Cancelling HS2 is the worst decision by a British PM in decades
It gets worse the more you look at it
I have been following British politics intensely since the late 1990s and there have been many bad decision in that time. Yet in its short-termism, lack of consultation, and inability to address the problem at hand, nothing I can remember quite tops Rishi Sunak’s decision to abandon the northern leg of HS2, the high-speed rail link currently under construction from London to Manchester.
First, the serious contenders. Blair and Iraq comes instantly to mind – and to be clear, I do not put stuffing up a train line on the same degree of severity as taking the country into a calamitous war. Nonetheless, a crucial point disqualifies it from top spot; the war would have still gone ahead whatever his view on it, in fact the decision Blair was making was whether to try and influence the outcome of the war via UK involvement. Clearly, Blair miscalculated the degree of British influence, but within the framework of options open to him the logic of his decision can at least be followed. It is also worth placing that decision within the wider context on the War of Terror, with its pervading sense in the West that ‘Something had to be done.’
Another serious contender might be the decision by David Cameron to hold an EU referendum. Certainly, the concept of subjecting your country’s foreign policy to the whims and surprises of what was effectively, as I believe John McDonnell said, a giant by-election, seems particularly foolhardy. Anyone with an ounce of sense of the country they were governing would have known how giving the British the opportunity to take a free hit at their ruling class would go.
Yet there were still good democratic arguments for having some kind of vote on British membership of the EU; the organization really had changed since 1973, and 43 years seemed enough time to seek the renewal of the public’s democratic consent. Plus the need for a vote did have a mandate by being included in the 2015 Conservative election manifesto. In addition, bad a job as Cameron did, he didn’t actually advise British people to vote for Brexit and indeed argued strongly against it; the decision is in the end that of the 17.4 million people who voted for it.
Another contender, I’ve been informed, is the withdrawal from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. I’ll take the words of the greybeards for that one; I was ten, and not even ten-year old me was up on pan-European monetary policy.
No, the more I think about it, the decision to end HS2 seems the most unfathomable, the most unable to be explained by circumstance and the most likely to be lasting in its folly.
Why is it so bad?
Let me break down some of the outstanding flaws of the decision.
1) It makes the original problem worse
Why was HS2 built? It was not, as in the counterargument of many, the ability to cut journey times between major British cities; I freely admit that embedding the term ‘high-speed’ in the name of the project was unlikely to dispel this impression1. Selber schuld, your own fault, as the Germans say.
But the major rationale for the project was always to free up capacity to run multiple local lines and freight on the existing network; this is why the idea of ‘improving existing railways’ instead of building HS2 was a flawed argument – without new railways there is always a hard limit on what improvements to existing lines can do, as the West Coast Mainline upgrade of the late 1990s to late 2000s, now largely absorbed, showed. If you upgrade local lines, you improve patronage of the railway, meaning you now have a need for increased capacity - in other words, HS2.
Sunak’s ostensible reason given was to cut costs and make an apparent saving of £36 billion. Well, given that we are still using the Victorian railways, I find the idea that a new capacity investment wouldn’t pay off over the long-term pretty hard to believe. As for the idea that Covid has lead to a shift in travel patterns; it has, but it’s more in a sense of a change in the nature of rail travel, with more leisure travel and less commuting, rather than it not being used altogether. And of course within that larger historical scale, the idea that a few years of covid-era lower railway use represents a permanent rejection of the railways seems absurd.
So I don’t buy that there’s any real financial saving here, as the cost is just being deferred into future.
However, if you don’t think it’s currently worth it, if you prefer to build nothing and leave the decisions to future governments, that’s also comprehensible. The UK economy isn’t great and there are always priorities to spend on elsewhere; you could focus on local transport first, for example, or go big on developing nuclear power, or bikes.
What you don’t do is what the government has done, which is to effectively take fright mid-project, with not spades but vast and expensive tunnelling machines in the ground. What’s so incredible is that so doing the Tories have contrived a situation where a huge amount of money has been sent to make the original problem worse.
There was congestion between London and Manchester; there is now going to be more congestion from Birmingham to Manchester, plus a new HS2-induced bottleneck at Birmingham as HS2 trains shift onto the existing network. So the line which least needed capacity – London to Birmingham – now has an excess at a final cost of 44 billion, and the area which needed it most – the north - is now more congested. Without the new track from Birmingham on, you may even need to close the WCML to upgrade it to handle high-speed trains!
It is truly, truly incredible to spend 44 billion to make your original problem worse.
Plus by connecting the Midlands and London like this you’ve also made a negative impact on the other outstanding justification for high-speed rail in the UK, bringing the prosperous south and poorer north together. You’ve effectively supercharged Birmingham as a London commuter suburb and not much else.
Then the next stages, the stretch from Birmingham to Manchester – and the abandoned Leeds leg – are the cheaper parts with the most return. Phase 2A, from Birmingham to Crewe, is estimated to cost 7.2 billion; peanuts in the overall government budget. You’ve done the really tough bit! You’ve done the bit with all the obstreperous Chilterns NIMBYs opposing the route! HS2 from when you’ve got to Birmingham is all gravy, and instead you’re not prepared to double your money to start getting your actual rail advantages. It’s a little like purchasing an expensive vintage motor car, then refusing to stump out on some pricey extra parts which actually make it drive. And so the flash car sits on your driveway as a monument to your own folly and intransigence.
Or like taking a perfectly serviceable elephant and painting it white.
2) It creates new problems