Jeremy's Blog 6th October 2023: After HS2

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 5th October 2023

HS2 has now been identified as the cuckoo in the nest with its ever-escalating costs and extending timescales, seen as an unmanageable project with its benefits now less than its vast and perhaps unquantifiable costs. It had grown to take a third of the Department for Transport’s capital budget, more money than either Highways England’s roads renewals programme or Network Rail’s capital programme. With little prospect of control, it had come to squeeze, if not crowd out, other projects. Phases 2a, 2b and HS2 East are now cancelled.

Its charmed existence, surviving each financial threshold and review, each time too big to fail as it went through £50bn and more, has become more doubtful as this year has gone by. The March 2023 announcement of a 2 year deferral of Phase 2a might now be seen more clearly as public spending discipline than juggling forecast figures. However, that deferral would have been at greater cost later. Within a few days in July, the Chief Executive disappeared and the National Infrastructure Commission gave Phase 2a one of its few red ratings for undeliverability.

Now new management is to be found for the Euston end, bringing in private finance and promoting thousands of houses by the Euston Development Corporation. The line then to Birmingham and Lichfield, too far advanced to drop, still has all its management issues.

That leaves us with the sprawling mess on the ground in sorting out the ashes of Phase 2a.

We now expect the formal process of removing safeguarding for the Phase 2a route to Crewe “within weeks”. Decisions over Phase 2b will take longer, interacting with other transport proposals. No statement has been made over the safeguarding or otherwise of the HS2 East route to the East Midlands Hub. Property acquisition ceases where safeguarding is lifted with the machinery is now to be thrown into reverse to dispose of property bought and now not needed. We await all details of how this might be handled.

There will bring many more questions and all the work that will accompany resolving them. The CAAV will be working on clarifying these. We will cover what we can at the CAAV Briefing Days in the next two weeks at Harrogate and Wyboston.

The major contractors might all have serious penalty clauses providing for large payments on cancellation. But how will all the people, farms and businesses who have been on the receiving end of HS2, with all their costs, disruption and agonies, now be handled?

This decision eases the financial shadow over many other schemes and enables more - and some road resurfacing. The money is redeployed to other transport schemes in the M62 corridor and further afield from Stranraer to the south west. These are all likely to be more manageable but each having its own impact on land and business.

Part of the HS2’s survival until this week has been by bluster over a project larger than anything the Victorians built as private sector projects. Burdened by scale, bedevilled by its specifications changing with political needs and beyond effective supervision, increasing overstretch saw bluster become bluff in a country with a stalling economy.

However late in the day this may be and with all the damage so far caused, the cuckoo has now been taken out of the nest. Perspective and proportion can now return but we are left with a lot that has to be put right.