Birmingham in 49 minutes, Leeds in 80, and 45 minutes shaved off the journey to Scotland’s major cities. For some, this is reason enough for the Government’s new High Speed Rail line (HS2) – stretching from London in the South, to Manchester in the North-West and Leeds in the North-East.
Many, including myself, would love to see the line extended all the way up to Scotland, providing a real boost to domestic tourism and sustainable growth.
But in amongst the disputes over cost benefit analyses and NIMBYism, there are some startling figures which remind us why High Speed Rail is vital for the future of British transport; and why it is that we included it in our 2008 policy paper Fast Track Britain, our 2010 Election Manifesto and now the Coalition Agreement.
Over the last 50 years the length of our rail network has roughly halved, but, since 1980, the number of passenger journeys has doubled. This reduction in capacity, at a time when demand has soared, has fuelled over-crowding and led to eye-watering price hikes.
Network Rail estimates that by 2024 the existing line to Birmingham and the North West will be full – already we are seeing serious congestion on commuter services at the Southern end of the line, seriously harming service reliability and passenger welfare.
These fundamental facts have been largely ignored by politicians and the press alike; the debate over the HS2 project has been damagingly distorted. The need for the extra capacity which this project will provide is not a luxury, it is a cold, hard necessity which we cannot afford to ignore.
There have been some ludicrous suggestions that this capacity problem could be fixed by extra carriages and the reduction of first class seats. It sounds like a simple solution, but running that many services on a single would result in a completely unreliable service. Massive infrastructure works on a deeply overcrowded line is not a solution, it’s not even a quick fix, it is a completely unrealistic alternative.
The only possible alternative would be to just build a non-high speed line along a similar route. But current estimates place the cost saving at just 9% and, crucially, the line would not stop the extraordinarily damaging growth in road and air travel.
Current projections suggest that the HS2 project will transfer 6 million air trips and 9 million road trips onto rail. If you’re going to build a new train line, you have to make it fit for 21st century travel.
There are some who say that we are so far behind our competitors in Europe and Japan that we should construct the whole line all in one go. But this would delay the commencement of building due to the size of the consultation and the complexity of the Parliamentary process, and it would lead to disproportionate financial and logistical difficulties. Just think back to previous Government IT projects.
For years Liberal Democrats have derided Government plans to patch up the old train lines and ignore technological advances abroad. But now, with massive pressure on freight and commuter services, disproportionate economic growth in London and the South-East and a pressing need to reduce our carbon emissions, High Speed rail is no longer the transport of the future, it is a logistical imperative.
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Watch interviews with former inhabitants of St Kilda from 1972
Councillor joins Lib Dems in Western Isles
Today we gave our thanks to the 999 services and other public servants
The Genome Rides on a Citric Acid Bicycle
Weekly Road Report - West End Ward #dundeewestend
Tory Leadership dirty tricks?
Suzanne Fletcher
Mary Fulton
Mick Taylor
Simon R
Steve Trêvethan
31 Comments
Alternatively, you could implement fiscal measures that will reduce the price of housing by a half. This would reduce the demand for rail journeys as people would then be able to live closer to where they work. The credit-fuelled housing bubble of the last decade caused the increase in commuter journey times. Decreasing journey times would make the problem worse.
At a time when our economy faces major problems, we should be asking ourselves why there has been such an increase in commuting and think about what we can do to alleviate the problem – i.e. ensuring that people can live next to where they work, encouraging working from home, etc. Our current system is madness and hopelessly inefficient – the number of hours spent commuting is economically wasteful and we simply cannot afford it. Subsidising more commuting is not the answer,
I like that you wish to see it go to up Scotland but i wish it would start in Scotland or the whole network rather than London to Birmingham/Manchester. The reason i object to the chosen route is that it does nothing for the already disadvantaged part of the rail network. The difference between Glasgow/Manchester & London/Manchester is approx 10miles yet the difference in rail journey time is approx 1hr 10mins.
Ok so on the journey between Glasgow/Manchester you have to change trains but if you time it right the wait should only be 10 minutes that still leaves an hour difference.
The idea that we build faster trainlinks between London & Manchester and that will spread to areas outside is like the Conservative policy of you help the poor by helping the rich. You don’t help the disadvantaged areas (whether its through poverty or infrastructure or anything else) by helping the already advantaged areas. You don’t reduce inequality by purposefully increasing it. That’s what this government doing by having HS2 on the current route.
Nicola, this ignores the substance of Julian’s argument – the primary argument for building the new line is to increase network capacity (arguments about speed are secondary), and if you’re increasing capacity, you do it where there is the biggest shortage of capacity. That’s why its construction is starting from London.
Plus – if there are currently significantly more journeys on the London-Birmingham stretch then that maximises the number of passengers who benefit from the initial investment.
Nowhere in this article do you mention the cost of HS2. £32 billion (that is £32 thousand million pounds) of taxpayers’ money will be spent getting HS2 to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. To continue the line to Scotland would cost tens of billions more.
£1 billion will be spent in this parliament just planning HS2. At a time of cuts to essential services, this is not the right priority for our money.
I broadly support HS2, and I agree with the thrust of your argument.
However, I beseech you Julian, seer of sense and campaigner for good that you are, to please please look into the case for terminating the London end at Old Oak Common, rather than Euston. This would:
1) Avoid horrific destruction of local buildings (many historic) and communities around Euston station, stretched over many years.
2) Save huge amounts of money. I’m at work at the moment so I don’t have the figures to hand, but the proportion of the estimated costs which will be spent on the section within a short distance from Euston was shocking (as quoted in Private Eye). Conversely the route into Old Oak Common requires a lot less urban redesign (and associated CPOs and demolitions), as well as enabling a more sensitively designed new station at OOC. If we could do this it will bring down the costs considerably, and massively strengthen the business case, exposing NIMBY objections for what they are.
3) Avoid further clogging of an already full station, or the complete rebuilding (with considerable upheaval) of a busy terminal. Which wouldn’t even really be that convenient anyway, as it links to fewer lines than a potential new station at OOC.
4) Connect with Crossrail, thereby making access easier from Canary Wharf and Heathrow, and be of easy access from Paddington, thereby hooking up the West.
Surely the main advantage of high speed rail is the potential for fast travel from Britain north of London to the continent. To get the full advantage we need to join Schengen and end timewasting and pointless border checks. I would like to see Julian Huppert calling for that, as soon as possible.
Welcome piece Julian. One additional advantage of High Speed is that it reduces the pressure for a third runway at Heathrow. You can then therefore offset the costs of the third runway against the price tag – £10 billion or more – as a significant social benefit. The reason is not just that it provides a substitute for short-haul flying. It also creates a close link between Birmingham International Airport, which is expanding, and Heathrow Airport. Does anyone believe the lobby for a third runway is not waiting to resurface?
Duncan, Neil, do you not think the capacity problem applies in the North of the country as well, plus speed is a huge part of HS2. The problem with your thinking is that it will always start with London so the rest of the network will generally stand still whilst the London lines are improved. This is one of the reasons why the nationalists are winning in Scotland. If your going to deal with the rail network, you deal with the places that need it most and thats just not the London lines.
Cynic,
when it’s a one-off capital infrastructure investment, the price-tag doesn’t matter too much. The money doesn’t add to the Treasury’s structural spending. What matters is that it can be demonstrated to provide a decent cost-benefit ratio, has social advantages (such as redistributing growth Northwards), reduces CO2 emissions, etc.
If that £32bn wasn’t spent on HS2, it wouldn’t suddenly be spent on something else instead.
I caveat this by adding that this only holds so far – the money still needs to be borrowed via the government’s usual channels, and too much one-off spending will warp the market for its structural credit needs. But £32bn over 20 years is nothing when you consider that the UK government can cope with an annual deficit of significantly over £100bn (in the short term).
Nicola,
The whole West Coast Main Line is going to need a big capacity upgrade, yes. HS2 will give exactly this. But frankly the London end needs it most.
I think it would probably be politically easier to build the London stretch last. Resistance is proving to be most ferocious in the rural communities along this part of the plan. If there was an existing high speed network from Birmingham northwards, the connection to London would be an absolute no-brainer and the anti-brigade wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Sadly, a Birmingham northwards network wouldn’t be anywhere near as beneficial to the economy or the environment.
@Jon Hunt
HS2 won’t ease the pressure on Heathrow, only 7% of traffic is domestic anyway.
Dr Huppert, I think you’ve been taken in by the pro-HS2 spin here without delving deeper into the facts. But that was also evident from your speech in the Commons debate on Thursday where you seemed to ignore comments from previous speakers and just read your prepared statement. As you will have heard in the debate, opponents of HS2 completely agree that there’s a capacity issue so it’s disingenuous to imply otherwise. But there are alternative, less expensive, less damaging and SOONER ways to solve the capacity problem (read railway expert Christian Wolmar’s comments on this). The West Coast Line’s capacity is estimated to be full far sooner than the planned completion date of HS2, so the taxpayer is expected to fork out £32bn and even then there’ll be several years where the WCML capacity issue isn’t solved by HS2!
Your assertion that HS2 is part of a “sustainable transport” system also naively assumes that it must be sustainable because it’s a railway.The DfT’s own report “Delivering a Sustainable Railway” (July 2008 6.14) states that 350km/h trains use 90% more fuel than 200 km/h trains – that’s hardly sustainable and one reason why HS2 is opposed by the Green Party, Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, Campaign for Better Transport, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and many other environmental groups. The fact that the line has been designed to cope with totally unnecessary speeds of up to 400km/h has meant that the route has had to be relatively straight, meaning it can’t avoid sensitive areas, communities and an officially protected Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. In addition it doesn’t even serve the comunities which it is set to damage, unlike HS1 in Kent which at least has some of the trains stopping.
I have voted Lib Dem for all of my life and supported the coalition, but your support of HS2 means that I can no longer do so. We need to spend more money on the rail network as a whole rather than waste vast sums on one extra fast line that will serve mostly the well-off. It is a complete folly – the poor are going to be subsidising the rich for years to come. It’s quite bizarre for the Lib Dems to be supporting this waste of public funds in this way.
We all know it will cost far more than the eye watering estimates. And there’s every chance that commuting levels – both domestic by train or whatever, or international by air – will fall due to progress in IT and ever rising fuel prices.
HS2 may be a white elephant almost before it’s complete.
What about the vast number of towns, including several significant towns in Cambridgeshire, with no rail connectivity at all? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on putting more communities within reach of railway services (and improving bus connections to them) thereby boosting their local economies? What happened to integrated transport?
I agree with Lorna – I’m all for putting more into public transport but spending an extraordinary £32bn on one excessively fast line that serves very few is NOT the best use of public money. The whole railway network could be improved substantially for £32bn – INCLUDING solving the capacity issue on the West Coast Mainline (e.g. “Rail Package 2 Plus”). I even understand all of the lines closed by Beeching could be re-opened for less than the cost of HS2!
I also find it extraordinary that the areas through which HS2 would pass wouldn’t even be able to access the trains. What sort of sustainable transport policy would build a brand new railway line through virgin countryside between London and Birmingham and not allow access to it for people who live there?
As Old codger Chris said it will cost more than stated.1 because they need to compensate fairly,which they dont seem to be doing at the moment.There are many blighted and some cannot plan to improve businesses as they do not know what will happen.2 the A11 recently was widened and bat bridges cost £500,000 .There are bats and numerous wildlife sites along the route that will be damaged.They have not even started to check about the damage to the water tables in the chalk lands.
I agree wth Chris that the UK should join Schengen, but actually this is not strictly necessary for ending timewasting border checks. On the Continent, the usual pre-Schengen practice on cross-border passenger train services was to do the border checks on the train, often while it was moving. [And this was also done on Eurostar in the early days, I am informed.] Also domestic passengers were always allowed to use continental international trains pre-Schengen. The irrational border measures for the Channel Tunnel, requiring pre-borading passport control, probably scuppered trains to France from north of London, and they may also explain the lack of a cross-channel inter-regional commuter rail service to allow easy carless travel between Kent and pas-de-Calais.
The East Coast main line is almost full. The West Coast main line is almost full. The only way to put more passenger trains on them is to remove freight trains, already severely discriminated against. when what we really need is more freight on the railways. Who are all these people with their heads in the sand? (Perhaps people should tell us where they live so at least we can dismiss the suspicion that they are Nimbys looking for arguments).
Of course there is an alternative – build lots of new motorways or widen existing ones to five lanes. This of course is what a lot of the people putting money into the anti-HS2 campaign would like to see.
Tony Greaves
I’d love to see HS2 but there are better ways to spend the money on the rail network and on other things entirely. For 32Bn you could potentially add a cycle carriage to every train on the network so that anyone with a bike knows they can get all the way to their destination. This would make trains more practical for a lot of people making a regular journey, eg a commute, especially as fuel gets more and more expensive. You could lengthen more commuter platforms to allow more capacity to be added to some commuter trains so there are less people standing for long distances. You could build more parkway stations to encourage people visiting cities to leave their cars outside the city. The idea of HS2 in isolation is fine, the cost is not.
@Bolivia Newton-John: I agree with the idea of a station at Old Oak Common, and not just for HS2: it would provide a useful interchange for several crossing but unconnected local rail and Tube lines around Acton. And certainly OOC should be a station stop on HS2, but I’m not sure about having it as the terminus. It is not much closer to central London than Heathrow Airport is, and there are already concerns about the HS2 station for Birmingham being rather too far out of the city centre. This arrangement would defeat one of the much-trumpeted advantages of rail over air: that passengers are taken straight from one city centre to the other. Also if international trains are ever to run on HS2, there surely needs to be a connection between it and HS1; this could be achieved by connecting them at Stratford “International”. It may be costly to build a high-speed line through or around central London, but doing so would make the line much more useful.
And a lot of the NIMBYism around HS2 would be eliminated by having at least one intermediate station in the Chilterns to give the people through which the rail line passes a stake in it. I don’t mean that all trains on HS2 should stop at intermediate stations, rather that there should be alternating non-stop and stopping services, like there are now on the West and East Coast lines. A fast line does not mean that all trains have to run non-stop; it has never been like that in Japan, where they’ve been doing high-speed railways since the 1960s. On the Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen line the first stations west of Tokyo are at distances roughly equivalent to having stations at OOC and in the countryside between Oxford and Milton Keynes (not all trains stop at these). [@Bolivia I read Private Eye’s Dr B Ching column as well]
Finally, HS2 should not result in classic lines being run down, as often happens in France when TGV lines are built. HS2 should supplement, rather than replace, inter-city services on the West Coast line.
So I broadly support HS2, but do have concerns about its execution. Even with the flawed plans, however, it is better than nothing.
Thanks for all the comments …
@steve – you’re right that we need to promote alternatives to transport, which includes flexible working, videoconferencing and helping people to live closer to where they work. But realistically, that is unlikely to be enough to reduce the capacity needs – especially with freight.
@Nicola – we do need to get the link to Scotland to happen, but the major capacity constraints are in the South at the moment, so it is not unreasonable to start there.
@cynic – I disagree. Long-term infrastructure is exactly what this country doesn’t build enough of, and it is worth doing consistently.
@Bolivia – I am indeed looking at some detailed proposals in that area; the Bill that would go through parliament will be slow and detailed, precisely to look at such ideas.
@Chris – agreed. Better links with Europe would be excellent. I spoke in a debate on pan-european transport strategies in June or so …
@Jon – 3rd Runway does keep getting pushed (Westminster is full of BAA ads at the moment), but getting stopped each time.
@Peter D – I have yet to see any realistic alternative capacity sources. Those I have seen have been remarkably optimistic, and fly in the face of what I hear from everyone who knows about rail management. For example, you need to keep empty train paths, simply to allow some resilience in case something goes wrong. If there was a serious alternative, I’d be interested to look at it. You argue we’re starting too late, and there will be capacity problems before HS2 is ready – I agree! But it’s hard to start projects in the past …
@Lorna – As you know, we are pushing for investment in other areas, and the government is actually doing a lot of investment in rail around the country, aside from HS2. I’ve spoken to the Minister about issues such as Wisbech/March
@Tony – well said!
Apologies to those who haven’t had specific replies …
Thanks Julian – was ambivalent about HS2 previously but this has tipped me more in favour.
Would also like to see improved rail services into and within Wales.
The argument about most commuter journeys being London-Birmingham rather than Scotland-Manchester … one wonders if there would be more journeys on the latter if they already had a faster and more reliable service. No doubt the HS2 will make people more keen to travel between London and Birmingham, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And how about that Oxford-Cambridge link one day?
Oh dear…
1. A station in the Chilterns is a Very Silly Idea. From the point of view of those (like me) who live in the Chilterns, it makes no sense because we can get to London pretty quickly on the Chiltern Line / Metropolitan Line anyway. For those of you supporting HS2, another station just slows the thing down making it even less econmically viable.
2. Note how everyone always talks about the journey time TO Londpn, not to Manchester, not to Birmingham., not to Glasgow. It’s always TO London, not from London. That’s the way the money will go as well.
3. Julian says that “the HS2 project will transfer 6 million air trips and 9 million road trips onto rail”. Er, oh yeah? The total number of air passengers between Birmingham, Manchester, East Midlands and Leeds / Bradford to Paris in 2010 was 920,499. Between Birmingham and London that figure is zero, I think, no-one in their right mind would do that. I would love to know where this “6 million air trips and 9 million road trips” figure comes from but it sounds like a very dodgy stat.
4. Isn’t the sine qua non of the colation government reducing the deficit? I don’t see anyone suggesting that HS2 will ever make a profit. Why are we going to use money that we haven’t got to build something that will require more and more public subsidy?
5. Nimby alert (good point, Lord Greaves, sir). My house is a good three miles from the proposed line and unlikely to be affected by noise or other disturbance. Assuming folk still want to live near London in the foreseeable future, HS2 would make my house MORE valuable as house-buyers move away from places on the line and look for similar accommodation nearby. So, thank you very much, but that’s still not a good reason to build the thing. Besides, don’t nimbys say “build it somewhere else”? Most of us that have looked at the proposals in any detail are saying “don’t build it at all”.
@Peter Jones: Intermediate stations can go on slower tracks, so that trains that don’t stop there rush past on the fast tracks. MOST fast, busy rail lines have a mixture of fast and slower services. Look at the East Coast Main line, where fast services that are non-stop from KX to York alternate with semi-fast services that stop at Peterborough, Grantham etc.
@Peter Jones: I don’t know where you live but consider Bicester to London as an example (mainly because a station near Bicester would connect with a revived Varsity Line (East West Rail Link)); the fastest trains from Bicester North to Marylebone take about 50 minutes; a High Speed service from a station nearby might make it to London in 30 minutes or less. Some people would undoubtedly be willing to pay more to shave 20 minutes off the journey. And besides, domestic rail services on HS1 primarily serve communities from which London can be reached fairly quickly by classic rail.
The assumptions in the business case are now having to be corrected because the are biased in favour of HS2. Costs have been understated and benefits have been overstated. The new figures are likely to show that there is no benefit to the economy from th current HS2 proposal.
Evidence shows that economic growth in the North would be better served by a high speed rail line between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle.
Is “NIMBYism” what you call localism when you disagree with it?
But setting that aside, HS2 seems to be a policy which has come from us shrugging our shoulders about a national economy wholly focused on London as the ‘engine of growth’ and laying down mile upon mile of hugely expensive high speed track simply to reinforce its dominance over the regions.
I think Bolivia’s point about not bulldozing its way to Euston are worth serious consideration. OOC has the potential for plenty of Crossrail and Undergound, Overground and National Rail Connections which could deal with traffic in a large number of directions. The number of people whose actual destination is Euston will be larger than those whose actual destination is OOC, but both numbers will be small. Cost-benefit needs to be carefully considered between each station.
The main downside is how to connect it to HS1 so that passengers can travel direct from the North to Continental Europe on sleeper services. I understand there is potential to use the North London Line for this. O and 10 points to whoever says ‘Schengen’.
@Duncan: Well finding paths for /sleeper/ services to the continent is not likely to be much of an issue, since they run at night when the rail network is not so busy; they also don’t need to run as fast as daytime trains; if it weren’t for the political issues (BTW Schengen and borders have been mentioned: read the earlier comments), sleeper trains between the UK provinces and the continent could be running now on existing track. But I don’t think it would be acceptable for daytime trains, to run fast from Brum to OOC then chug slowly along the North London line (competing for paths with stopping metro-type trains on mostly double track) to connect with HS1 at Stratford. There would need to be a dedicated connection between HS1 and HS2.
As for Old Oak Common as the HS2 terminus: Euston is much closer to where most people travelling to London want to go. Most of central London is in walking distance from there, but not from OOC. As I wrote earlier, OOC should be an interchange on HS2, but not the terminus.
For the record – I don’t live anywhere near the HS2 route and never have. Tony Greaves is obviously right that some of the opposition comes from people who want the money put into roads – there will always be vested interests on both sides of an argument.
I’m sure HS2 is proposed with the best of intentions. Rather like the Edinburgh tramway.