By Joe Card
At the Conservative Party conference in October, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the long-awaited high-speed rail line from London to Manchester (HS2) would be scaled back, and instead only connect London to Birmingham. Although this announcement is unsurprising, it again highlights a long-running problem with decision-making at the heart of British governance: politics is prioritised over policy. At every stage of the process, ministers have made choices based on political expediency rather than what might be in the best interests of the country and its future.
The debate over cancelling the Birmingham-Manchester segment of HS2 had been rumbling on for over a year but seemed to reach a fever-pitch in the week before Tory conference, with government ministers and Sunak repeatedly refusing to confirm or deny media speculation that the line would be cut. Controversial decisions to scale back HS2 aren’t new: since the initial proposal in 2009, HS2 has gone through multiple iterations with plans regularly changing. The most significant changes have been to the budget: in 2009 the total cost was estimated at £37.5 billion, but estimates from a government commissioned review placed potential costs at £107 billion. And while inflation and delays due to COVID have inevitably played a role in that increase, at least some of the blame can be placed on the UK government’s slapdash approach to policy decisions.
HS2 has its origins way back in 2008 when Theresa Villiers, then Conservative Shadow Transport Secretary, made her position clear in an announcement rejecting a third runway at Heathrow, again at Tory conference, in favour of a new high speed rail connection from Manchester and Leeds to London via Birmingham. Villiers chose to highlight HS2’s economic and environmental benefits as compared to a Heathrow expansion, as well as improvements in capacity and journey times, promising 45-minute journeys from Birmingham to London and an hour and a quarter from Manchester. The subsequent announcement of the policy by Andrew Adonis, then Labour’s Transport Secretary in 2010, emphasised economic benefits with a promise of £2 of economic benefits for every £1 spent, as well as capacity and journey time improvements.
It is now abundantly clear that no government could have chosen to go ahead with HS2 in any of its many iterations based purely on policy considerations. Even in 2011, the evidence from other countries with developed high speed rail networks suggested that the promised ‘rebalancing’ of the national economy towards the North and the Midlands, now known as levelling-up, was unlikely to materialise. Furthermore, the model used by the Department of Transport to judge the value of lower journey times, and ultimately make its HS2 business case was later dismissed by the Department itself, as well as the Institute for Transport Studies. The capacity argument for HS2 was equally clearly dismissed by House of Lords Committee report in 2015 which argued that overcrowding on existing lines was an issue, but one largely confined to “Friday evenings and weekend services”, and that there was no evidence that HS2 was an appropriate solution.
In reality, however, these announcements had more cynical motivations, making it unsurprising that on closer inspection these claims didn’t hold up. In evidence to a House of Lords committee, Dr Richard Wellings, from the usually Conservative-supporting Institute of Economic Affairs, argued that Villiers’ announcement was a sop to Conservative voters in constituencies around Heathrow: rather than being based on clear policy objectives, the decision was “reprehensible vote-grabbing”.
Labour’s decision making was no less nakedly political, with Peter Mandelson writing in 2013 that the decision was “partly politically driven”. At the time of Labour’s announcement Mandelson was a senior Cabinet Secretary and wrote that when the decision to adopt the Conservative policy involved no consideration of “detailed facts and figures”, and that the choice was made on the “eve of a general election” to “paint an upbeat view of the future” following the 2008 financial crash. There could hardly be a more blatant expose of how governments rank the political forces of the day over their responsibility to deliver the best long-term policies for Britain.
The clear prioritisation of politics over policy wasn’t limited to the start of HS2’s tortuous journey. Many of the later changes which so drastically undermined the policy benefits of investment were motivated by pure politics. In particular, the choice in 2012 to increase tunnelling and cutting on the route through the Chilterns has been blamed for some of the significant cost increases from the initial proposal. Although Justine Greening’s eventual announcement that tunnelling would be expanded and diverted was presented as environmentally motivated, it’s difficult to imagine that the high profile resignation threats from ministers and the pressure in safely Conservative, Home Counties constituencies had no impact.
The decision by Rishi Sunak to scrap the Northern arm of HS2 was equally based on politics rather than policy. This is not to say that it was a sensible political decision – I for one can’t see why Sunak chose to delay his decision, only to announce it in the very city that would have benefitted from the investment. The suggestions that Andy Street, West Midlands Regional Mayor and one of the Conservative party’s few credible figures, might’ve resigned live on TV at conference demonstrated just how risky Sunak’s move was.
Nevertheless, he clearly saw an opportunity to drop an increasingly unwieldy spending commitment that seemed to be growing uncontrollably, at a time when the Labour Party’s new commitment to fiscal discipline and the fiasco of Liz Truss’ brief government threatens the Tories’ traditional ‘responsible fiscal policy’ argument. By ditching HS2 Sunak is able to (credibly or not) claim he can fund other rail projects in the North without new borrowing, while throwing a bone to Conservative fiscal hawks who never liked HS2 anyway. Once again political factors have won the day over any suggestion that the UK can be relied upon to take and then stick to long-term investment decisions. What construction firm now would bet on a major government contract being followed through to completion without a hefty break clause?
The UK evidently has a serious problem with how long-term government investment decisions are made. We have schools falling down, a shortage of hospitals, and a rail network that is hopelessly out of date. All of these problems have one thing in common: their only solution is sustained, long-term investment. This requires politicians to move beyond the immediate political pressures of one-week news cycles, short ministerial tenures (with a new Transport Secretary every two years since 2010), and five-year parliamentary sessions – something neither the Conservative nor Labour leadership teams show any signs of.
