BOB SEELY MP: There remains a powerful case for national rail …
BOB SEELY MP: There remains a powerful case for a major national rail project – just not the mega turkey that is HS2
In the history of infrastructure projects, HS2 is truly unique, but not, I fear, in a way that its backers would want. It is probably the single worst value-for-money project in British history.
The scandal with HS2 is not that it may be cut back, but that this Labour vanity project was ever seriously considered in the first place.
Thank God Prime Minister Rishi Sunak[2] has the honesty to confront this mega turkey.
Although the Prime Minister insists no final decision has been taken, it seems clear that any plan to build the northern leg of HS2 between Birmingham[3] and Manchester will be scrapped. I do hope so.
Many expect him to say so in his speech today at the Conservative Party[4] conference in Manchester, even though there remains a noisy lobby opposed to scaling it back.
BOB SEELY: Thank God Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (pictured) has the honesty to confront this mega turkey
Pictured: The HS2 construction site at Curzon Street in Birmingham city centre on Tuesday
What Mr Sunak also seems likely to confirm is that the line from Birmingham will terminate at Euston in Central London rather than Old Oak Common in West London as had been suggested.
And that the money the Government was planning to spend on the northern leg — at least £28billion — will be reinvested over many years in the Midlands and the North.
All of which we should welcome. Because per mile, HS2 has become by far the most expensive railway project in the world.
It was initially costed at £33.4billion. By 2015, it had a budget of £55.7billion and in 2019 the project was expected to overrun to £65billion. Now it is expected to top £100billion. Costs for Phase One are running at up to £400million per mile, over ten times those of other high-speed railways.
And despite hacking back its various limbs to save money, HS2 keeps coming back to gobble up more taxpayer cash, like a grotesque financial Hydra or metastasising economic Triffid.
It is a great example of the sunk-cost fallacy: When you invest so much — money, time or emotion — into something you can’t bear to abandon it, even though you know it won’t be worth the cost.
It’s easier to kick the can down the road than to accept that HS2, while noble in its aims, is simply too expensive for what it is.
Why do some politicians fall for these white elephants in the first place? The Oxford academic Bent Flyvbjerg argues that mega-projects get approved when they succeed in constructing ‘a fantasy world of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, overvalued local development effects and underestimated environmental impacts’. That’s HS2 in a sentence.
Or, as Shelley put it in Ozymandias, his poem about vainglorious edifices. ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Well, I certainly despair at HS2. It started life as a typically cynical New Labour gimmick to divide Conservative voters at the 2010 election, since it went through so many Tory heartland constituencies.
It was justified by David Cameron on the grounds that it would go via Heathrow. But that plan was dropped.
Then it was justified on traffic-reducing environmental grounds. Although it was later admitted that HS2 likely won’t bring down CO2 emissions but will possibly increase them. The concrete alone would take years of use to cancel out the CO2 produced in its manufacture.
After that it was justified because it would ‘create a million jobs’. This claim was later described as a ‘lie’.
BOB SEELY (pictured): HS2 has never stood up to scrutiny. Every time a story justifying it was exposed as far-fetched or downright false, its backers peddled the next dishonest claim, then that in turn was revealed to be wrong
Then it was business-time saved. This assumed that travellers don’t work on trains. Yet some 70 per cent of HS2’s net transport benefits appear to have been calculated using this highly dubious if not fraudulent claim.
Since 2013, it has been justified on the basis that it will provide greater capacity — despite HS2’s figures now being seen as outdated given that, because of working from home, commuter rail travel has plateaued at about 70 per cent of pre-Covid levels.
And despite the fact that almost all other train routes into London — whether at Paddington, Waterloo, London Bridge or Liverpool Street — happen to be more congested than the Birmingham to London line.
HS2 has never stood up to scrutiny. Every time a story justifying it was exposed as far-fetched or downright false, its backers peddled the next dishonest claim, then that in turn was revealed to be wrong.
This went on ad nauseum, until so much money had been spent that it became too difficult and embarrassing to call a halt to what had become the world’s greatest gravy train.
All the while no one knew the true costs. Costs which are, as Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said, now out of control.
HS2’s former Land and Property Director Doug Thornton, has said that estimated purchase prices of properties along the route were ‘enormously wrong’ and that thousands of properties had not been budgeted for at all. The National Audit Office, meanwhile, discovered land costs for Phase One were out by nearly £3billion.
The figures appear so out of kilter that I wonder whether this was incompetence, wishful thinking or worse?
Now, Lord Heseltine and former Chancellor George Osborne say that national pride is at stake, arguing: ‘Governments are remembered for what they build and create.’ No, they are not. They are remembered for how they govern and what they stand for. Politicians who believe in ‘government by shiny things’ shouldn’t be let anywhere near taxpayers’ money.
Don’t get me wrong; investment in good public transport is a moral good. But we need good judgment. Just because HS2 is eye-wateringly expensive, doesn’t mean it is eye-wateringly good.
There remains a powerful case for a major national rail project — it’s just not HS2.
The major rail project we should have embraced, in full, is the rebuild of the northern rail network. The case in favour is overwhelming, as a House of Lords report argued.
In 2019, Boris Johnson should have committed to it to show our determination to drive regional regeneration —the so-called Levelling Up agenda. Several of us advised him to do so. It would have been both right and wildly popular — especially with Red Wall Tories.
Instead, Boris committed to Levelling Up the North by building a railway through Buckinghamshire.
There comes a point when HS2 becomes just too expensive. We have reached that tipping point. So much spent on one project, when the rest of the country needs investment, is wrong, especially as the scheme has never come close to the returns demanded of normal government projects.
For all the regional grandees demanding that HS2 be delivered, has a single one offered any financial support? No.
Worse, the misuse of funds means the investment which could have driven real regeneration, opportunity and wealth creation has been squandered.
Thankfully, we now have a Prime Minister who asks hard questions. He’s right to say that we can’t just have our cake and eat it. There are missed opportunities when public money — our money — is badly spent.
We need politicians like Rishi. A few more and we wouldn’t have got into this fine mess in the first place.
Let’s cut our losses and finish this Labour vanity project at Birmingham, and instead commit a future Conservative Government to rebuilding the northern rail network, and then deliver on value-for-money road and rail projects up and down the country.
HS2 should never have been built. Those who championed it should hang their heads in shame.
■ Bob Seely is the Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight
References
- ^ Bob Seely (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ Rishi Sunak (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ Birmingham (www.dailymail.co.uk)
- ^ Conservative Party (www.dailymail.co.uk)