HS2: how it grew year by year into a £100bn plus monster

While the Conservative Party conference was in session, Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he said, with reference to HS2: “We want to make sure we get trains to Leeds in a way that actually benefits people on the network and not blindly follow some plan invented 15 to 20 years ago which no longer benefits people.”

This was hardly a bombshell, since rumours had been circulating for some time that the eastern leg of phase 2b of HS2, between Birmingham and Leeds, was at risk of being abandoned. In fact, the Government asked HS2 to “pause” work on the eastern leg some time ago. This is how governments behave when a wholly unrealistic pet project is in trouble: they subject it to a death of a thousand cuts, pruning and trimming, retreating very slowly to save face, when the statesmanlike thing would be to grasp the nettle and junk the whole mad enterprise, root and branch.

To examine the progress of the insane HS2 project is to realise how relatively well-managed and budget-sensitive was the construction of Britain’s most iconic previous vanity projects, the Scottish Parliament building and the Millennium Dome. The Scottish Parliament was originally costed, by First Minister Donald Dewar on the back of an envelope, at between £10m and £20m; its eventual cost was £414m, more than 20 times the projected figure. The Millennium Dome was initially estimated to cost £399m (a figure suspiciously just short of the more alarming £400m) and eventually came in at £799m, in 1999 money – the equivalent of £1.38bn today. It was its patent uselessness after the Millennium celebrations were over that exposed the intrinsic white elephant status of the Blairodrome.

All of that past folly represents small change, dwindling into insignificance in comparison with the cash-eating bacterium that is HS2. Its alleged purpose has been changed several times in deference to altered circumstances when, in reality, it only ever had one purpose: to feed the egos of grandstanding members of the political class, seeking a “legacy”. Like an unshakeable incubus, it has been with us for so long it has become a permanent part of the political landscape. There are people now on the voters’ roll who were not yet born when HS2 was first mooted. Retracing its history is like reading in sequence all of the more gruesome books of the Old Testament.

HS2 first came into existence as a proposal by Greengauge 21, a transport industry lobby group. It was originally costed, in 2007, at £7.1bn. Its original justification was to avoid building a third runway at Heathrow (for planes to Rochdale, presumably? Go figure). In 2009, Gordon Brown, trying to compete with his predecessor in the vanity project stakes, announced the creation of HS2 Ltd to develop the monster. By 2010 it had acquired a destructive route through the Chilterns – nothing better proclaims a new, iconic project than ravaging heritage – and its cost had risen to £30bn. Later that year the Coalition government cancelled the proposed spur to Heathrow (thus invalidating its claim of “connectivity” with the continent).

In 2012 the extravagant claim made for HS2 was that it would “create a million jobs” – an indication of how far its promoters had lost touch with reality. By 2013 the cost had increased to £42.6bn and even Peter Mandelson, a former supporter and champion of vanity projects, decided to get off the train, condemning it as an “expensive mistake”. The year 2015 was a bumper one for HS2: the admitted cost of the project rose by one third in that year alone, to £55.7bn. Then some embarrassing facts became public. It emerged in March, 2016, that at the proposed speeds, track could break up and trains derail. So, high-speed rail became moderate-speed rail and the core claim of accelerated travel became discredited.

In other words, HS2 could not deliver what its name proclaimed. The then transport secretary Chris Grayling, a politician with the unhappy knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in October 2016, told a startled Andrew Marr: “One of the myths about HS2 is it’s about speed.” Clearly, only an idiot would have imagined a project named High Speed 2 was about – er – speed.

By this time, a worse problem than constructing the system was trying to find a plausible purpose for its being built. The next straw grasped at by HS2’s apologists was improved capacity, shortly blown out of the water: for that, a totally different strategy is required. Apologists reached for the universal panacea: “HS2 will conserve, replace or enhance wildlife habitats and green spaces. It will create a green corridor along its route.”

This was politico-speak for destroying 350 unique habitats, 98 irreplaceable ancient woods, 30 river corridors, 24 Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and bunging in a few thousand shrubs bought as a job lot from garden centres along the route. The exceptional devastation caused by HS2 is due to the fact that the exceptional speeds it was expected to record when first mooted – but now discounted – meant the route had to proceed in a straight line, like a Roman highway, with dire consequences for the environment.

Last month the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published the latest report on HS2. It found that “value for money was at risk and concluded that the Department and HS2 Ltd’s lack of transparency and failure to tell previous committees that the programme was facing difficulties had undermined public confidence in the programme…”

The latest range of government cost estimates (in case you feel you need a good laugh) is £35bn – £45bn for Phase 1; £5.2bn – £7.2bn for Phase 2a; £32bn- £46bn for Phase 2b – all at 2019 prices. This led the committee to conclude that the entire railway could cost £98bn, just short of the £106bn estimated by independent observers. But that is all now pie-in-the-sky, bargain-basement prices, for the real cost potential has shifted seismically since Covid. The extra expenditure and construction delays that will occur in the wake of the pandemic are incalculable.

If the mad project proceeds, and remembering that its notional opening date has been postponed to as late as 2034, there is no realistic prospect of its being completed at a cost of less than £200bn and almost certainly more, at a time of exceptional fiscal squeeze. Even at its inception there were doubts of its relevance by the completion date. Now, with the established habits of working from home and Zoom conferencing, fewer business passengers than ever will travel regularly by train. The fall in season ticket sales is a significant indicator.

As for creating a million jobs, at the Delta Junction near Birmingham, a total of just 35 were allocated to local people. For the later stages of construction, HS2 told the Public Accounts Committee that the workforce “was likely to come from a global pool as those skills are rarer in this country”. The much-vaunted National College for High Speed Rail, designed to train apprentices in the requisite construction skills, has instead been absorbed into the University of Birmingham.

But the real elephant in the waiting room is the major crisis developing over the construction at Euston Station. The problems are so intractable that, despite the distant launch date, it is now proposed that in its first years in operation the London terminus for HS2 will be Old Oak Common. By the time passengers have found their way there and travelled by the more modest speeds dictated by safety considerations, it is not inconceivable that their journey times may be longer than at present.

Politicians are now sending mixed messages. Andy Street, the West Midlands mayor, delivered a bullish message during the Conservative conference in which he acknowledged that the eastern leg of HS2 would probably be delayed, but insisted it must be made clear that the delay is temporary, and the full high-speed line will eventually be built. Yet, more reasonably, Mr Street told the Public Accounts Committee: “You do not need to build the whole of 2b eastern leg high speed for West Midlands business to get what it needs for connectivity across the Midlands.”

He also, very sensibly, wanted a commitment to the Midlands Rail Hub that would provide “connectivity into the centre of Birmingham, much greater capacity and also the rapid links between Birmingham, Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Coventry-Leicester”. That is absolutely right. What the Midlands and the North need is east-west connectivity, provided by longer trains, extended platforms and other infrastructure improvements to which a portion of the money being squandered on HS2 should be committed.

From the more unashamedly spendthrift tradition of Labour, Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, urged the Government to resist “penny pinching” by scrapping the eastern leg of HS2. If there is one fault of which the Johnson government cannot credibly be accused, it is penny pinching. The struggling public, taxed beyond endurance, and rising, daily sees its hard-earned tax contributions shovelled into the purposeless black hole that is HS2, purely to gratify Boris’s egotistic love of big projects, however pointless.

Beyond realistic transport policy or considerations of fiscal prudence, there is a major constitutional issue embodied in the HS2 scandal: the gross lack of public accountability that makes a mockery of our supposed democracy.