Think HS2 is a waste of money? This is worse ...Middle East

Imagine you are in charge of something which, by money wasted, is perhaps the greatest disaster in British history; something you yourself describe as an “appalling mess” with no solution, final budget or opening date in sight.

What do you do? Why, you start work on another scheme just like it, only worse.

Even as she pledges to “draw a line in the sand” under the failures of HS2 – though her plan to do this has yet to be revealed – Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander is quietly preparing an even greater train crash.

Even as she publishes a report criticising her predecessors for rushing into immature schemes for political reasons, and making promises they could not keep, Alexander is about to do precisely the same.

In the next few weeks, we’re told, the Government will make some kind of commitment to a second high-speed rail project, in the North of England, between Manchester and Liverpool. This scheme achieves the difficult feat of making HS2 look sensible.

It will be a high-speed railway on which trains will never be able to reach high speeds because the stations are too close together.

It will start with a vastly expensive eight-mile tunnel in the wrong direction – roughly south, only then turning west towards Liverpool.

The distance between the two cities will be a third greater than the current line.

And, as a result, it will actually take longer to reach Liverpool than the existing service.

The price? According to the people pushing the project, the line will cost £17bn. This is enough to electrify every existing rail line in the North and give four cities a new tram system. In reality, perhaps £30 or £40bn.

The official reason for doing it like this is that trains could also serve Manchester Airport. But the “airport” station would actually be a mile away, and you would have to transfer by bus. That journey would also be slower, or at best no quicker, than by the current conventional trains running into the airport itself.

The real reason, almost certainly, is that those first eight miles in the wrong direction were also slated to carry the northern leg of HS2, Phase 2a and 2b, which were cancelled in 2023.

Rishi Sunak axed HS2 north of Birmingham in 2023

And some still hope that Phase 2 can rise, slightly modified, from the dead. Little noticed in Wednesday’s announcement, Alexander also gave “steers that [HS2] should plan to retain the spurs to the former Phase 2a and 2b sections,” at a cost of £500m.

So as well as Liverpool-Manchester, we could be on the hook for a third disastrous high-speed scheme, a reinstated HS2 northern leg.

Nine-tenths of journeys are local. Each year, three London bus routes carry about as many people as Spain’s entire 2,500-mile high-speed rail network. One London tube line carries six times more people.

Yet for most of the last decade, long-distance high-speed rail has dominated, distorted and damaged British transport policy – at the direct expense of things which matter far more.

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Since HS2 started to suck up all the money, for instance, the expansion of Manchester’s Metrolink tram has come almost to a halt.

Between 2010 and 2015, it added 58 new stops. In the last decade, it has added only six.

Last year, the Government spent 75 per cent more on HS2 than it spent on local public transport across the entire country.

But public transport is a network. Creating better public transport means creating a better network – allowing people in thousands of places to travel easily door-to-door, often by connecting from a train to a tram or bus. It does not mean grafting one or two new high-speed lines, serving a handful of places, onto an otherwise decrepit system.

The fixation on high-speed rail has also meant an obsession with links – that is, lines between places.

But the key capacity problem of the North’s railway is at nodes – chokepoints, like central Manchester, where all the trains converge.

Could Manchester and Liverpool follow London?

The best way to fix that is not high-speed schemes, but a Northern equivalent of London’s Elizabeth Line, a new tunnel under central Manchester with an underground station at Piccadilly, joining up the existing conventional lines on either side.

A two-track tunnel could, like its London sister, run 30 trains an hour, five times more than the service proposed for the Liverpool-Manchester high-speed track.

Rather than just one line serving seven stations, it would create a dense, frequent network serving about 80 stations.

It would be both transformative and deliverable. It would, admittedly, make less money for the likes of Arup and Balfour Beatty.

Ministers and metro mayors now have a choice. They can waste more years clinging to high-speed fantasies that may waste billions before inevitably being cut back or cancelled, given the continuing deterioration of the public finances, and of HS2 Phase 1. Or they can get started on something that would work.

Andrew Gilligan is head of transport at Policy Exchange.

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