HS2: a principle worth upholding

It’s time to advance a strong, democratic case for high speed trains in Britain

For once Boris Johnson called it right. On Friday, he pronounced managers of Britain’s second high-speed rail link, HS2, ‘profligate’ and, in fact, ‘hopeless’. And he was right.

Yet it looks likely that he’ll go ahead with HS2 – still spending, perhaps, £106bn on it. And he’ll be right to do that, too.

Why? Because we have to separate the disgraceful managerial conduct of the project, from conception to today, from the political principle of high-speed travel.

Even if accompanied by 5G telecommunications networks, HS2 will never meet Johnson’s hopes of ‘levelling up’ the North, let alone Scotland, with London and the South East. Yet the project’s whole history has been accompanied by different kinds of hype which, like that around addressing what used to be called the North-South Divide, have failed to convince. And so long as the underlying logics adduced to back HS2 were weak, its practical implementation was likely to be poor.

Just two years after it passed the dictatorial Climate Change Act in 2008, Labour issued a White Paper backing HS2. Making 79 references to sustainability, it celebrated the savings in CO2 from reduced air travel that HS2 would bring. That gained HS2 one dubious foundation, and today, a ‘net-zero carbon UK’ is the lead rationale offered by HS2 Ltd. But another, just as dubious foundation was also laid in 2013, when HS2 Ltd, a non-departmental public body wholly owned by the Department for Transport, published 25-years-out forecasts in the shape of a thoroughly technocratic and utterly suspect ‘cost-benefit’ case for HS2.

From this point on, things went from bad to worse.

In the usual manner, those quoting for the work vastly and no doubt deliberately underestimated its cost in the future, so as to win a lucrative client in the present. Thereafter, HS2 Ltd spent at least £600m just buying land for the route for the line: the project is more a familiar property play by the elites of UK plc than it will ever be the envy of transport professionals worldwide. On top of that, the whole venture is beset by the inflation, chaos and amateurism that we have come to expect from transport in Britain – rail and its governing structures very much included. In particular, with HS2 the management of engineering risk and the stringency of engineering specification have been a disaster.

It has all been very sad. After a broad improvement in its management of major projects up to and after the Olympics of 2012, London’s Crossrail will, like HS2, now endure an enormous cost overrun, amounting to £3bn on £18.25bn: it is running nearly three years late. Meanwhile a third, £14bn runway at Heathrow, though given the green light by Parliament, is set to open at least two years late, in 2028-9.

What sets HS2 apart, though, is the way in which the project has flouted democracy itself. The company has issued hundreds of Compulsory Purchase Orders so as to evict landed, business and household interests in its way – often paying them low or late. It has commissioned scores of reports and brought inquiries upon itself, but rewarded incoming and outgoing executives, as well as suppliers, in a thoroughly opaque manner. It is now favoured by Chancellor Sajid Javid and Johnson himself because a secret report – by former HS2 chairman Douglas Oakervee, naturally – is supposed to contend that no other alternative is ‘shovel-ready’.

In the process, the high-handed, there-is-no-alternative stance of the authorities on HS2 has not just made some outbursts of NIMBYism justified. It has also given credence to the most backward Green prejudices.

Unconsciously echoing the right-wing Swiss priest Ivan Illich (Energy and equity, 1974), critics of HS2 vilify high speeds as an addictive capitalist enterprise from which only the rich will benefit. In know-nothing mode, they present the broad half-hour saved between London and Birmingham as a trifling matter, as if emergency meetings in the flesh, leave aside the overall question of the productivity of the UK economy, are of no import. Cocking a snook at men, HS2’s opponents insist, in an always profound and radically new way, that any and all ‘megaprojects’ like HS2 represent merely egoistic, if not phallic, gestures, vanity projects, toys for boys. In the usual heart-rending video featuring kids, doleful music and soft focus, luvvies Emma Thompson, Annie Lennox and Chris Packham urge us: stand up for the trees that HS2 will destroy… by destroying it. Lastly and most significantly, HS2’s critics are adamant that local and intra-urban transport – buses, cycle lanes, walking – should take precedence over the national and inter-urban sort.

Parsimonious Tory backwoodsmen may stage a small rebellion against HS2. But those who ridicule the project only get away with the ropey arguments summarised above because its supporters are lost for words.

In fact the real rationale for HS2 is simple enough. The transport of goods and people is progressive. It increases the value of the objects bound up in freight, gets commuters to work and back, brings distant family members together, and offers new experiences of new places. Everyone sees himself or herself as an expert on transport, because everyone has used transport and continues to need it, too – in ways that IT will never be able to provide. Therefore in addition to, not as a substitute for other transport projects, the principle behind HS2, like the wider rail capacity it is set to open up, amounts to an unconditional good.

Add to this a still more vital consideration. While it certainly has international dimensions and local ramifications, democracy is in the first place a national issue. Yet national sovereignty cannot be exercised without a population able to reach all parts of the nation with relative ease.

By itself, HS2 cannot even help to guarantee that a voter from John O’Groats can meet one from Land’s End in Westminster, there jointly to hold their elected representatives to account, in person, and not over a livestreamed video link. However, it would be a shockingly backward step not to move Britain decisively into the 21st century in all aspects of travel – high-speed inter-urban trains emphatically included.

Britain’s infrastructure crisis is everywhere. That’s why transport has become a democratic question. The route, economics and technology of HS2 will, rightly, always be a matter of debate – compensation regimes and passenger fares emphatically included in this discussion, too. The project might best be built from the North down, rather from the South up. But whatever the case, a democratic politics must allow all citizens of the UK, not just ministers and CEOs, to go about their business with ease.

Older people, people who cannot drive, those with disabilities, accompanied children, those with luggage or heavy shopping: all these groups, along with the vast majority of Brits, should be able to move from city to city in the UK without too much effort. HS2 is a small and long overdue step in the direction of reviving a truly national kind of discourse and intercourse. Its management deserves much more democratic supervision than it has ever had. But as a principle, the project deserves our support.