Let’s get one thing straight: the government has not, in fact, committed to bringing HS2 all the way to central London. Transport secretary Louise Haigh may have told Times Radio this week that, “It would never have made sense to leave it between Old Oak Common and Birmingham. Euston was always planned to be part of the picture”, before adding: “We are hoping to make an announcement on that very soon.”
But in the world of British rail investment, there are few guarantees, and even projects that have been announced multiple times sometimes fail to materialise. (Just ask anyone who’s tried to take an electric train through Manchester Piccadilly’s platforms 15 or 16 recently.) Chancellor Rachel Reeves is said to have asked minsters to model billions of pounds of infrastructure cuts. Until you’re actually sliding out of Euston on a high-speed train, take nothing for granted. It is, nonetheless, absurd that whether a new line between London and Birmingham should actually reach central London should even be a question. Of course it should. Of course.
A precis of the story so far, which I’ll try to make quick, in exactly the way the British rail network is not. The project to build a new railway line from London to the north, first commenced at the tail end of the last Labour government, was meant to solve a number of problems on the network: competition for paths into Euston; high ticket prices resulting from hard limits on the number of seats on trains on the West Coast Mainline; fast trains sharing space with local ones, preventing expansion of suburban networks in the Midlands and the north. “If we don’t build this everything is going to break” doesn’t sound very sexy, though, so the line was instead branded “High Speed 2”.
That, though, has meant a decade and a half of sarcastic comments about whether Brummies really needed to shave a few minutes off their journeys to the capital: the capacity increase that was the real purpose of the project has often been forgotten. Throw in the fact that costs have ballooned – partly because of the decision to bury much of the line in a doomed attempt to reduce opposition in the Chilterns, partly because they always do – and support collapsed.
Rishi Sunak thought he’d be onto a winner, then, when he announced the decision to scrap those bits of the project that hadn’t commenced yet: lopping off the northern branches; announcing that it would only continue from Old Oak Common to Euston if private funding could be found. Unfortunately for Britain’s leading train-hater, it turned out that going to Manchester to announce you were cancelling a new train to Manchester was not a popular move after all. In February, the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee, said it was “highly sceptical” the government would be able to find the private investment necessary to make the extension to Euston work, thus placing the ball firmly back in the government’s court.
The case for not building the line at all is weak, but plausible. The case for building half of it then giving up there is non-existent. In her long-awaited budget – which is still, somehow, nearly three weeks away – the Chancellor should stop messing around and find the money to finish the job, extending HS2 to central London and to Crewe, too.
For one thing, forcing those travelling from Birmingham to London to finish their journey on the Elizabeth Line would overwhelm what is already the busiest rail route in Britain. At the far end of the line, bodies including the National Audit Office have warned that terminating the route at Birmingham would actually reduce capacity between London and the north, by creating a fresh bottleneck where the new route joins the old. In a review commissioned by the government, the former Siemens UK boss Jurgen Maier said that not finishing the line would “leave the West Coast Mainline, and… the M6, to collapse”. It is not simply that a half-finished HS2 will be less useful. It will mean we spent tens of billions of pounds to make our transport network worse.
The Treasury, of course, is less concerned with the functioning of the country than with things that can be plugged into a spreadsheet. But here, too, the evidence is piling up that finishing the line would be the sensible choice. Governments sometimes recoup the cost of infrastructure by offering investors the chance to run it as a long-term concession. A recent report from industry groups, reported in the Guardian, argued that the Old Oak Common to Birmingham version would have a likely value of £5bn, while the version extending to Euston and Crew would increase to £20bn – more than enough to recoup the additional £11bn in costs. That’s without considering the value of all the extra journeys, homes or other developments the new line will allow.
Last but not least, we’ve already started: preparation work such as demolitions at Euston has already begun; tunnel-boring machines are being strategically buried at Old Oak Common on the grounds that it’s better to risk this being pointless than to have to continue the tunnel once the station is up and running. As John Dickie, chief executive of London business group BusinessLDN, recently argued in an open letter to rail minister Lord Hendy: “Given costs already incurred, and with existing infrastructure and site teams in place, there will never be a cheaper time to build this tunnel than now.” The case for finishing it is too strong: sooner or later it will happen, and a Treasury that really cared about long-term value would make sure it was sooner so we can start reaping the benefits.
Not finishing the line – under a Chancellor who used her first conference speech to talk about investment – would be a national embarrassment. This country invented the passenger railway. Come on. So no, the government has not committed to finishing HS2. But it very obviously should.
