Off The Rails
The Prime Minister leaves Manchester with a promise to end the so-called war on motorists and the cancellation of yet another leg of HS2. Dressed up as long-term decision making, this is short-termism at its very worst, a plan not for the future but to win votes.
In announcing that the car driver should take priority over the bus passenger, this Government is upending decades of transport policies from both Labour, coalition and Conservative governments, and returning us to the so-called great car economy of the 1970s.
Mark Harper and his team have been trying to do the right thing, including capping bus fares which has resulted in bus fares in rural areas having fallen 11 per cent over the last year.
But smooth running is essential if the bus is to attract people out of their cars. Removing bus priority measures will simply lead to more buses more often being stuck in congested streets along incidentally with all the motorists the PM says he wants to help. And people will take the view that if they are going to be stuck in a traffic jam, they may as well be stuck in their own car rather than stuck in a bus.
The good news, if there is any, is that the Plan for Drivers talks about reviews, changing guidance and the like. Very little if anything can be forced on local councils before May next year when the General Election is widely expected. Department for Transport civil servants, charged with making something palatable out of these fetid ingredients, can be forgiven for taking their time and going slow, in the entirely reasonable expectation that a General Election may well mean a change of personel.
Then came the hammer blow that we had all been expecting – the amputation of what was left of HS2.
The HS2 concept I signed up to, both as Shadow Transport Secretary in 2009 and then subsequently as a transport minister, was light years away from where we have ended up. That was for a network of new track, not simply to Manchester and Leeds, but one that had a spur to Heathrow, to discourage internal flights, and a link to HS1. Trains would run from Edinburgh and Glasgow through to Paris and Brussels using HS2 and HS1.
Philip Hammond and I actually wanted to extend the Heathrow link round to Gatwick, linking the two airports in 14 minutes and avoiding the need for a third runway at Heathrow. That idea was kiboshed by the aviation industry going over our heads straight to Cameron and Osborne.
So first the Heathrow link was dropped, then the link to HS1. Next we lost Leeds, and now we have lost Manchester. The line that was supposed to level up the country will, if it does anything, simply reinforce the strength of the south. If building the line had started in the north, in Manchester and Leeds, and proceeded south, nobody would be arguing that it should be amputated before reaching London.
Britain is fast becoming an international joke and the HS2 decision will only reinforce that view. The country that gave the world the railway cannot even build a new line. We currently have just 67 miles or 108 km of high-speed line. France has 3000 km, Germany 1500 km, Spain 4000 km, and China 40,000 km.
Meanwhile, across Europe one new kilometre of track is costing £32 million. In Britain, the cost of HS2 per kilometre is £200 million. Constant changes to the specification, excessive use of expensive consultants, and bloated top-level management have played their part.
We were treated on the radio on Wednesday morning to the former transport secretary Grant Shapps trying to blame the cancellation of the Manchester leg on COVID, notwithstanding he was championing HS2 as essential after the pandemic had abated. Passenger numbers on the railway, particularly on long-distance routes, have in fact recovered well. More to the point, numbers today are far in excess of those which were seen in 2012 when the business case for HS2 was agreed.
The case for HS2 was always built round capacity, not speed, so that problem will continue to exist on the already congested west coast main line. Those who were looking forward to using the freed-up line to put on extra local services or more freight trains will have to think again.
Still, we can take heart apparently from the fact that HS2 trains will continue on existing tracks into Leeds and Manchester, so at least passengers there can savour the HS2 logo and paint on the sides of the trains. Half Speed 2.
In his conference speech, Rishi Sunak promised a ragtag and bobtail selection of other bits and pieces to assuage the North. While some of these certainly have merit, they do not compensate for the hammer blow that has been delivered. Moreover, what confidence can anyone possibly have that these will actually materialise, rather than being cancelled down the line as so much else has been?
This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in Passenger Transport.
Image: Hitachi Rail, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
