For a scheme sold as helping the Midlands and North, HS2 is remarkably London-centric. It won’t even reach Manchester for nearly 20 years, and is built around the desire to let London’s frenetic business activity spill up the line to other cities. In a country that tried to fulfil its potential in every region, we’d be upgrading our miserable Liverpool-Hull links – not duplicating our London-Birmingham ones.
In part, HS2’s conception reflects our deference to global competition and the realities imposed by our chosen model of development: with growth rooted in the City, business services and the South’s ever-virile property market, the capital has become England’s economic motor. And our over-centralised political system locates too much power in Westminster and Whitehall: both a product of London’s historical dominance, and a cause of its perpetuation, this ensures that all the key decisions start in the capital. Small wonder that our new line will, too.
So our economy is distorted; and HS2 will only fortify London’s position as our transport hub. But in reality, the alternative is not a flowering of regional infrastructure – it’s a well-meaning plan for multiple smaller projects, whittled down by successive governments until little remains. For big projects have glamour, demand commitment, and resist salami-slicing: it’s hard to get them moving, but just as hard to stop them.
What’s more, when finally delivered, mega-projects produce benefits that no Treasury cost-benefit analysis could predict. The HS2 chief’s arguments that high-speed rail generates substantial economic growth seem weak: in Ebbsfleet and Ashford, for example, HS1 has offered an economic edge, but no transformation. Yet HS1’s Stratford station was crucial in bringing the Olympics to Britain – thus transforming a swathe of East London (via another huge project whose benefits, again, won’t be manifest for years to come). Or look at Greenwich Peninsula, where an ill-conceived millennium project catalysed transport and remediation work that’s produced a brand new residential, office and leisure city quarter.
Given a radical plan to rebalance our economy and our polity away from London to the English regions, we’d have a very different mega-project from HS2. But this is where we are – and high-speed rail does help us handle the fall-out of our wildly skewed economic model. If we build it, we won’t regret it; but we won’t understand its true value until many years after the first fast trains pull into Birmingham’s Curzon Street station.
Editor, Matt Ross: matt.ross@dods.co.uk