HS2: is this the end of the line?

Britain has endured its fair share of doomed prestige projects, said Larry Elliott in The Guardian, but “as white elephants go, HS2 is in a class of its own”. Since the high-speed rail link got the formal parliamentary go-ahead in 2012, it has become a byword for bureaucratic incompetence and waste.

Some £20bn has already been spent on the scheme, which was originally expected to cost £37.5bn but is now expected to cost at least double that. The eastern leg of the link that was supposed to run from the East Midlands to Leeds has been scrapped, and delays mean the first trains to Manchester won’t arrive until the late 2030s at the earliest.

It’s currently unclear where the London terminus will be. Last month, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, a government watchdog, gave the majority of the HS2 scheme a red rating. This means it thinks that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable”, and that there are “major issues” with it that at this stage “do not appear to be manageable or resolvable”.

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‘National disgrace’

It’s a “national disgrace” that the HS2 project has been allowed to descend into such an unholy mess, said William Hague in The Times. The costs of the plan have steadily risen even as the potential gains have diminished. Dominic Cummings was right when he tried to persuade his then boss Boris Johnson to “scrap the entire idea back in 2019 when there was still time to do so”. Britain simply “has to get better at managing huge infrastructure projects”.

The problem goes beyond just HS2, agreed The Times. The planning process for the Lower Thames Crossing, which is intended to relieve the congested Dartford Crossing, “has so far cost more than it took Norway to build the longest road tunnel in the world, and it is nowhere near complete”. National Highways reckons it will cost up to £500m to add a lane in both directions to the four-mile A46 Newark bypass. For that sum, “California built 22 miles of express lanes for Route 101”. We must pare back the endless public consultations, environmental surveys and judicial reviews that have gummed up our planning system.

‘If we can’t stop HS2 we should at least make it stop’

HS2 has become a costly distraction from our other urgent infrastructure needs, said The Daily Telegraph. The money devoted to this grand vision could be more productively invested in building “more houses, better roads and reservoirs, and safe, efficient nuclear power plants”.

If, as we’re always told, the real point of HS2 is not to shorten journey times but to free up capacity on existing lines, said Rory Sutherland in The Spectator, one option would be to make HS2 slower. That would save money and allow for a curvier line that bypassed some obstacles. It would also enable HS2 trains to stop more often, benefitting communities along the route. Creating entirely new stations in empty areas could help generate wealth by spawning new towns. Swindon, Crewe and Derby owe most of their growth to rail connections. “If we can’t stop HS2 we should at least make it stop.”