HS2 yay or nay?

[BloodyHellKen]

With the recent discussion re: HS2 all over the news I've been wondering what the general consensus is and MN seems like a good place to start.

Do people feel it should:
a) have been stopped years ago
b) stopped now
c) completed

Personally I think it should have been stopped years ago as I always suspected it was a lot of money for very little gain (in fact I wouldn't even have started it). The money could have been better spent elsewhere IMO (eg a reliable service from Liverpool to Leeds via Manchester) and I don't understand why both Labour and Conservatives have been so wedded to it.

Anyone?

There is nothing going on in Britain (or indeed the whole of Europe) on the scale of HS2. That’s why scrapping it is so appealing to many people. It feels like doing so would save a shed load of money that could be either be spent on other stuff, or not spent at all saved. Because the everyone keeps talking about a cost of £100bn it gives the impression that there is a pot of money laying around with that much in it. But there’s isn’t.

In reality HS2 is a 30 year project that has a budget of about £3bn a year - enough to run NHS England for about a week. The money for the northern leg doesn’t even exist yet so scrapping it saves nothing. And even if everyone agreed today that cross country train services should be improved (which they definitely should) then good luck getting designs, planning permission and funding this side of 2050.

So the UK is now doomed to have sub-standard infrastructure forever. The government has gone scorched-earth and is making sure that no cancelled parts of the project are safeguarded for later use. Instead Rishi has come up with a hastily-crayoned wishlist of random schemes in marginal constituencies that we all know will be forgotten about as soon as the election is over. Few of them have had any design work done and the rest are therefore years away from shovels in the ground.

Investor confidence is shot to pieces. The reason that big projects cost so much in this country is that no one trusts the government to see them through. They've been proven right again.

Can't believe how misunderstood HS2 is/was. This thread highlights it.

It was all about improving local and regional train services by taking the west coast mainline train off the same track so they can run more local train services.

It was about using more freight trains to take Trucks off motorways and ease road congestion.

They messed up the name on inception. It was not about cutting journey times between Manchester and London.

Cannot improve local train services if there is no capacity and the local trains have to constantly wait/get delayed to let faster trains pass.

To provide more detail on why this project is important and what went wrong.

Firstly, forget journey times, despite what the Daily Mail thinks it's not all about "saving you 15 minutes to London" (a figure that is bogus anyway). It's about capacity. The West Coast Main Line is the most congested mixed traffic railway in Europe. Look up peak time ticket prices between Manchester and London (keep an Aspirin handy, you'll need it). Why are prices so extortionate? Because capacity is so limited that the government ordered the operators to price off demand. HS2 would have increased capacity into Euston threefold.

Stopping commuter trains (London Overground) would have gone from 3,900 seats per hour to 6,500. Regional trains (London North Western/West Midlands) from 1,600 to 6,800. Intercity trains (Avanti) from 5,800 to 21,600. That's a huge boost in capacity, which means that prices can drop (supply and demand). Paths would also become available for the container trains that run between ports in Essex and the distribution centres in the Midlands, taking lorries off of the roads.

Now let's take a look at journey times, because they do matter, but not in the way that the Telegraph would have you think. At the moment it takes 4:30 to get from London to Glasgow. So people fly because even with getting to the airport and going through security it's quicker. HS2 would have reduced London to Glasgow times to 3:40. Suddenly rail is able to compete properly with the airlines and poach passengers from the polluters. It worked for Eurostar: https://www.airlineratings.com/news/trains-versus-plane-eurostar-almost-halved-airline-demand/

"But I don't want to go to London" you may say, "how would I benefit?". Some of you want to travel from Liverpool to Manchester (and beyond). Northern Powerhouse Rail was George Osborne's scheme to sort out the appalling east-west transport links in the North. NPR trains were going to run on HS2 infrastructure between Manchester Airport and Manchester Piccadilly. They can't now, that's just been cancelled.

Some posters on this thread want better links between Sheffield and Manchester. At the moment they have to be threaded through Stockport which is far too congested to allow any improvements. HS2 would have freed up capacity through Stockport.

Maybe you want to travel between Birmingham and Leeds/York/Newcastle. Currently you have to spend two to three hours wedged into someone's armpit outside the toilet on a four coach Crosscountry Voyager (particularly now that the government have just cut the fleet). With HS2 you would have had three trains per hour, eight coaches long, and shaved an hour off of your journey time.

So why did costs become far greater than any European railway? Well they always were going to be a little higher, we are the most densely-populated large country in Europe. That we left things so late didn't help either. But why did they increase? Well when the French build a high speed railway, they don't have years of consultations and parliamentary inquiries. They get on and build it with the legal minimum of fuss. They certainly don't go building loads of extra tunnels just because the True Blue seats in the Chilterns are unhappy at having their view spoiled.

Not that views were going to be spoiled by much in the long run. Building sites aren't fun to live besides, but once the line is running and the vegetation has regrown you will barely notice it. Unlike the M40.

Then there's the usual government mismanagement. The boss of HS1 (on time, on budget) applied for the job. He was turned down (too inexperienced apparently). As a PP said, it's a really daft thing to announce what your budget is, it encourages contractors to take the piss. Keep it under wraps and keep them guessing, it forces them to be more competitive. The endless government reviews and delays have driven up costs too. What we really could do with is a rolling programme of infrastructure improvements. Then construction firms can invest in building an experienced workforce. Instead the government keeps turning the tap on and off, meaning that it covers the cost of training everyone from scratch and then watches them all piss off elsewhere because there's no more work for them.

I don't have much to add except that I am appalled at this decision. Sunak witters on about long-term planning and then does this.
I am beginning to despise the little twerp as much as Johnson, and I didn't think that was possible.

I think that's it dead permanently now. Sometimes these types of project get resurrected every 20 years or so. The landowners and communities that did not want the second phase will now put leisure facilities, nature reserves and housing where the original leg was planned. That will act as a blocker for the future.

agree. I loathed Boris but at least he had some vision for the country (even if he did spout tosh a lot of the time) and also had some environmental credentials.

@DdraigGoch sums it up more eloquently than I could. Is a total fucking disaster for the north.

HS2 was to increase capacity so that freight and people could move more seamlessly. As a climate campaigner - I was unpopular for saying that it was the best of bad choices. There are no good choices here BTW - But I was in favour of HS2

I suffer with the building of HS2 everyday, I see the destruction to my local area every day, the traffic delays, crumbling roads, displaced wildlife, and even I think this is fucking stupid decision!

At least I could convince myself while sat at yet another set of temporary traffic lights that it was all for the greater good, now it's all bloody pointless, all that money, all that destruction for a bloody white elephant!

Just to add to my post from last night:

Why can't we just upgrade the existing line? In short, they tried that. The West Coast Route Modernisation sent Railtrack into bankruptcy. It squeezed every last inch of capacity from the existing route and that quickly filled. The words most dreaded by any passengers are "rail replacement bus". Imagine years and years of replacement buses while work goes on. Ask anyone living in the South Wales Valleys what it's been like over the last year while the network has been upgraded. Sometimes you can't keep bolting things on, you need to start from scratch.

Is it true that the Government are rushing through the sale of the related HS2 land so that it can never be built?
If so, I am disgusted at their sheer callousness and disregard of the country they're supposed to represent.
Who voted for this?!

A for me. It’s caused endless problems where I live and seems just like a job creation scheme

That in it's self isn't necessarily a bad thing!

I heard a career advisor from Manchester on LBC yesterday talking about how she has spent the last 5 years encouraging students in to Civil Engineering etc due to the HS Manchester link.

I also see how many of the workers from HS2 in the local pubs, restaurants on a Friday afternoon, I'm sure they use local hotels too & probably boost the local hospitality economy!

What do you mean by "rushing through the sale of the related HS2 land"?

I suspect they'll be selling of the land they've bought up via compulsory purchase to developers. Buy cheap sell at market price, lots of profit to the shareholders. Don't be surprised if the people who buy the land for development are connected to the main players in HS2.

It's true. They're also removing all development restrictions placed on the postponed sections of route so that there's nothing to safeguard it from having housing built. Happening within weeks according to the Guardian. It's a scorched earth tactic. Experts have described it as "pure spite".

Just in case anyone is swayed by the promised alternative projects that the government says will be coming to their area - don't get your hopes up, it didn't even take 24hrs before they started abandoning items on that list. Mind you, they even suggested extending Metrolink to the airport - it's only been open nine years!

We have taken a strategy that was built over 15 years, with cross-party political consensus, with numerous expert studies and replaced it with a plan rushed together in a Manchester hotel bedroom

Just how bare-faced were the lies? Ministers on TV saying that no decision has been made yet, Sunak claiming that he doesn't want to be rushed. Then after the announcement comes out a video that was clearly pre-recorded in London.

Going through the list, there's a suggestion of extending the Nottingham trams to Clifton South. That's been open for eight years. This list is basically a combination of things that have already been built, things they were building anyway, and things they have no intention of building.

Then there's the fact that two-thirds of the funding is going towards road projects. Just as we're trying to move our transport infrastructure into the 21st Century they taking a mid-20th century approach. Dualling roads never goes over budget, right? Should see the A9 in Scotland. By contrast the Scottish government are doing a very good job of electrifying their railways and building new lines (not just repairing freight routes for passenger use, these are ground up reopenings).

They haven't bothered to consult the experts. Transport for the North were left in the dark, so were Network Rail and the National Infrastructure Commission.

How are they allowed to do this? Doesn't it have to go through Parliament? It does feel nasty and spiteful.
This lot really are a bunch of crooks and thieves. Feathering their own nests, and that of their cronies and then swanning off to the Lord's, or to the US (probably) in Sunak's case, leaving the country in tatters. They disgust me.

Technically Parliament has only authorised the purchase of land and the finances for the construction. There is no stipulation in the act that says that the work has to be finished.

That said, for such a severe policy change to be announced outside of Parliament is wrong. The Speaker will be furious.

Would it surprise you to learn that most of the proposed projects on the government's list are in marginal constituencies? That's why the Hope Valley has been prioritised over the Calder Valley, for example. Despite the Calder Valley being considered a greater priority by Network Rail.

The reason I asked about this "rushing through" was because of The Crichel Down rules:

This section sets out the revised non statutory arrangements (‘Crichel Down Rules’) under which surplus government land which was acquired by, or under a threat of, compulsion (see paragraph 7 and the annex to this section below) should be offered back to former owners, their successors, or to sitting tenants (see paragraphs 13, 14, 17 and 18 below).

Those property owners who sold will be offered the property back first, but note that residential tenants will usually be offered the right of purchase before the landlord. Land that is not developed will be offered back to the original landowner.

It is not the case to assume large swathes of land will go to the Chipping Norton set, in fact very little will.

In summary, several of the announced projects have already been built, some have been announced several times before, lots of the projects to support the North are actually in the, erm, South, and some of the announced projects have already been cancelled.

and all of that was outlined in a speech by Sunak that was clearly recorded in Downing St prior to conference.

whatever your view is on the pros and cons of HS2 the way this news has been handled is an absolute piss take.

HS2 buys your house, having settled price. You sell whether you want to or not. You pay Captain Gains Tax on the sale. HS2 doesn't want the house now and you can't afford to buy it back. Here comes Chipping Norton and friends.

The A9 desperately needs duelling from Perth to Inverness. Far too many accidents and life's lost on that road every year.
They have experimented with allowing the trucks to go at 50 cars restricted to 60 with average speed cameras but people still take chances.

11 killed on it last year alone. It must be one of the most dangerous roads in the whole of the UK.

It's criminal not to keep restrictions in place to stop HS2 land being developed for other things.

I don't know about England but I know its very difficult to compulsory purchase land in Scotland. Its actually far easier to 'come to an agreement' ie a sensible price than for both parties to fight via courts and lawyers over compulsory purchase.