Tag Archives: high speed 2

The Independent View: What’s wrong with HS2?

By Penny Gaines | Fri 1st November 2013 - 4:14 pm

High speed 2 easily cleared its first parliamentary hurdle yesterday, with just 34 MPs voting against the High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill – 350 voted in favour. Here Penny Gaines argues the case against HS2 is still strong.

High Speed 2 will cost £50bn, including the trains. But it is an environmentally damaging vanity project, with a constantly shifting rationale for building it.

The current argument is that speed is irrelevant for the case for HS2, but that our existing railways are nearly full and the only option is to build a new high speed railway. This argument does not stand up to scrutiny.

Vampire railway: High Speed 2 to suck life out of local economies

By Andy Boddington | Sat 19th October 2013 - 10:03 am

The case for High Speed 2 is looking more and more like a Tonka project – a big showy toy that politicians can brag about, but will do little for the UK’s economy. And it is not an equitable project. It is set to damage the economy of areas like east of England and boost London at their expense.

It’s not long since KPMG published a report claiming that the line could boost the economy by £15 billion a year. Now BBC’s Newsnight reports that the KPMG report left out data on those areas that stand to lose out from the project.

In cash terms, the BBC lists Aberdeenshire, Aberdeen City and Moray as faring the worst, losing £220m a year by 2037. But local economies are different sizes, so it helps to look at percentages.

LibLink: Nick Clegg says High Speed 2 is good for London

By NewsHound | Fri 6th September 2013 - 9:41 am

Writing in today’s Financial Times, Nick Clegg reasons that HS2 is good for London as well as the north.

He says that the capital’s long-term status as an economic global powerhouse will be threatened if housing and transport infrastructure inside London are not upgraded, and the links to and from the city are not improved. He cites Germany and Japan where good transport links have allowed prosperity to “flow from one part to another”. If we want to keep Britain among the world’s largest economies, Clegg argues, we must find a better way to link London to the rest of the UK.

There are forces who have always opposed doing anything big beyond London. They seem content to see the bubble blow up in the capital without providing any sort of valve for release. It has been going on for years, it has got to change and under this government it is.

Posted in LibLink | 11 Comments

Norman Baker MP writes… High Speed 2: Transforming our national rail network

By Norman Baker MP | Mon 28th January 2013 - 1:53 pm

In the two centuries since the Golden Age of British railways, from the opening of the Stockton and Darlington line in 1825, Stephenson’s Rocket and the railway boom of the 1840s, Britain has tumbled from the position of being the envy of the world, to lagging sadly behind. The busiest sections of our old Victorian railways are now struggling to cope as the railways become increasingly popular. As anyone who travels regularly by train as I do will know, the West …