UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s recent decision to abandon the remaining phases of the High Speed 2 programme reflects the government’s growing antipathy to rail investment and equivocation about climate targets. This is in stark contrast to the pro-rail policies increasingly in evidence around the world, and leaves Britain’s railway without a clear plan for future expansion.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak used his speech to the annual Conservative Party conference in Manchester on October 4 to announce a further scaling back of the UK’s High Speed 2 project, which had been intended to create a high-capacity north-south trunk route linking London with cities in the Midlands and north.
Confirming speculation that Phase 2 between the West Midlands and Manchester via Crewe would no longer be taken forward, Sunak said ‘I am cancelling the rest of HS2’. This also includes the truncated eastern leg from the Phase 1 route at Water Orton to meet the Midland Main Line near East Midlands Parkway.
The announcement means that of the 540 km ‘Y network’ planned by the then government in 2010, only the 190 km Phase 1 now under construction between London, Birmingham and a junction with the West Coast Main Line near Lichfield is confirmed as going ahead.
Sunak said ‘a false consensus has taken root that all that matters are links between our big conurbations … all we really need though, is better transport connections in the north, a new Network North that will join up our great towns and cities in the north and Midlands. This will be our priority.’
He described HS2 as ‘a project whose costs have more than doubled, which has been repeatedly delayed and it is not scheduled to reach Manchester for almost two decades. And for which the economic case has massively weakened with the changes to business travel post-Covid. And so, I’m ending this long running saga.’
There had been speculation that the London end of the line might be cut back to the western suburbs. However, construction of Old Oak Common station is well in hand and its design is not suited to turning back more than a few trains per hour. Sunak suggested that a central London terminus at Euston could be retained, but the government subsequently clarified that its development would be contingent on private funding.
Undertaken without any parliamentary scrutiny, the cancellation has sent shockwaves through the UK infrastructure sector. It is all the more staggering when one considers two of the biggest challenges Britain faces as a nation: climate change and a macroeconomic ‘productivity gap’.
With a general election looming next year, Sunak has painted himself firmly as ‘a friend of the motorist’, openly reallocating spending to the roads. The government claimed that the HS2 decision would ‘save’ £36bn, enabling many more local transport projects to be funded. Leaving aside the fact that it had yet to borrow most of the funding required for HS2 Phase 2, up to 70% of the proposed spending in his hastily cobbled together Network North package is allocated to road schemes.
It seems clear that current ministers have absolutely no aspiration to see any growth in rail use, either for freight or passenger. Last year’s decision to halve UK air passenger taxes and the political choice to freeze road fuel duty for the past 13 years rather suggests government policy favours a modal shift away from rail. This is profoundly alarming when we consider that UK rail passenger volumes more than doubled in the 20 years pre-Covid. And although the pandemic has disrupted established travel habits, rail ridership is approximately 15% higher now than when the original HS2 network was agreed.
‘It seems clear that current ministers have absolutely no aspiration to see any growth in rail use, either for freight or passenger’
Despite the Prime Minister’s claims, Covid has not dented the British public’s desire to travel by train. It is arguably government policy which is pushing them away, reflected by real-terms fare increases every year, imposed cuts to rolling stock fleets and an ongoing consultation on mass closure of ticket offices across England.
Far from facilitating Sunak’s ‘better transport connections in the north’, abandoning HS2’s potential for segregating long-distance inter-city services from three heavily utilised trunk lines actually removes any scope for improving or expanding regional and local passenger services across much of the conventional network. Industry insiders have calculated that the HS2 cancellation may result in a worse service for many towns and cities than today.
British policymakers appear to have forgotten that transport is the largest source of carbon emissions in the economy, and that pollution is still growing. The UK’s most recent Carbon Budget, setting out how the country will achieve its legally binding net zero targets, sets out the need for road vehicle-km to fall by 9% by 2035 and 17% by 2050. Yet there has been scant progress on decarbonising road haulage, and there is huge appetite from industry for rail to play a greater role in moving freight. Little wonder that the Rail Freight Group rapidly condemned the HS2 cuts as ‘the worst possible outcome’ for rail-borne logistics.
More concerningly still, the axing of the remaining phases of HS2 echoes Sweden’s recent decision to abort its high speed rail investment, and plays into a worrying narrative about rail spending being ‘elitist’. This is counterintuitive, given that investment in high speed, conventional and urban rail globally is arguably reaching a level not seen since the advent of the automobile age.
In September 2025, Britain will host celebrations to mark 200 years since the opening of the pioneering Stockton & Darlington railway. Sunak’s decision will surely still be reverberating then, as Britain’s rail sector finds itself in a state of flux with no coherent plan for stability, let alone growth. One wonders how much there will be to celebrate.
