Beeching 2

Today the BBC News website reports that the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) now estimates that the extended version of High Speed 2, with its northern projections to Leeds and Manchester, will cost the British taxpayer more than £80 billion, compared with the previous comparatively trivial figure of £42.6 billion. As with all such estimates beloved of our political and financial masters - where millions so easily escalate into billions and trillions and on into completely meaningless-illions – there is a strong whiff of wetting one’s finger and sticking it up into the wind. “Ah yes, um, £80 billion, that sounds about right. It’s only the taxpayer. Pity the poor sods who live in Canterbury or Cardiff or Cornwall who will still have to fork out for HS2 at very little potential benefit to themselves. Never mind.” But to be fair, while the figures may be a bit iffy, the IEA is opposed to the current proposals and they suggest that the money could be better spent on more effective rail improvements. How absolutely true. Carefully thought-through improvements, for instance, the consequences of joined-up thinking and imaginative planning by people sympathetic to, and knowledgeable about, our railway heritage. No, not the Fat Controller.

No one has a clue how much HS2 will cost. Nor how many jobs it will create, or how much business it will generate in different parts of the country, or even if anyone will want to use it, or be able to afford to. Completion date, a couple of decades on, is a long way away. These are fast-moving and scary times. As someone once said, making predictions, especially about the future, is difficult. The big changes are the ones we didn’t see coming : the end of the Soviet bloc, the internet, 9/11 and the insanity that has followed. And so it will be; 20 years is a very long time, even if politicians can’t imagine beyond next weekend or at best beyond the next election – and, all too often, routinely can’t see beyond the tip of their steadily extending noses. Whatever the merits of the estimated figures, the IEA report does note, however, that the scheme is “incredibly poor value for money” – so, then, no different really from what indigenous longterm UK residents have come to expect in general, and fully in line with the effects of successive government policies.

The £80 billion (I’ve just checked and it hasn’t gone up since this morning, though admittedly it is a Sunday and the school holidays) apparently allows for all the bribes, hand-outs, fudges, kludges, bodges and infrastructural bandaids necessary to render the scheme halfway palatable to a captive public, or even do-able at all. The report isn’t officially released until tomorrow, so I’m not sure if the new figure takes care of the tricky bit about going where people actually want to go, e.g. city centres, or stations where there are ongoing connections to other places, rather than stations with fascinating historic columns quite near to city centres or “hubs”  in the middle of nowhere but accessible by an extended tram route with only 15 intermediate stops, just as long as you don’t mind humping your baggage and your small children across the footbridge.

A few weeks ago I voluntarily underwent the profoundly depressing experience of attending a public meeting where the aims, pros and cons of HS2 were explained, with the opportunity for the audience to ask questions and to raise objections. The responses were widely varied, across the spectrum from unquestioning acceptance to unsubtle badge-wearing “Stop HS2 !” fundamentalism, and with many shades of detail and specificity of concern in between. There’s an awful lot to weigh up which – frighteningly – appears to have been brushed under the carpet by the experts who really understand these matters. “Of course, we’ve looked at that in immense detail, and we concluded it was a non-starter. Trust us, we know best. Next?” Sadly, but by no means surprisingly, I came away feeling that the matter has already been decided and that, while there will be some sort of sham of a “consultation” process, and a few minor tweaks reluctantly permitted here and there, if the present government (or its replacement by the other lot in 2015) has anything to do with it, the biggest public transport disaster since Beeching is fully on track – and an expensive, environmentally destructive, and wrongly sited track it is absolutely determined to be.