Depleted and unwanted, HS2 hurtles on.
‘Like Johnson’s garden bridge, the more extravagant it is, the more it can be described as world-beating.’ Photograph: Eddie Keogh/PA
by Simon Jenkins, The Guardian UK
Britain’s new high-speed railway will not – repeat: not – get to the north of England. It will go back and forth from London to the Midlands and its chief beneficiaries will be London commuters. All else is political spin.
This became certain last week as the government’s internal major projects authority declared phase two of the HS2 project, to Manchester and Leeds, effectively dead. While the already-started London-to-Birmingham stretch is still marked at “amber/red” for “successful delivery in doubt”, anything north of Crewe has been designated “unachievable”. Its multitudinous issues “do not appear to be manageable or resolvable”. [...] This was the verdict of an arm of the Treasury and Cabinet Office.
Since HS2 has always been politics-driven – no rail strategy ever gave it priority – it has raced past every red light for a decade. By far Europe’s biggest infrastructure scheme, it has finally been overtaken by its own extravagance. The pandemic has sent commuter numbers plummeting and wrecked any remotely plausible rate of return.
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This one train line will consume the equivalent of Britain’s entire projected railway investment budget during its two decades of construction.
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travelling between Birmingham’s as yet non-existent Curzon Street station and a Euston station that does not link with HS1 and the Channel tunnel (and is not even on the new Crossrail). No one boarding a train in the north will be able to travel directly to France. As for Curzon Street in Birmingham, it is a mile from the New Street interchange and the west coast main line. This makes absolutely no sense.
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HS2 is more a taxpayer-funded theme park than a railway.
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The project has long been out of control. It is a spending black hole: figures in 2018 showed its latest boss Mark Thurston having to be paid over £660,000 a year, with 15 of his colleagues on over £250,000. A quarter of all HS2 staff, over 300 people, received above £100,000. The Commons public accounts committee declared it to be “badly off course” and lacking even the most “basic financial controls.” This is despite the outlay of £600m annually on consultants, including £35m on the “big four” accountancy firms.
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It is never too late to stop a dud project, but it requires ever more courage to do so.
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... t-taxpayer Accessed: 2021-07-30
