local boy, the novelist William Cooper, he grew up with “steam in his veins”. I may have taken a rather different route, away from the town, but I feel intensely for it and its future. And far from being the stereotypical HS2 critic – ensconced in the Chilterns, perhaps, and worried about the depreciating value of my house, with high-speed trains soon to rattle the windows – I believe that greater investment in the Midlands and the north is sorely needed, not least in its public transport systems.

The important question is, however, cui bono? As the New Economics Foundation reported in 2019, of the projected “passenger benefits” of HS2, 40 per cent would accrue to London, a figure, they noted, that was “significantly ahead of the capital’s share of national gross value added”. What this would mean, in other words, is that nearly half of the economic benefits of HS2 would flow to the south-east, compared to only 18 per cent to the north-west and 12 per cent to the West Midlands. The scheme does of course have its intelligent advocates, not least the rail engineer and journalist Gareth Dennis, who has been right to point out that one of the key virtues of HS2 would be the freeing up of space on the already overburdened West Coast Main Line, allowing more commuter services and, importantly, freight to run on existing track. And the worst outcome in this regard is exactly the truncated service left by Sunak’s cuts, which while speeding up services to Birmingham would reduce capacity further along the line by up to 17 per cent.

That said, it is hard to look beyond the time and money wasted on what was always clearly a white elephant. Britain’s broader transport infrastructure has long been in need of urgent upgrade. Local bus routes have been slashed in recent decades, and anyone who has tried to take a train across the Pennines can attest to both the depth and breadth of the rail network’s failings. Its immediate electrification should have been a government priority long ago, along with more frequent and better InterCity services. But we also shouldn’t pin our hopes of levelling Britain’s regional inequality on an individual train line. It is only by looking beyond London, and its radiating financial and logistical tentacles, that those grander ambitions can be realised.

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