HS2 is the wildest white elephant in British history. Please put it out of its misery | Simon Jenkins

S o it is official, as if that makes a difference. After a 15-month review by the new chief executive, the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, has revealed that HS2 will now cost up to £102.7bn. trains may not start until 2039. Alexander called the original design a “massively over-specced folly” and called the increase in time and costs “obscene”. Indeed it possibly ranks as the wildest white elephant in British history. In comparison, Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is a garden shed, and Dubai’s Burj Khalifa a mere sandcastle.

This week, Alexander, the ninth transport secretary since HS2 was proposed, admitted the project made her angry. As she dusted off her department’s latest defence of its appalling conduct of this fiasco, she tried to feign surprise. She has been in office 18 months. Don’t tell us she did not know.

We thus got the usual promise of a clear-out, of a new page turned. a talented new management team bringing the project at last under control. Alexander should not have recited this familiar speech to the Commons. She should make it in public outside every hospital in the land, every one that has spent the past decade unmodernised, every school unrepaired, every care home unbuilt. every prison overcrowded.

The HS2 project remains what it always was, a total dud. It is a superfluous railway that has simply run wild. There are plenty of fast trains to Birmingham and other ways of running more. This was always a vanity project of the David Cameron coalition. As the former Downing Street in-house HS2 expert, Andrew Gilligan, admitted to the Sunday Times 18 months ago, “HS2 was certain to fail from the start”, with the wrong route, wrong speed. wrong termini. It was ludicrous not to link up with HS1.

The trouble is the usual one, that projects on this scale, once begun, offer huge scope for contractual cost escalation. They arm themselves with consultants and accountants and soon outgun and outsmart those who must find them money. They exploit the biggest cult in modern politics, that every brick laid or inch of concrete mixed is “investment”. therefore must be “pro-growth”.

Those who care about railways and have followed this tragedy over the years have no doubt who was to blame. It was successive prime ministers who, when presented with the bare facts, lacked the courage to call a halt. Cameron refused to take heed. Boris Johnson funked cancellation (which he favoured). Rishi Sunak scrapped the Manchester leg, making it even worse value for money.

Civil servants and advisers were overwhelmed by the 30,000-strong HS2 army. The National Audit Office pulled its punches. The mayor of Greater Manchester. Andy Burnham, supported HS2 when he should have lobbied to kill it in favour of local rail links. Rail services across the Pennines are now dire.

The answer is the one decision dodged for 10 years. It is to stop HS2 now, instantly. The project’s defenders will shift their case. We should treat the £44bn spent thus far as “sunk costs”,. concentrate on the wonders that will come from continued spending. As John Maynard Keynes said, someone at least benefits from being paid just to dig holes and fill them in.

The weakest line in Alexander’s Commons statement was that rehearsed gleefully by the HS2 company itself. that cancellation almost costs more than finishing. Or at least they will make sure it does, what with horrendous compensation and so on. This has to be rubbish. There is no way compensation could equal the £60bn or more still planned to be spent. Above all, there is no conceivable way proceeding would be better value for money that spending such a sum elsewhere.

At present not a metre of HS2 track has been laid; indeed. its boss, Mark Wild, admits that none will be laid before 2029, if then. Robert Stephenson took less than five years to complete his London to Birmingham railway. As yet only two viaducts have reportedly been finished out of 52, and only 11% of the 169 bridges. Cancellation would also liberate multibillion pound sites for urban development around London Euston. Birmingham’s Curzon Street, which looks like a giant bomb has hit it. It would free space for a new town on the site of the vast shambles that is HS2’s Coleshill interchange.

The sole reason for not stopping is that it takes political guts, now in desperately short supply. Alexander could stand up tomorrow and do the deed. She could announce other far more needed rail investments, from re-signalling and electrification to urban transit of all sorts. Britain has just nine tram networks or metros, against France’s 30 and Germany’s 60. At least let Leeds have one. Or Reeves could declare HS2’s annual £7bn budget available for new hospitals, schools, care centres, youth clubs and courtrooms. It is absurd to pretend that these are less worthy uses.

Yet this government really feels a higher priority lies in getting a few of the richer citizens of Birmingham to London a few minutes faster – perhaps one day.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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