HS2: less fun than the Concorde

We are now approaching Old Oak Common, where this train will terminate. Please take all your belongings. Customers for London should take the Elizabeth Line to complete their journey. Thank you for travelling on the White Elephant railway and have a nice day.

High Speed 2 was a guaranteed financial disaster from the day the first lines were drawn on the map, a vainglorious project where even its pre-mobile-phone proponents were never sure whether it was about speed or relieving congestion on other lines.

The original Y-shaped plan, a new permanent way to link London with Leeds and Manchester, with dreams of one day getting to Scotland, has been pruned like an out-of-control rosebush, and now all that remains is a pitiful stump to allow passengers to travel very fast from Birmingham to somewhere near London.

While the line from Birmingham to Manchester is still theoretically going ahead, there is no realistic chance of it happening in the next decade, or at all. Iain Stewart, the Conservative chairman of the transport select committee, is very cross. He was quoted this week as saying: “Either do it properly or don’t do it at all.”

Unfortunately, he was not advocating the latter option. Yet it is not too late to call the whole thing off. Only about a tenth of the £100 billion realistic cost has been spent so far. The misery and disruption through Bucks may be coming to an end, but that is just the start. The channel tunnel showed that the biggest cost overruns are not in the earthmoving, but in the signalling and systems to deal safely with 1000 tons travelling at 100mph. HS2 has much more tunnelling than the Chunnel, and the trains are supposed to run faster (although not as fast as in the original fantasy). That spending has barely begun.

The sums are made much worse by the thousands of local safeguards and nice-to-haves in the original legislation, coupled with legal, environmental and activist protests. This, and the lawyer-driven inertia of the British planning system, has been devastatingly dissected by Henry Hill for CapX.

HS2 is a textbook example of the downside of localism, shifting power away from central government to small groups. We may agree that we want more infrastructure, just not near us, thank you very much.

Worst of all, this line does not even address the railways’ biggest need, for a modern service connecting Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester and a long-time supporter of HS2, recently admitted that given the choice today, he would want the trans-Pennine link. Since the line is unlikely to get past Birmingham, you can see his point. As it is, this Concorde on wheels is destined to promise no more than a grand day out in the Midlands from Old Oak Common.

A Long Time in Finance podcast is published free every Friday on Spotify and Apple apps.