How Happy is everyone with High Speed 2 ?

The High Speed 2 railway plan was pitched and accepted by the Labour party back in 2009. It’s main focus was to re-balance the UK’s economy between north and south and to boost it by billions each year, by employing up to 25,000 workers to build the line, nearly 100,000 jobs created once the line is completed, and the estimated £34bn in fare revenue over a 60-year period. The development was also planned to cut down journey times between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. This was thought to be achieved during phase one by running the trains up to 14 times per hour in both directions along with having up to 1,100 seats per train; tripling the train capacity along this route, in order to reduce overcrowding. 

No-one, however, believed that it would have so many financial issues. This was partially due to the original estimate of £56bn, to build the railway, being presented to parliament. This figure then kept growing from £62bn to £81bn and (as of September 7^th, 2019) up to an eye-watering £88bn. There were doubts over HS2’s budget very early on which were discovered by the project’s former infrastructure consultant, Michael Byng who (as well as turning to help those affected by HS2) claimed that the £27bn budget for phase one (London to Birmingham) contrasted with every other realistic estimate, he claims the he told senior members of the project and they simply sent him on his way. HS2 officials have publicly denies that they are in trouble but that they acknowledge that the project is “facing challenges to keep costs within budget”. 

One of the main hubs of this huge railway is London, and if you’d ask anyone, they would tell you that land there definitely isn’t cheap, unless they were working for HS2. Doug Thornton was a former employee of HS2 and oversaw acquiring all the land needed in order to build phase one of the track, he states that the budget set aside for the compulsory purchase of property was “appalling” , with blocks of flats being bought for £500 and a house with a garden in Euston for £600. Thornton was fired after walking out of his work’s premises after morally refusing to give a presentation, before the scheme as confirmed by parliament, to board members by using false numbers that would undercompensate people by 100’s of millions of pounds. HS2 also claims that they are working on and improving the estimate but an investigation by the national ordit office, found that their property estimates did increase significantly but they hadn’t been required to provide it’s updated estimates to parliament so MP’s voted and approved of the scheme without hearing these updated figures. HS2 is also taking the keys to people’s properties before paying out compensation, this leaves families and smaller businesses robbed as they often cannot afford to relocate without the compensation money that HS2 would promise to give them but is no-where in sight. 

Larger groups of people are also seen to be speaking out against HS2; such as the pressure group STOP HS2, who campaign against this scheme as it will “destroy natural beauty and ecosystems” and increase carbon dioxide emissions. Many people in Birmingham are also complaining about the promise of 30,000 new jobs being created during phase one, as a disproportionate amount are in London. The huge amounts of compulsory purchases are also ruining living lives as well as dead ones as, in order to make way for the main station in London, archeologists are working hard to carefully remove hundreds of thousands of skeletons from an ancient burial ground dating back to 1788. 

So far More than £1.25bn has already been spent on buying London properties alone and HS2 is still negotiating more purchases, despite a government review in October into whether the project should even continue. Many of the doubts expressed by parliament are clear as they include the drastically rising costs and the vast delays, since phase one was scheduled to be finished on 2026 but that figure has now been pushed back to between 2028 and 2031.  

So as the HS2’s 225mph top speed, is the only speedy thing about this project, many people as well as parliament are left with a lot of questions: Will parliament will allow the completion of one of the world’s most expensive railway? Do the national benefits outweigh the costs? Or is HS2 just a “fast train for fat cats” ?