‘Uncancelling’ HS2 is a good start – but can’t we go even further?

As a “glass half-empty” man (virtually a professional requirement in my line of work), news about grand projects, and especially in public transport, tends to provoke cold fear rather than optimism.

Try as I might, I can’t help being suspicious about the leaked announcement (respect to Henry Riley at LBC for squirming it out of Whitehall) that the government is going to reinstate the northern extension of HS2 – a scheme freighted with such high hopes, but less well favoured in its financing and management.

For a start, we’re not talking here about returning to running the high-speed railway from Euston (now virtually confirmed as the London terminus) to Manchester, but just building the “2a” section that was intended to go from Birmingham to Crewe.

Tantalisingly close to Manchester, 2a has already had the necessary legislation passed to override the usual planning objections – and is the cheaper of the many options to revive HS2.

It is also very good news for north Wales, and the Welsh government who rightly resented having to help pay for a line that went nowhere near the principality. It should also, from my memory, make it easier for traffic, especially perhaps more freight, to get to Ireland via Holyhead. “Change at Crewe” indeed, as the old saying goes.

It’s obviously a key junction, with routes to Derby, Stoke and Manchester, and the entire West Coast Main Line. But, well, Crewe isn’t actually Manchester, or Leeds, or East Midlands Parkway, or Newcastle, for that matter.

Project 2a will be cheap, by HS2 standards – about £5bn. Would it prove even more expensive in practice, and be late to arrive? Apparently, Keir Starmer has been personally involved in the resurrection of HS2 with interested private companies, conducting talks in confidence at the Labour conference. The government has therefore decided that it should not be run by the HS2 consortium, and will instead be funded and built using private finance, where the costs may be recovered by leasing it out to them, presumably for a sufficiently long period they can make a decent return on it. For now, details are sketchy.

It is at this point that we need to pull the communication cord and pause for some reflection.

However cleverly it is structured, this kind of public-private partnership usually means that profits are privatised, losses are nationalised and, if the thing proves to be a flop, the whole liability is handed back to the taxpayers. This is, after all, what has happened before – with the ill-fated Railtrack, the privatised firm that took over the whole of the old British Rail track and infrastructure and went bust within eight years.

The performance – and fate – of individual train operating companies has also been rather mixed. There must be serious concerns about how the finances of a new line from Crewe to Birmingham to Euston will work, and how easy it will be to restore the viability of a line that was always thought to only make economic sense if it went to Manchester and Leeds.

Was Rishi Sunak right, in other words, to cut our losses and cancel the HS2 northern extension? And was Labour right when, observing the usual obsequies, they said they couldn’t afford to reverse that decision?

There are other unanswered questions, too. Will Labour now cancel the £36bn of extra transport investment that Sunak initiated when he downgraded the high-speed line in order to refurbish existing train stations and even fix potholes? Is creating another private finance nightmare the best possible use of the nation’s resources?

Why on earth doesn’t the line continue from Euston to nearby St Pancras station, where it could connect with HS1 and the Channel Tunnel? Will anyone in Rhyl be able to afford a ticket?

I’d love to think HS2’s partial resurrection is the beginning of a new age of the train, the prestige project of a proud new, publicly owned Great British Railways, which will be the envy of the world. But some of us will need some convincing.