HS2 is a mess. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander announced this week that it was likely to cost up to £102 billion just to get to Birmingham. It will not be the fastest train in the world either. HS2 will now go at 320 kilometres an hour. Fast for Britain but bog standard for everywhere else.
Nor will the train line be open until mid to late 2030s – and even then it will literally be a shuttle between Old Oak Common in deepest West London and Birmingham. Birmingham might get a bit better off as a result, but high speed rail will not be transformative, because there are no plans to extend it to Manchester or as originally planned to Leeds and then the rest of the country,
The whole thing is a very expensive disaster – a disaster mostly of the Conservatives making, who kept interfering politically, changing the plan (and therefore the project) and adding billions of pounds worth of tunnelling to protect some of the richest communities in the Chilterns. A rail line that was supposed to be about spreading wealth from London to the North has turned out to be like almost every other infrastructure project in recent times: it has only benefited the South.
HS2 was originally a Labour idea. It is called HS2, by the way, because a Labour government built HS1, the line from the Channel Tunnel into Stratford and St Pancras. The line was completed on time and on budget costing £6.8 billion, pocket money in HS2 terms. It wasn’t quite as easy to build as it is now portrayed but the team who led the construction also got a lot of things right. Not least the technology. The train was an extension of the TGV in France, straight out of the box.
Contrast with HS2, a mega innovation project as well as an infrastructure project. The UK had not built a railway line north of London since 1900, but decided that for HS2 they would use rail technology that has never been used before in the world, expensive tracks made with concrete slabs instead of ballast to increase the speed, an ultra-modern signalling system, cuttings built to last through the worst case climate change scenarios, plus design-winning viaducts, more than 65 miles of tunnelling. And that’s before we get on to the specially designed trains which run best on specially built HS2 tracks and were only designed to stop at specially designed HS2 stations.
Had the people who decided on HS2 learnt the lessons of HS1 (they didn’t), then we would have had a much cheaper line which could probably have extended to Manchester easily and might have been used for Northern Powerhouse rail too. We also might have a line which would have gone into London or at least Birmingham much more cheaply on existing train lines. The reason the centre of Paris hasn’t been ripped up for the TGV is that the train slows down into the Gare du Nord.
And had we planned HS2 at the same time as HS1 (we didn’t) then both might have joined together at a large station on the Kings Cross site.
It was clear researching my book that civil servants and MPs were totally out of their depth and understood little about the engineering so never even asked the right questions. That has to change!
There are numerous other reasons that HS2 has been expensive which I go into in my book, but not using tried and tested technology out of the box is a major one. So does HS2 mean that we shouldn’t be building infrastructure? The answer to that is a resounding no. Infrastructure is what creates a modern country. We just need to build smarter and learn the lessons of projects that worked and look beyond our borders to success stories.
We do urban infrastructure in London very well indeed and have expertise in it. Just look at the Elizabeth Line and the Jubilee line extension which have increased the capital’s wealth. But urban infrastructure is not the same as building high speed trainlines round the country.
Most importantly we should have a cross-party long term plan about what infrastructure we need in the country over the next 30 years, pass it through Parliament and discuss all the trade-offs then with things like the environment.
Buy-in from businesses and local and regional governments is essential so we can work out what is good for them too and get them to contribute where they can (little of this was done with HS2). At the moment we have no future British vision, so each individual infrastructure decision is contested with the public, local government and within the ruling party.
Finally we need to build infrastructure not because we can prove some arbitrary cost benefit but because the government and the country decides it is in the long-term public good.
Sally Gimson’s book Off the Rails published in 2025 by Oneworld is available at all good bookshops.
