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The high-speed rail project HS2 is not likely to begin running by the latest-projected date for doing so, it has been revealed.
The announcement adds to the wealth of indications that the whole project has been nothing but a waste of tens of billions of pounds of public money – ordered at a time when public money was scarce.
Were David Cameron and his “Con/Dem” (Conservative and Liberal Democrat) coalition government deliberately keeping cash away from where it would do the most good?
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The BBC tells us, “HS2 has confirmed that its aim to get trains running between Birmingham and London between 2029 and 2033 “cannot be achieved”.
“Earlier this year, HS2 CEO Mark Wild acknowledged that construction had been “harder than thought” and “needed a reset” involving a review of the project’s cost and schedule.”
Apparently the project is now at an “advanced stage of a comprehensive reset”.
HS2 was originally devised in 2009, but plans were not confirmed until 2012, when the UK was struggling under the austerity project of David Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, who extracted tens of billions of pounds from the UK economy plunging millions of people into economic hardship and causing 190,000 excess deaths, according to the London School of Economics.
Was it just another Tory money pit – a plan to spend money so poor people can’t benefit from it?
And do we even know how long it will take for HS2 to pay for itself, once it finally becomes active?
Taking the second question first: the short answer is: no – there is no credible, agreed estimate for when HS2 will “pay for itself”, and on current evidence it may never do so in any meaningful economic sense.
Here’s the longer answer, because the way HS2 has been justified keeps shifting:
When HS2 was first approved in the early 2010s, the Department for Transport’s business case claimed that the scheme would deliver a positive benefit–cost ratio over a 60-year appraisal period. That did not mean it would ever repay its construction costs in cash terms.
It meant that, on paper, the monetised value of time savings, agglomeration effects and supposed productivity gains would exceed the cost over several decades.
Even that weak claim has now largely collapsed.
The original economic case depended on four things that are no longer true.
First, the network was supposed to be national. London to Birmingham was only phase one, justified mainly because it would unlock later legs to Manchester, Leeds and beyond.
With those northern legs cancelled, the biggest projected benefits disappeared. What remains is a very expensive inter-city shuttle between London and the West Midlands, terminating at Old Oak Common rather than central London.
Second, the cost assumptions were fantasy. HS2 was sold at roughly £33 billion in 2011 prices. Even after massive scope cuts, current estimates sit well above double that in cash terms, and nobody now pretends the final figure is stable. Every reset pushes the break-even point further into the future.
Third, the time-saving argument has been intellectually discredited. Saving “up to 20 minutes” was always a weak public-facing slogan, but internally the business case relied on the now-absurd assumption that time on trains is economically “unproductive”.
Remote working, onboard connectivity and changing work patterns have blown that model apart. The Treasury quietly downgraded the value of travel-time savings years ago, hollowing out HS2’s headline benefits.
Fourth, passenger demand projections are shaky at best. Post-pandemic travel patterns have not returned to the growth curves assumed when HS2 was approved. A railway that is not full does not generate transformative economic returns.
Put bluntly: there is no serious analysis now claiming HS2 will ever recoup its costs, either through fares or through wider economic benefits, within any politically or socially meaningful timeframe.
The National Audit Office has repeatedly warned that value for money is “unproven” and deteriorating, and the government has stopped publishing clear benefit–cost ratios altogether. That silence is telling.
As for whether this was “just another Tory money pit”, the answer is uncomfortable but fairly clear.
HS2 fits a long Conservative pattern: large, centralised prestige infrastructure, managed through private contractors, justified by abstract growth models, and insulated from democratic accountability once construction begins.
The costs are socialised; the benefits, such as they are, skew towards business travellers, property developers and London-centric firms.
Meanwhile, genuinely redistributive alternatives – regional rail upgrades, local transport, bus networks – were starved of funds or cancelled to “pay for HS2”.
It was not designed primarily to help poorer people travel more cheaply or more reliably.
HS2 fares were never intended to be low.
Nor was it about regional equality in any serious sense once the northern legs were dropped.
We are left with a truncated project that no longer even fulfils its own stated purpose.
So, yes, it increasingly looks like a white elephant, because HS2 was politically mis-sold, economically over-promised and then cynically hollowed out.
What remains is an enormously expensive solution to a problem that no longer exists, delivering benefits that are narrower, later and smaller than anyone was originally told to expect.
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HS2 exposed as a Tory white elephant and waste of public money
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The high-speed rail project HS2 is not likely to begin running by the latest-projected date for doing so, it has been revealed.
The announcement adds to the wealth of indications that the whole project has been nothing but a waste of tens of billions of pounds of public money – ordered at a time when public money was scarce.
Were David Cameron and his “Con/Dem” (Conservative and Liberal Democrat) coalition government deliberately keeping cash away from where it would do the most good?
The BBC tells us, “HS2 has confirmed that its aim to get trains running between Birmingham and London between 2029 and 2033 “cannot be achieved”.
“Earlier this year, HS2 CEO Mark Wild acknowledged that construction had been “harder than thought” and “needed a reset” involving a review of the project’s cost and schedule.”
Apparently the project is now at an “advanced stage of a comprehensive reset”.
HS2 was originally devised in 2009, but plans were not confirmed until 2012, when the UK was struggling under the austerity project of David Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, who extracted tens of billions of pounds from the UK economy plunging millions of people into economic hardship and causing 190,000 excess deaths, according to the London School of Economics.
Was it just another Tory money pit – a plan to spend money so poor people can’t benefit from it?
And do we even know how long it will take for HS2 to pay for itself, once it finally becomes active?
Taking the second question first: the short answer is: no – there is no credible, agreed estimate for when HS2 will “pay for itself”, and on current evidence it may never do so in any meaningful economic sense.
Here’s the longer answer, because the way HS2 has been justified keeps shifting:
When HS2 was first approved in the early 2010s, the Department for Transport’s business case claimed that the scheme would deliver a positive benefit–cost ratio over a 60-year appraisal period. That did not mean it would ever repay its construction costs in cash terms.
It meant that, on paper, the monetised value of time savings, agglomeration effects and supposed productivity gains would exceed the cost over several decades.
Even that weak claim has now largely collapsed.
The original economic case depended on four things that are no longer true.
First, the network was supposed to be national. London to Birmingham was only phase one, justified mainly because it would unlock later legs to Manchester, Leeds and beyond.
With those northern legs cancelled, the biggest projected benefits disappeared. What remains is a very expensive inter-city shuttle between London and the West Midlands, terminating at Old Oak Common rather than central London.
Second, the cost assumptions were fantasy. HS2 was sold at roughly £33 billion in 2011 prices. Even after massive scope cuts, current estimates sit well above double that in cash terms, and nobody now pretends the final figure is stable. Every reset pushes the break-even point further into the future.
Third, the time-saving argument has been intellectually discredited. Saving “up to 20 minutes” was always a weak public-facing slogan, but internally the business case relied on the now-absurd assumption that time on trains is economically “unproductive”.
Remote working, onboard connectivity and changing work patterns have blown that model apart. The Treasury quietly downgraded the value of travel-time savings years ago, hollowing out HS2’s headline benefits.
Fourth, passenger demand projections are shaky at best. Post-pandemic travel patterns have not returned to the growth curves assumed when HS2 was approved. A railway that is not full does not generate transformative economic returns.
Put bluntly: there is no serious analysis now claiming HS2 will ever recoup its costs, either through fares or through wider economic benefits, within any politically or socially meaningful timeframe.
The National Audit Office has repeatedly warned that value for money is “unproven” and deteriorating, and the government has stopped publishing clear benefit–cost ratios altogether. That silence is telling.
As for whether this was “just another Tory money pit”, the answer is uncomfortable but fairly clear.
HS2 fits a long Conservative pattern: large, centralised prestige infrastructure, managed through private contractors, justified by abstract growth models, and insulated from democratic accountability once construction begins.
The costs are socialised; the benefits, such as they are, skew towards business travellers, property developers and London-centric firms.
Meanwhile, genuinely redistributive alternatives – regional rail upgrades, local transport, bus networks – were starved of funds or cancelled to “pay for HS2”.
It was not designed primarily to help poorer people travel more cheaply or more reliably.
HS2 fares were never intended to be low.
Nor was it about regional equality in any serious sense once the northern legs were dropped.
We are left with a truncated project that no longer even fulfils its own stated purpose.
So, yes, it increasingly looks like a white elephant, because HS2 was politically mis-sold, economically over-promised and then cynically hollowed out.
What remains is an enormously expensive solution to a problem that no longer exists, delivering benefits that are narrower, later and smaller than anyone was originally told to expect.
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