HS2 and the buffers of Brexit

Between the old North-South divide and the more recent Referendum falls a tricky rail project

Even by the usual standards, transport in Britain has entered a new stage of crisis. For many airline passengers, Heathrow has become a disaster zone of overcrowding, IT snarl-ups and delays – yet London mayor Sadiq Khan has teamed up with Greenpeace and others to subject the 2026 opening of a third runway at Heathrow, which Parliament voted for in June, to judicial review. With trains, in the south-east, problems with no fewer than three new timetables, staff training and train financing at Govia Thameslink Railway have reached surreal levels. In northern rail, we have no more than a promise from hapless transport secretary Chris Grayling that the £3bn upgrade of the TransPennine line will ‘include’ electrification. In cars, over the past 10 years, vehicle miles have risen 3.7 per cent, while Britain’s 31,000-mile major road system has grown by 176 miles, or less than 0.6 per cent.

Just as it does with industrial plant and commercial property, British capitalism sweats old assets in transport more than it invests in new ones. But there’s an important new development. The High Speed 2 rail project (HS2) linking London to Birmingham and, eventually, to parts north, is gradually moving from design to construction. But, like other rail projects outside London, its prospects look like being inflamed by the geography of pro- and anti-Brexit sentiment, which broadly reflects Britain’s longstanding north-south divide.

Remember HS2? When it was agreed by the House of Commons in March 2016, only 44 MPs voted against it. That kind of unanimity, Rob Lyons noted on spiked a whole three years before, was special: it reflected both Green prejudices against use of the air and motorways, and the utopian hope that a fast rail link still decades away from completion could, by itself, regenerate the north of England and somehow keep it tethered to London, too. Fast-forward to today, however, and the outstanding feature of HS2 isn’t political unanimity, but political silence.

In the usual ominous style, the start of civil engineering works on the first phase of HS2 has already been quietly postponed by three months – twice, to June 2019. Budget overruns already demand not only that HS2 Ltd shut down businesses in the way of its route, but also that it compensates them much later, if at all. Last, Grayling has appointed, as the new chairman of HS2 Ltd, Sir Terry Morgan: that’s significant, because Morgan used to chair London’s successful east-west Crossrail project, which thankfully is due to open as the Elizabeth Line this December. But that’s about all the current news about HS2.

There’s no conspiracy of silence. But although the annual budget for the first, London-Birmingham phase of HS2 is only about £2bn, the cumulative spending on it, even without overruns, will be £27.4bn by its completion in December 2026. Remember, too, that a December 2016 Cabinet Office report by the Infrastructure Projects Authority argued that the cost of the full project, including a second phase linking up to Leeds and Manchester, could ascend from £56bn to more than £80bn. So: not much needs to go wrong for the hopes of Remoaners in Westminster, of HS allowing them to retain some link with the rest of the Midlands and the north, to fade.

So the Government and Remoaners are certainly not celebrating HS2 as a great national project, or as an icon-to-be of technological progress and post-Brexit modernity. On the contrary, they’re playing HS2 down.

Now, Brexit voters in the Midlands and the north won’t cry into their beer about any failure of HS2 to be completed and so save them 32 minutes on the train down to Euston. But HS2 isn’t the only transport project that could end up alienating the pro-Brexit parts of England from London and the south-east. Apart from the TransPennine link, Transport For The North, which in April 2018 Parliament created as England’s first sub-national yet statutory transport body, wants to upgrade lines out of Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, as well as build new lines between Manchester and Leeds and between Liverpool and HS2. The body wants 30 years to be allowed to do that; and it’s already four years since then chancellor George Osborne fatefully called for a Northern Powerhouse with high-speed TransPennine link – not just a more-or-less electric one. So if building the HS2 line, upon which much of general northern rail development depends, is much delayed, the transport ramifications, and the political consequences, promise to be serious.

Not for the first time, the authorities don’t know which way to turn. Continue with HS2 in all its likely expense, and the Treasury will be upset, environmentalists will moan, and the City of London may have to wave goodbye to London’s putative south-west to north-east link, Crossrail 2. Drop HS2, and the connectivity of England, whose internal air routes are weak and whose roads are creaking, will come under question – and Leave sentiment in England will add another grievance to the long list it already has against the London elite.

What emerges is that Brexit issues now permeate all aspects of policy – even reputedly technical ones such as transport. Already the dynamics of and technology around freight traffic at the Irish border and at British ports are discussed as never before. Already, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar has threatened to close Irish airspace to flights bound to and from Britain. Brexit has made transport a thoroughly political issue. And the complaints of the Labour Party and Manchester’s Labour mayor Andy Burnham, that Tories are ignoring the transport needs of the North, are neutered by Labour’s total orientation to Brussels and to London.

One final point. The utopias about transport innovation that are upheld by international transport technocrats – of electrified, autonomous, shared, connected and yearly updated cars, flying taxis, flying cars, smart cities and all the rest – have, despite all the evidence of British infrastructure collapse and political division over transport, never been wilder. Thus, in a rare report, Britain’s obscure National Infrastructure Commission has pronounced that autonomous vehicles may render traffic lights and stop signs ‘unnecessary’ by 2050.

Reassuring, that.