Stopping HS2 could be a hazard for Labour as well as the North

A visit to a couple of the huge HS2 sites scattered along the route between London and Birmingham will debunk any idea that this scheme can be stopped in its tracks. Some £20bn has already been spent or committed and the current rate is around £140m per week, or £7bn per year.

Contracts have been signed, commitments made and calling a halt would leave a disparate collection of structures including a massive viaduct over the Colne Valley and a 10-mile tunnel. These giant structures, mostly completed, can serve no alternative purpose except possibly as the world’s biggest mushroom factory or its most expensive tourist walkway.

There are plenty more embankments, bridges, and tunnels. Indeed, this 140-mile-long first section includes 32 miles of tunnel and nine miles of embankment, most of which have been started, if not already completed.

Residents of the Chilterns, who have not been won over to the project despite millions being spent on mitigating measures such as extra sections of tunnel, restrictions on the use of lorries and support for community schemes, will have suffered a decade or more of disruption for nothing.

So, the project has to continue but it has become increasingly diminished – a shadow of its former ambitious self.

Early casualties were the connection to Heathrow and the link to HS1 – and therefore Europe – via the Channel Tunnel, but more recently the eastern section to Leeds has been abandoned, with the line now petering out somewhere in the East Midlands, as has the Golborne Link that would have allowed Manchester trains to continue northwards on the existing West Coast main line.

Now, Rishi Sunak is considering the most dramatic cut of all: the abandonment of any construction north of Birmingham, leaving HS2 as a self-contained line linking Birmingham Curzon Street, a new facility a mile away from the existing New Street station, to Old Oak Common, a new hub under construction at a former rail depot some five miles west of Euston. As one wag put it, the line would be less London to Birmingham and more “Acton to Aston”.

Perhaps the link northwards from Birmingham might survive the big cut, but such a truncated line would be the worst of all worlds. It will have a negative benefit-cost ratio – in other words it will cost more than it will ever benefit the economy – and will offer a very limited number of journeys between a pair of cities that already have two good railway connections.

Moreover, the politics would be disastrous. Andy Burnham, mayor of Manchester, has already been highly critical, arguing that “The southern half of England gets a modern rail system and the North [is] left with Victorian infrastructure.” As Burnham points out, this hardly accords with the levelling up agenda.

However, while Labour politicians may gloat about Tory discomfort on the problems with HS2, they may soon find themselves having to deal with them. And there is no easy solution.

Cutting back Phase 2 through to Crewe and eventually Manchester will cost an estimated £34bn, money which otherwise could be spent on a huge range of schemes that fit far better into a Labour agenda, whether it is simply improving the bus network or patching up school buildings, to large projects involving new hospitals and other much needed infrastructure.

Labour has promised in the past that it will build HS2 in full, though it has never made clear precisely what this means. Does this mean that whatever the cost, the scheme will be completed? Is this a commitment to build the Golborne curve, and the complete eastern section to Leeds? If so, it is unclear where the money will come from.

HS2 has no clear budget and currently all its costs are quoted in 2019 prices, which means that the numbers will be greatly increased when the money is actually allocated.

Megaprojects like this have a momentum of their own. They are, like the apocryphal supertanker, very difficult to turn around. An incoming Labour government cannot just sit on its hands and hope the whole thing will go away. But it must also be wary of making narrow political points that may end up costing a future government billions.

Christian Wolmar is the author of ‘British Rail’, a new history published by Penguin, and presents ‘Calling All Stations’, the transport podcast. He is a former transport writer for ‘The Independent’.