Last week Boris Johnson announced that work on the controversial High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project would go ahead, with the first trains planned to start running between 2028 and 2031, and a second phase scheduled for completion between 2035 and 2040.
HS2 will, according to the official HS2 website, connect around 30 million people in London, Birmingham and Nottingham. The HS2 team also estimate that, once completed, around 300,000 passengers will use the service daily, adding up to about 100 million people a year.
In fact if you only listened to the people behind HS2, you would have a difficult time finding fault in their mission to rebalance the national economy and bring “Britain closer together.” However, any observer of British economic policy over the past 40 years might doubt the intentions of a national government that has cut spending on infrastructure in the North and Midlands.
It is correct that the national economy is pitifully unbalanced, and weighed in the favour of the more affluent and commercial south. HS2 is supposed to improve this by spreading commerce and therefore wealth from London to the poorer northern regions – thereby improving national prosperity. So what’s the problem with this?
The problem is that most of this new traffic will be going one way, from north to south. I fear that HS2 will draw the best and brightest away from the north and down to the capital – to the detriment of the already economically malnourished regions of this country.
HS2 also claims the project will support the national transition to zero carbon, and if the estimates about passengers are correct, then the new train service will take a huge number of cars off the road.
High speed trains are electric, so they only emit what’s necessary to generate that electricity. Therefore in the future, with fully decarbonated and renewable power generation, HS2 could achieve zero emissions over a very long distance. So once again, what’s the problem with this? Long distance low emission travel isn’t a bad thing.
The problem is that these are all hypothetical claims. We have no guarantees that zero emissions can be achieved, and even if they can of how long that might take.
The only thing we can be sure of is that the cost will be enormous, and much more than we were told. Originally estimated at £56bn, information leaked to the Financial Times last month suggests this has risen to £106bn. The theory is that the service will pay for itself through all that economic activity that it will generate.
But again that’s hypothetical, and I argue that this public money would be better spent elsewhere in ways that would have a more guaranteed and direct impact on national prosperity.
Even if the predictions of zero emissions pan out, what about the environmental cost of creating HS2 in the first place? Building it would create a huge amount of emissions, and some of the damage done to wildlife across the country would be irreparable.
At its core, the case against HS2 is that it is too much of a gamble, and that it is therefore not worth taking. To build HS2 we would have to spend vast amounts of real money, on the as yet unreal possibility that it would resolve elements of our transport, economic and climate crises.
But if the gamble fails we will have spent billions of pounds on a vanity project that just sucks more talent down south, and at a time when we should be more careful about what we risk our money on.