Rishi Sunak set to scrap second leg of HS2 to Manchester
£100 billion to knock 10 minutes off the London to Birmingham time.
And once we include getting to Old Oak Common and into central Brum it will probalby be slower than the current link.
And all because the European Union thought that high speed rail links from one end of Europe to the other would be a nice idea.
So the next time some tosser says ‘what has Brexit achieved then?’ (as I heard two foreigners on the train say yesterday) I can tell them “saved the UK billions of pounds that would have been wasted on HS2″…..
Hooray!
Since privatisation, bus fares in the UK as a whole have nearly doubled in real terms since 1987
What happened to the price of petrol in real terms between 1987 and 2023?
So it’s true that you’re definitely heading towards an election then.
Of course what I’d really like to see him do is legalise fracking!!
“Of course what I’d really like to see him do is legalise fracking!!”
Would it be possible for a government to issue fracking licences that were non-rescindable? I’m thinking in the way that there are people who have mineral and aggregates mining licences that were issued during wartime (or the immediate postwar period) in areas that would never get permits nowadays (like National Parks) that cannot be removed. Would it be possible for a government to issue licences for fracking in a way that could not be removed by any future government?
But think of all the extra work they’d be able to do in those 10 minutes! All those white privilege lectures! All those Diversity, Inclusion and Equity classes! All those jobs for the starving Irishmen digging the rails!
We can’t afford the trains but the fact that we build aircraft carriers at 100 billion a throw when we haven’t got any aircraft shows our true Bulldog Spirit! So carry on and think of England!
QE-class carries, built at: Rosyth, Fife, Scotland.
Contract announced 2007, by: Prime Mentalist Gordon Brown, MP for Kircaldy and Cowdenbeath, Fife, Scotland.
Constituency electorate size (2010): 73665
Number of votes for G. Brown (2010): 29559
Cost of both carriers: £7.6bn (according to wokipedia)
Cost per vote for G.Brown : £257,112.89
I’m sure he’d agree, our money well spent.
And all because the European Union thought that high speed rail links from one end of Europe to the other would be a nice idea..
But it was so bloody useless it never even tried to achieve that. Otherwise it would have arrived at St Pancras, but in any case syncing from the start outside London with “HS1”, so that Manchester to Munich was seamless. The idea of Birmingham to Brussels requiring a change of station in C London proved that our politicians were crooks (just like the vaccines, there will be money involved, and lots) because not even they could be that cretinously stupid.
Would it be possible for a government to issue licences for fracking in a way that could not be removed by any future government?
No, and as long as the Climate Change Act exists, anything the government tries to do to get out of the Net Zero noose could be successfully challenged in the courts.
Where judges who agree 100% with the Guardian get to make decisions.
And that’s assuming the Civil Service doesn’t kill it first, and that Labour run local authorities and the State’s favoured Just Stop Living eco terrorists don’t make life difficult for the frackers. Which are false assumptions.
We can’t afford the trains but the fact that we build aircraft carriers at 100 billion a throw
Presumably so that we can donate them to the insatiable Mr Zelensky.
Jim – yes, by the simple expedient of framing the contract in such a way that adjudication in the case of disputes rests with a third party prepared to take on the role and not the government.
BBC not happy that he’s scrapped the home energy efficiency taskforce. Maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66900999
My wife met Rishi and recommended the cancellation of HS2. He bleated that it was very difficult because of the contracts. She was not impressed.
Otherwise she thought him a pleasant and intelligent chap. But she doubts he has the balls required to be a conservative Conservative.
“ Presumably so that we can donate them to the insatiable Mr Zelensky.”
Apart from the, not fitting in the Black Sea Ukraine has managed to suppress Russians operations there without them.
“bus fares in the UK as a whole have nearly doubled in real terms since 1987”
Doubled? More like increased tenfold round here.
“she doubts he has the balls required to be a conservative Conservative.”
The news that he has balls would be a relavation.
Please note, the article in question is written in the future tense. Like much of this government’s policies. What actually happens is an uncertainty even the Hindu gods aren’t privy to.
No-one cares much about speed unless it’s a daily trip, or you save people needing to pay for a hotel room. HS2 is too far for commuting and already quick enough that you can do Manchester to London and back again in a (long) day.
Steve: what’s the 35th root of 2? 2% per year.
Even Arthur’s tenfold is still only 6.8% per year.
Lesse, in 1987 my annual income was £1920. Last year my annual income was, ooo, coincidence, £19,200.
BIS,
HS2 is over. No-one wants the embarrassing U-turn of saying it’s a colossally stupid idea, or to get their green credentials questioned, so they’re going to implement the first version, talk a lot of “commitment to rail” and “feasibility studies” and build nothing more.
Even Labour are now making noises that it’s not going to be done.
https://www.ft.com/content/aadf80e2-66a6-4edc-9202-d30eef5417f6
When HS2 was announced, two things were immediately obvious: (a) it would never reach Euston; and (b) it would never go beyond Brum.
It can now be renamed, I give you: The Acton-Aston Expressway.
@Western Bloke
It’s never over until the fat lady sings. So wait for Diane Abbott or Lady Severalbellies to clear their throats.
I see the reason for the line has subtly changed. The pro brigade are saying it was NEVER about faster journey. Which came as a surprise to me given that high speed is actually in the name.
Of course no-one then asks them if, it was never about speed why build a high speed line?
If it does ever go into service, passengers will have the choice of either taking a train from Birmingham New Street to Central London, or from Birmingham (please fill in name of station) to Acton.
Absolutely no one will use this service. Nobody at all. Well, apart from escaped prisoners from the Scrubs seeking a quick getaway.
@Steven Crook
The case for HS2 has always – right from the beginning – been about capacity on the West Coast Main Line.
Go back to the 2007 White Paper, which set out the strategic direction. You can see them moaning about capacity with forecasts that they’d run out by 2030.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/243207/7176.pdf
On the basis of recent demand trends, if the investment committed in this HLOS is maintained through future control periods, in accordance with the capacity and funding projections set out in this White Paper, than the measures described would be sufficient to meet growth on all routes until about 2030. The first areas where demand growth might require additional interventions are on the London–Birmingham–Manchester corridor and on London’s busiest commuter routes. It would not be prudent to invest today to address capacity issues that are unlikely to materialise until two decades hence, and may not materialise
at all. But a need exists to start planning work ahead of the next HLOS in 2012, to cover the possibility that demand growth accelerates.
Back in 2001 the Strategic Rail Authority did do a study on potential demand for a new South-North high-speed line modelled on France’s TGV, but it didn’t come to anything. The 2007 White Paper led to the launch of new studies on ways to resolve the capacity issue, and the first proposals for HS2 came out in January 2009 – initially tasked to “consider the case for new high speed services from London to Scotland. As a first stage we have asked the company to develop a proposal for an entirely new line between London and the West Midlands”.
https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20100203063942/http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/highspeedtwo/highspeedtwo.pdf
The analysis on why the line has to be high speed is very poor, and worth reading for that reason. They start by talking about how it’s great Europe is covered in high-speed rail these days (it wasn’t an EU diktat that we build HS2, so this isn’t really a Brexit issue, but it’s fair to say the kind of important people who thought HS2 was a jolly good idea had a case of Brussels brain) then make a very sci-fi comparison with the practical difficulties of maglev (!) to conclude that conventional high-speed rail would be a thoroughly sensible option.
@ Anon
– The case for HS2 has always – right from the beginning – been about capacity on the West Coast Main Line.
Go back to the 2007 White Paper, which set out the strategic direction. You can see them moaning about capacity with forecasts that they’d run out by 2030.
Hmm, not exactly moaning about it – they concluded that there was no point investing (beyond preliminary planning) at that time for a distant demand that might not even occur.
. . . the first proposals for HS2 came out in January 2009 – initially tasked to “consider the case for new high speed services from London to Scotland . . .”
That seems more like it. There may have been no EU “diktat” regarding high speed rail but the general policy of connecting the “regions” was well established – and they didn’t mean by horse and cart. No matter how they dressed it up the whole project was obviously a ridiculous eurotic fetish that should have been cancelled the day after the Brexit vote.
Anon,
“it wasn’t an EU diktat that we build HS2, so this isn’t really a Brexit issue, but it’s fair to say the kind of important people who thought HS2 was a jolly good idea had a case of Brussels brain) then make a very sci-fi comparison with the practical difficulties of maglev (!) to conclude that conventional high-speed rail would be a thoroughly sensible option.”
I think this is probably true. There’s an Upper Normie opinion about rail and how wonderful and cheap it is on the continent, and how it’s embarrassing that we don’t have those lovely TGVs.
Sadly, they can’t grasp the geographic difference. How Britain isn’t laid out like France. Most of the UK population is bounded by Liverpool, Leeds, London, Southampton and Cardiff. Your journey is likely to be less than 200 miles, which you can do as a return trip in a day.
The EU has Kraftwerk doing Trans Europe Express, while we have Flanders & Swann doing The Slow Train.
It’s the difference between leaving Paris in the morning to meet in Vienna in the evening, and moaning that they’ve closed the line at Blandford Forum.
@Western Bloke
I think this is probably true. There’s an Upper Normie opinion about rail and how wonderful and cheap it is on the continent, and how it’s embarrassing that we don’t have those lovely TGVs.
Yes, and I think the comparison to maglev (which made those dreams of high speed look cheap and reasonable) was a nice touch! Though I’ll admit planning decades ahead does mean you have to keep an eye out for alternative technologies. One of the other weaknesses was the argument about using rail to replace driving in order to reduce carbon emissions, on a multi-decadal timescale. In truth even a very good railway connection will only slightly dent people’s desire to drive around, and for a really significant dent in the CO2 from road emissions you really need to look at improved ICE efficiency and/or a transition to alternatives like hybrid/electric. Which, funnily enough, were all happening anyway, regardless of HS2.
Making demands of rail or road traffic forecasts for the 2080s – which is used to do the cost-benefit analysis of such projects – must involve plucking a lot of numbers from thin air when you consider the potential impact of autonomous cars, more immersive VR options for meetings, electric airborne taxis that take a similar role to what sci-fi types thought flying cars would do…. the list goes on. And while most of that list might turn out to be pie in the sky, anything which does catch on could be transformative. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a technological planner in the 1960s who now gets judged by their woeful failure to anticipate the landfill android mobile while bigging up other stuff which is regarded as a comic failure. The technological aspects of the future are genuinely difficult to predict. Human geography, on the other hand, is pretty solid ground. If I were to guess at the population distribution in 2100 I don’t think I’d get it far wrong, and to the extent I do, it’ll likely only be because I misjudge the probability of a political decision (e.g. how likely I think the London Green Belt is to be protected indefinitely).
Sadly, they can’t grasp the geographic difference. How Britain isn’t laid out like France. Most of the UK population is bounded by Liverpool, Leeds, London, Southampton and Cardiff. Your journey is likely to be less than 200 miles, which you can do as a return trip in a day.
So this is something I really can’t get my head around. In France you have pretty big population centres separated by miles and miles of nothing. High-speed rail makes a lot of sense, particularly if it can do city centre to city centre in a time that compares well to flying to/from an airport on the outskirts.
Britain isn’t like that at all. And Britain is not going to look like that in a hundred years’ time. One problem with that more uniform density is that you can’t go very far before hitting (or at least near-missing) a substantial enough settlement that the local political representatives say “hey, we are having all the inconvenience of construction work (all those horrible jobs, eh? hope we get rid of them soon) and trains passing near us, but why aren’t we getting a stop?” But if you do put all those stops in, you’re not “high speed” any more. On the other hand, if you don’t put all those stops in, then the kinds of journeys a lot of people want to make aren’t so easily made. And of all the things putting people off using rail at the moment, is shaving a few minutes off the journey really the limiting factor? Rather than, say, the price of the tickets – especially for group/family travel – or the risk, perceived or real, of disruption and unreliability?
@PJF
I’m just pushing back on all the people – you see a lot of this on social media, probably less so chez Worstall – saying “wow, so now you’re claiming this was really about capacity all along? You’re telling me this for the first time! Well if that’s your new little story, how come HS2 has ‘high speed’ in the name then? STOP GASLIGHTING ME!” HS2 in its incarnation as HS2 has always been about capacity on the London-West Midlands-Manchester line. That’s what the rail nerds have been discussing for decades, it’s what you see in the official documents, it isn’t some kind of state secret.
However, this wasn’t well-reported by the media. The idea of flashy shiny speedy trains is a big part of how it was presented to the public – and politicians- because it was assumed this was sexy and would gather more support than talking about boring capacity planning issues.
But for decades before there has been a thought-worm crawling between rail-nerdy brains about building a North-South or even London-Scotland high-speed link. I’m pretty sure this thought-worm cross-fertilised with the WCML new capacity planning and HS2 was the bastard offspring, but I don’t know enough about rail planning in the 1970s-1990s to lay out the genealogy of it.
There’s no doubt that part of the original ‘cost justification’ for HS2 was based on the value of time saved for all the high powered businessmen and civil servants that would be riding on it. It didn’t take long for members of the public who had actually used a train to point out that mobile phones and laptops made it almost as productive (in some cases, maybe moreso) than sitting at a desk, so that claim was swiftly dropped in favour of ‘capacity’.
As others have said, if more capacity was needed on the WCML (maybe, in 2030, on some HS2 consultant’s spreadsheet) then a ‘traditional 4-track mainline with tilting trains running at 140mph using in-cab signalling would provide much more additional capacity than HS2. Such trains could run at the same speed all the way to Glasgow and Edinburgh, which HS2 trains can’t do because they can’t tilt, so journey times to those destinations would be much the same.
There was even a fully costed plan for ‘reinstating’ the Great Central (those bits of it not buried under housing estates, but quite a lot is still left) closed by Beeching, it was an order of magnitude cheaper than HS2 (even back then, when it was ‘only’ going to cost £50 billion).
@Chris Miller
HS2 does follow a small part of the route of the Great Central. The idea of reinstating it does float about, Ross Clark (in the Speccie) and Peter Hitchens bang on about it quite a lot. But everyone who works in rail seems to think the idea is quite mad and utterly unworkable, even those who aren’t in awe of flashy shiny new toys to play with.
https://archive.ph/kG70i is from a proper rail engineer.
https://paulbigland.blog/2019/08/03/rebuild-the-great-central-instead-of-building-hs2-heres-why-its-utter-nonsense/ is from a rail journalist.
There are loads more. Knocking down the “fallacy” of reviving the Great Central seems to be something rail types really enjoy writing about. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the actual analysis (as opposed to journo scribblings) in favour of the Great Central – were there serious rail types on that side of the argument too? If so their voices are being drowned out.
Paul, no one does that on the continent. Spend a day on a train to cover that kind of distance.
When we have a day meeting we get up at 5 AM, fly to meeting location, and get back home at 10 PM. The same day.
Did just that, to London, last week.
Anon,
And while most of that list might turn out to be pie in the sky, anything which does catch on could be transformative. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a technological planner in the 1960s who now gets judged by their woeful failure to anticipate the landfill android mobile while bigging up other stuff which is regarded as a comic failure.
I don’t think it’s realistic to try and foresee anything beyond about 20 years. You can see new things that are growing, and extrapolate futures from them, but you can’t see the blokes in sheds or doing PhDs that are going to crack a little thing that has impacts.
So this is something I really can’t get my head around. In France you have pretty big population centres separated by miles and miles of nothing. High-speed rail makes a lot of sense, particularly if it can do city centre to city centre in a time that compares well to flying to/from an airport on the outskirts.
Over the distances of TGV, city centre doesn’t matter that much. Quite a lot of the stations are parkway stations, like Avignon. And they serve more of an area than just a particular city.
The thing with UK high speed is that you don’t have to be far out of Birmingham or Manchester for it not to be the quickest route to London. If you’re in Solihull or Coventry and have to make a connection to the HS2 station, sit around waiting for it, you would probably have been quicker to just take the old train.
One problem with that more uniform density is that you can’t go very far before hitting (or at least near-missing) a substantial enough settlement that the local political representatives say “hey, we are having all the inconvenience of construction work (all those horrible jobs, eh? hope we get rid of them soon) and trains passing near us, but why aren’t we getting a stop?” But if you do put all those stops in, you’re not “high speed” any more. On the other hand, if you don’t put all those stops in, then the kinds of journeys a lot of people want to make aren’t so easily made. And of all the things putting people off using rail at the moment, is shaving a few minutes off the journey really the limiting factor? Rather than, say, the price of the tickets – especially for group/family travel – or the risk, perceived or real, of disruption and unreliability?
And nearly all the problems of rail come down to the government running it. Every other form of transport tries to fill seats to maximise revenue, because whether it’s Wizz Air or National Express, it’s run by rapacious capitalists. They set prices for individual services. Rail prices are set by government. Going to Gatwick in August has much higher demand than going to Gatwick in October. So, many trains run nearly empty because the price is £20 and so cheaper to drive. But if the price of that train was £10, they’d go for it.
Conversely, a lot of overcrowding on rail is because of particular demand for some services that isn’t priced in. The trains just before the rugby kickoff cost the same as the ones 2 hours earlier.
On top of that, just general inefficiency and cowardice. This nonsense consultation about ticket offices. Everyone else ditched ticket offices years ago. National Express have a telephone service to support disabled people because you really only need a handful of people for the whole country to support that, not 3 people in every fucking station.
I don’t know why the UK uses Europe as its rail model, other than geographic proximity. The only country with really genuinely successful rail is Japan, where the sheer cut-throat capitalism of most of the network and operators has provided incredible density of service (and stations, and lines), fast, frequent, completely interchangeable ticketing between fierce rivals, almost nothing ever late.
Western Bloke, staffed ticket offices are useful for driving revenue from international travellers, especially when you have bewildering fares or requirements. Otherwise systems become basically for the exclusive use of clued-up locals.
I went to Lisbon last weekend, looked up in advance how to use the metro. I generally like travelling on city metro systems and trams and such. And it turns out I have to buy a green card for 50 cents (fine) somewhere but only special places sell them. I then have to put money on that card, and then buy ticket using that money, and then if it is a day ticket somehow activate the ticket. And then the card expires after 1 year, along with any money left on the card.
Now, this is a particularly retarded system. I have Oyster-style cards for various places all over the globe, but in Lisbon I decided to use taxis rather than the metro.
The system in BiG City, also a place with insane numbers of overseas visitors, is similarly retarded. The ticket machines will sell day tickets, but to get a week or month ticket you need an oyster-style card that is even dumber and less useful than the one in Lisbon (you can’t put money on it, only tickets). Increasingly the machines don’t take cash any more. Alternatively you need an app. That’s the only way to get the cheapest tickets.
And the app needs an account, with login, and so on.
Forcing people to have to have an account, which they have to curate, linked to an app on a smartphone, which is dependent on a full battery to use the transport service, is just a level of complication too far for a lot of people. It’s the public transport equivalent of the 15-minute city concept.
Also, every time you want to buy a fucking ticket you find the BiG City app has logged you out and wants username, password, and 2FA.
Hasn’t the capacity justification for HS2 been knocked on its arse by the Post Covid Working from home preference?
BiFR
Do they have Steifenkarte where you live anymore ?
I used to use them in many Jerry cities as well as Vienna. It seemed a nice solution, one cancelled the number of stripes according to the length of journry and/or which zones one passed through. Struck me as an easy solution to digitise.
The monthly commuter ticket in Munich was crap and typically overengineered.
Recently on an Austrian ticket machine, I was offered a range of fares depending on what train I was going to take ( eg express more expensive than stopper ).
Flubber,
Hasn’t the capacity justification for HS2 been knocked on its arse by the Post Covid Working from home preference?
Ironically, the capacity justification was knocked on its arse about the same time that the business case for HS2 was published.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/304957/total-historical-national-rail-passenger-journeys-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
Rail use shot up from mid-1990s to mid 2010s. Growth in the service economy, more people going to offices. The people doing HS2 planning just continued that straight line growth of 2%+ per year for another 25 years to 2035. Of course, that was always going to peak, and the price of laptops, broadband and various software tools then started to put a dent in demand. From 2014 until before Covid, peak demand for rail fell overall. Up slightly in the early years, then declining in the later.
The only growth in rail is for leisure. Which is slightly above pre-Covid. But, there’s not a capacity problem there.
Otto,
Every Jerry city has its own slightly different way of ticketing. In Cologne you can buy tickets on the train and sometimes or sometimes not at stops. In Berlin you can buy something like a Streifenkarte, and then you validate them when you get on bus, metro, etc. It is more practical than having to only buy a ticket for immediate travel, but depends where you are.
Lots of it is rendered obsolete by the “Deutschlandticket”, which gives you total access to all local transport in the country for €49 a month. One of the current rulers more idiotic ideas, intended to get people out of cars but has succeeded in nothing more than subsidising commuters and slashing transport company income. But it is fascinating to see how it has, with the stroke of a pen, rendered almost obsolete all the 356 different local transport operators (the Holy Roman Empire survives to this day, in the form of German ticketing zones) competing, expensive, and totally shit attempts at going “digital”.
@Anon
Those are straw man attacks on the “Great Central” concept. Nobody is proposing to rebuild an exact replica of the GCML as it was in the 60s, in the style of Pete Waterman operating on 1:1 scale. A new 4-track mainline would use tilting trains and in-cab signalling, allowing 140mph running. More significantly, tilting trains could run at the same speed all the way to Glasgow and Edinburgh, in a ‘dead heat’ with HS2 (whose trains don’t tilt, so would have to be restricted to 100mph once off the HS2 lines). And it would have cost a small fraction of HS2’s ever-growing price tag (which is probably why the idea was discarded).
@Bi4R
I note the Paris Metro (which all the usual suspects rave about) is finally doing away with paper carnets, but is introducing its own “Oyster Card” (Huitre Carte?). Why not follow London and just allow any credit card to be used. A simple, well-proven system.
Chris, I can think of two reasons.
You need to retain a cash-equivalent payment option. Not everyone has a credit card, and in particular not every foreign visitor will have one compatible with the Paris metro. This was a problem in London when contactless non-Oyster payments were first introduced, but international acceptance of payment cards can still be a bit fuzzy (uncomfortable experience trying to pay a hotel bill in Japan once, going through the wallet as multiple cards were successively declined).
Second, you (we) really, really want the option of an anonymous system. Sure, journey details are retained (for some time) but Oyster and equivalent can be bought for cash and topped up only with cash, thereby increasing the efford required for any future government to link the use of the card and thus past travel behaviour to an individual.
I don’t, probably just getting older, feel comfortable in the UK buying a pint on a debit or credit card, especially not when you do it each time for every round. I don’t want this level of intimate transaction detail on my bank statement. As I didn’t go back to the UK for over 2 years for the obvious reasons I was astonished to do so and find barmen exclaim “oh, cash!” when I try to pay.
I suspect the real reason is that you have to put funds onto an Oyster Card, some of which never get used, so the provider gets free money (I used to consult for the company that runs all this for TfL). But if you build a system that supports contactless cards issued by the rail company, it’s trivial to allow it to work with any credit card.
My personal niggle with the system is that you can’t associate railcards with your credit card, so if I used the Underground more often, it would pay me to use an Oyster Card, even though I’d have to keep some of my cash on it.
I think a lot of it is the same reason you have to buy postage stamps in advance.
The number of users, the inefficiency of chasing thousanda of ’em for two figure debts, you’d just write it off.
This also is one reason why they are so keen to be cashless with a CBDC they can track every transaction for.