HS2 route ‘should be repurposed for new power cables’ if railway axed

The route of HS2 should be repurposed to lay new power cables if it is scrapped, Lord Bamford, the chairman of JCB, has said.

The major Tory party donor said the line of the much-maligned high-speed railway could be used for cabling infrastructure to support an expected growing demand for electricity.

He said “lateral thinking” was now needed to “secure some value” from the project, which is expected to be downgraded by Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, in the coming months.

Mr Sunak is said to be considering scrapping the line north of Birmingham to Manchester^[1], and ending it in west London rather than in Euston as planned.

An announcement had been expected as soon as this week. But it is now likely to be delayed amid concerns over how scrapping the Manchester leg would have looked just days before the Conservatives arrive in the city for their annual conference.

As pressure grew on Mr Sunak to make the move anyway, Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said HS2 looked like ending up as a “total waste of money”.

A poll has also suggested that more people are against the construction of the first leg of HS2 than support it.

The YouGov survey found that 39 per cent are against, while just 29 per cent are in favour. The rest had no view.

In a letter to the Telegraph, Lord Bamford said: “Amid growing calls for HS2 to be scrapped, possibly in its entirety, in the wake of escalating costs, delays and proposed cuts to routes north of Birmingham, can I make an appeal for some lateral thinking?

“With much of the construction under way, or in some instances actually completed, why don’t we use the route to lay down the cabling infrastructure needed to support the anticipated growth in demand for electricity across the country?”

He said electric cars and vans alone could increase demand by up to 100TWh (terawatt hours) by 2050.

“As we’re all going to be consuming a lot more electricity in the future, there is a compelling logic to having a central spine to distribute the power up and down the country,” he said. “The spine is already there – it’s called HS2…

“Former power stations along the route – Rugeley in Staffordshire, for example – could be reconfigured or repurposed to distribute the power from the spine around the grid, if necessary.

“Lateral thinking is needed to secure some value from the considerable investment that has already been made in this project.”

Meanwhile Mr Johnson told Times Radio he believed HS2 should never have been given the go-ahead^[4].

“This whole thing, it just makes me want to weep,” he said. “It just makes me despair. The original sin was agreeing to do it in the first place.

“It was obviously going to be hugely expensive^[5], with relatively little gain from it relative to pretty much anything else you could have done with the railway or transport system, whether that’s making rail connections across the north vastly better or actually building a bunch of bypasses and improving the roundabouts in the road network.

“And we knew that this was not the best way you could spend that amount of money. We also know how difficult we find it to build these projects … I just wish it had never happened in the first place.”

He added: “It rather looks like we’re going to totally waste the money on this in producing a rail at the cost of tens of billions, which will get you from Birmingham to central London less quickly than you can do at the moment.”

References

1. ^{^} considering scrapping the line north of Birmingham to Manchester (www.telegraph.co.uk)
2. ^{^} HS2 opposition outweighs support (cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk)
3. ^{^} 2801 HS2 Shambles (cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk)
4. ^{^} should never have been given the go-ahead (www.telegraph.co.uk)
5. ^{^} hugely expensive (www.telegraph.co.uk)