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The construction of High Speed 2—a railway estimated to cost £50 billion—will be one of the most expensive infrastructure projects ever undertaken in the UK. The Government has yet to make a convincing case for proceeding with the project.
We fully support investment in rail infrastructure and welcome the Government's commitment to it. But the project has to be developed against a background of financial restraint and it is not at all clear that HS2 represents the best, most cost-effective solution to the problems it is intended to solve.
The Government's two declared objectives for the project are to increase capacity on the railway to meet long-term demand and to rebalance the economy by stimulating growth in the north of England. But the scale of the alleged capacity problem is unclear and the Government has not demonstrated that HS2 is the most effective way of achieving the desired rebalancing of the economy.
On capacity, published statistics on current rail usage do not suggest that there is an overcrowding problem on long-distance trains, either now or in the near future. On stimulating growth, the Government has not considered whether this could be better achieved by investing in improving regional links between northern cities.
The Government claims that the biggest beneficiaries of the project will be business travellers, yet the evidence used to calculate the magnitude of this benefit (an estimated £40.5 billion) is out-of-date and unconvincing. Neither are we convinced why, if business travellers were the biggest beneficiaries from the project, they should not contribute more to the cost by paying higher fares.
Before spending more taxpayers' money on this project, we believe that Government should answer the questions raised in this report. It needs to demonstrate that HS2 is the most effective way of achieving the declared objectives of the project and, if it is not, then the plan needs to change. The lengthy passage of the enabling legislation for the first phase of the construction provides an opportunity to examine the case for HS2. There should be no embarrassment in being prepared to revise the project: the objectives and cost are too important.
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