Is High Speed 2 a White Elephant?

High Speed 1, the line which connected the Channel Tunnel with London St Pancras, opened to passengers in 2003. A major upgrade from the slow and meandering line from the British side of the Channel Tunnel to London Waterloo, the new line was to be the first step in what was anticipated to be an exciting revolution in British rail travel, with the line intended to connect with the West Coast Main Line, with the plan being to schedule high-speed rail services between the north of England and continental Europe via London.

Stratford International, a railway station in East London, was intended to be the London stop for this grand pan-european service. The station was specifically designed and built for international rail travel, even having passport control areas ready to go just as soon as these services began operating. However, today Stratford International holds the honour of being the only station in Britain which has has the word ‘International’ in its name and yet has not one single international train stop there.

High Speed 2, when it was formally announced in 2013 after four years of studies into its feasibility, opted against the idea of connecting with HS1 and instead would be built as a brand new yet very old-fashioned railway line: Starting from a terminus in London, like the lines built in the Victorian era, and ending at three points: Birmingham, Manchester and East Midlands Parkway, the latter being for connections to East Midlands Airport. Ten years on, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the Manchester leg of the project will join the East Midlands Parkway leg into the dustbin of history, though the rumoured truncating of the route at a terminus at Old Oak Common, some seven miles west of Euston, has been revealed to be just a rumour.

Billions of pounds has already been spent on the project. Works have been taking place at London’s Euston station and surrounding areas for years on building the new HS2 rail terminal: hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on compulsory purchase orders on buildings in the Euston area, businesses have been permanently closed down, residencies demolished and even a trade union has had to vacate its premises to make way for the enormous amount of plant vehicles required for the works. In the rural areas of counties like Staffordshire, protestors have been battling to save ancient woodlands and nature reserves which have been targeted for destruction for the railway line.

The project appears to be so truncated, so unpopular with people who live in the path of the line and so poorly located in terms of its London terminus that cancelling the project entirely now seems to be the optimal strategy. Yet again, a major British civil engineering project has mired itself in cost overruns, de-scoping and talk of complete cancellation. But how?

The first flaw in the HS2 rail project is the path of the planned line. The failure to plan and build the line to connect with the existing HS1 route from London St Pancras to the Kent coast effectively doomed the project, or at least seriously devalued it and pre-ordained the cuts and cancellations which have followed. One key reason for this is that the route as originally planned is a duplication of already existing routes: There are already services running from London Euston to Birmingham and Manchester and from St Pancras to East Midlands Parkway. Duplication of routes was the pretext under which the Great Central Railway was closed in sections between 1960 and 1969, because there were other services from London to Manchester and Liverpool. That line’s terminus, London Marylebone, was at the time a target for closure and the withdrawal of these services was perceived to be necessary to hasten the terminal’s departure.

The second key flaw in the project is that it is an eye-waveringly expensive one at a time when 62% of the British rail network is still not electrified, provincial lines are, in the main, operated by ageing and low-capacity diesel trains and journeys across the country (for instance from Cambridge to Oxford) are gruelling and tortuous affairs, where travelling into London and back out again is almost always the best option, despite the increased expense that this entails. It is also notable that there are still only two railway lines which cross the city of London, one being Thameslink, which opened in 1988, the other being the Elizabeth line, which opened only last year. It is extremely difficult to make a compelling case for a new high-speed rail line linking cities already linked by railway lines while there are still signal boxes dating from the 1860s in operation. In short, the billions sunk into what is increasingly looking like an extremely expensive vanity project could have been better spent upgrading existing lines which haven’t seen investment in decades.

The third key flaw in the project is that the Government is in charge of it. Not for the first time, a major British civil engineering project has become bogged down in a quagmire of massive cost overruns, inquiries, protests, legal challenges and hellishly-expensive compulsory purchase orders. One could argue that handing the reigns of such a huge project to the Government was setting the project up to fail from the beginning, however the private sector’s level of investment in this country is practically zero because the rate of profit from such investment is practically zero. Governments have to underwrite these projects and, critically, stump up the vast majority of the money to pay for it. However, with capitalist governments’ tendency to bureaucratise major projects rather than actually lead them themselves (partly because of the dearth of talent among our ruling class and partly because bureaucratisation creates lucrative revenue streams for the contracted firms and individuals paid to become part of this bureaucracy), these projects become huge financial colanders, leaking money from every angle.

With Rishi Sunak announcing that HS2 will now not be built to Manchester, the question which presents itself is: Is there a case for HS2 to be built at all?

The clues to what should be the future of HS2 arguably lies in what is left of the project, as well as the state of the rest of the British Rail network – a high-speed line will be built which will run from Euston to Birmingham, when there are already rail links between the two points, with the high-speed option likely to shave around twenty minutes off the current journey time and the new line will not connect with the existing high-speed railway line between London and the Channel Tunnel. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the rail network remains stubbornly un-electrified, rolling stock on many provincial railway lines is ageing badly and lines which cross the country are slow and infrequent and signalling systems range in age from brand new to 150 years old.

In the face of all this, the High Speed 2 rail project, as it is constituted, should be scrapped.