Why Boris Johnson’s HS2 review will probably give the project the green light

Boris Johnson’s promised review of HS2 has materialised, as one of the first acts of the new transport secretary Grant Shapps. The feeling in the rail industry is that HS2 is likely to survive, and probably with very few significant changes.

The pledge to review the project was made during the Tory leadership contest – the line is not popular with Conservative activists and the inquiry was seen as an attempt to curry favour.

Crucially, work on the line “will continue in parallel with the report”, so there’ll be no hold-up. The review will also be out by “the autumn”: it’s already 21 August. That’s not a lot of time to come up with anything too major.

The terms of the inquiry feel like a shopping list of the suggested changes the project’s critics make. The review will look at reducing the line speed: this is likely to be rejected because it offers no serious cost savings within the confines of existing route. It doesn’t actually cost very much to make a given railway line high-speed.

Stopping the line at Old Oak Common, on the outskirts of London, instead of continuing into Euston, will also be considered – but is also a non-starter. The entire design and justification of the project’s first phase is based on creating more capacity into Euston for slower regional services, which this would not do. While Old Oak Common will be well-connected, those passengers have to go somewhere and TfL might also have something to say about dumping them all on to Crossrail out in the suburbs.

It’s possible that because the work from Old Oak Common is the most technically difficult (it involves a lot of tunnelling), contractors could be given more time to get it right. But this would be a construction scheduling issue rather than a reduction of the scope of the project.

What’s more uncertain is what the report will say about cost overruns and delays. Large infrastructure projects almost always suffer from such problems and HS2 seems to be no exception – HS2’s chair has reportedly estimated the likely overrun at around £30bn. The review may make a recommendation on whether the project is still worth it. With rail demand already far outstripping the original assumptions HS2 was based on, and no real better alternative, the answer is probably yes.

The rest of the terms of reference appear designed to be helpful, rather than hole it below the waterline. They include ideas such as assessing “the full range of benefits from the project, including but not limited to: capacity changes both for services to cities and towns on HS2 and which will not be on HS2” and “whether there are opportunities for additional commercial returns for the taxpayer through, for example, developments around stations, to offset costs”. These aren’t terms of reference written by someone on a mission to stop the line.

The chair of the inquiry, hand-picked by Boris Johnson, is Douglas Oakervee. Himself a former chair of HS2, he’s previously said it would be “catastrophic” not to build the line, and shown he understands the capacity arguments well. However, his deputy will be Lord Berkeley, a hereditary peer and transport wonk who is strongly against the line. It is difficult to see how they will agree on much, and there must surely be some chance of Berkeley producing a minority report.

But overall, the details of the review’s set-up tend to point to HS2 getting the green light, perhaps with some relatively minor changes to integrate it into the new east-west lines planned to link northern cities together. These have already been happening in the background anyway, but were recommendations included in the findings of the review, so could be framed as a victory for people opposed to the project.

Of course, if the past few years of politics have taught us anything, it’s that anything could happen. So if the review comes up with something completely unexpected, don’t be too surprised. We can only read the tea leaves.