Comment
DELAY REPAY
Halting HS2 is embarrassing but it’s the right decision – taxpayers like me are fed up of having our pockets picked
IF I were Andy Burnham I would be spitting brass tacks at Rishi Sunak’s cancellation of the northern leg of HS2.
The Greater Manchester mayor has every right to feel aggrieved that a project which could bring faster trains — and prestige — to his city will no longer be completed.
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No longer will he be able to brag about having one of the fastest inter-city train services in the world.
But, in common with 67million other people in Britain, I am not Andy Burnham.
I am a taxpayer fed up of having my pockets picked by an ever-more extravagant HS2, with its highly-paid executives and consultants.
Like so many people forced to subsidise this monster, it is unlikely I would ever have used the trains.
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In fact, where I live in East Anglia, HS2 would have worsened the train service.
It would have meant the expresses to Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh would have been diverted away from Peterborough, where I can currently intercept them.
Of course it is embarrassing for Britain that HS2 is being truncated.
But then the project had already become a national embarrassment, costing multi- ples of what the French, Germans, Italians and Spanish have spent building their high-speed rail networks.
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Nevertheless, Sunak is right to cancel the rest of the project, even at this late stage.
Government simply cannot write an open cheque for HS2 and sit back as costs are endlessly revised upwards.
Sunak has sent an important message for promoters of other public projects — no, the Government is no longer going to allow taxpayers’ cash to be squandered.
HS2 always was the wrong project, and I say that as someone who loves travelling by train.
It was over-engineered and it ignored how people really want to travel.
It is absurd to have trains running at 225mph between cities that are less than 200 miles apart.
The excessive design speed added billions to the cost and meant the trains would have to bypass towns and cities where they should have been stopping.
There was nothing in HS2 for the people of Coventry or Stafford.
Nottingham was supposed to have been served via a tram from the outskirts.
There would have been no connections with towns such as Wolverhampton or Oldham, which lie off-route.
The line would have stopped 100 miles short of the places in the North which really need a lift — places such as West Cumbria or Teesside.
Neither was there anything in HS2 for people who live in Birmingham and Manchester and who need to get to work there.
Britain’s regional cities have very poor public transport networks compared with London.
That is where the money really needed to be spent, on the sorts of journeys millions of people make every day, not on a vanity project designed around the needs of a relative few politicians and business people.
You can see what was in HS2 for George Osborne, who approved the project as Chancellor.
It would have allowed him to travel between Westminster and his Cheshire constituency in comfort and style.
Trouble is, that for years HS2 has been sucking dry the budgets for less prestigious but more urgent transport projects.
Electrification of Trans-Pennine lines has been halted and much-needed bypasses cancelled, leaving many people living with heavy lorries rumbling past their front door.
Even the potholes have gone unfilled.
Open cheque
HS2 was making Britain look like one of those developing countries that have a spanking new international airport to impress visitors, but drive away from it and you find rickshaws having to negotiate deeply rutted roads.
Sunak has been accused of abandoning “levelling up”, but he has shown it is him, not HS2 enthusiasts, who really understand the needs of ordinary people in the Midlands and North.
Thanks to yesterday’s an- nouncement there will be an extra £36billion to spend on local rail and road improvements.
That will go a long way if spent wisely.
HS2 should never have been approved in the first place.
There were far cheaper ways to increase rail capacity, which the Government started to say was the real purpose of the project when critics pointed out the folly of spending billions to shave a few minutes off an already rapid service from London to Birmingham and Manchester.
But given that construction is well under way on the southern leg, Sunak has made the best of a bad job in allowing that section to be completed.
Best of bad job
We will still get something out of it.
The new line will be joined on to the existing West Coast Mainline, speeding up journey times even for people travelling north of Birmingham.
Meanwhile, there is another way the Government can improve lives for rail travellers: Sort out the militant rail unions once and for all.
Like so many other people attending the Conservative Party conference I would have loved to have travelled to Manchester by train but was forced to drive because of Wednesday’s rail strike.
Never mind trains travelling at 200mph, one going at half the speed would have been nice.
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Sunak has called time on an overblown vanity project.
His next task is to deal with the everyday problems ordinary people face as they attempt the increasingly difficult job of getting about the country.
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