Thread by @Andrew_Adonis

My full response to Sunak & critics of HS2 who trashed Britain’s future 🧵
You would think, from Sunak & the media, that HS2 was dead & deserved its fate. But as HS2’s main architect back in 2009/10 I only wish Labour had stayed stayed in office long enough to see it through 1/

instead of the serial incompetence in execution which followed in the 13 Tory yrs.
In fact, despite Rishi Sunak’s cancellation of HS2’s northern branches, 140 miles of new rail track from London to Birmingham, Britain’s 1st & 2nd largest cities, will soon be completed. 2/

This part largely follows my 2010 blueprint, a tribute to the exceptionally able planners who pioneered HS2. It’s also thanks to a cross-party consensus I worked hard to foster, which survived until Sunak bizarrely chose to make the cancellation of a railway line from B’ham 3/

Manchester a totem of his claim to be the agent of “change” at the unpopular tail end of 4 terms of Tory/Brexit/austerity govt.
This cross-party consensus enabled the project to advance after 2010, albeit far too slowly, despite almost annual changes in the executive or 4/

ministerial leaders responsible for HS2 since 2010. There are more tunnels & the total cost is a lot higher than originally envisaged, to which I will revert later, but this central section of HS2 is intact and will not be undone.
When HS2 opens, I expect it will be greeted 5/

as a transport miracle, rather like the first railways & motorways & high-speed lines around the rest of the world. All of these at the time had critics on grounds of cost & novelty in their fraught periods of construction. High-frequency, reliable, high-speed trains 6/

will complete the central London to Birmingham journey in 40 mins, half the current journey time & without the constant disruption which bedevils today’s congested Victorian main line from Euston to the north. 
From the critics, you would think that HS2 was a luxury. Why 7/

is it then that virtually every other large, developed nation in Europe and Asia—starting with Japan 60 years ago between Tokyo, Nagoya & Osaka, a distance similar to that between London, Manchester & Glasgow—has built high-speed lines connecting their principal cities, and 8/

and all of them are running at high capacity? For exactly the same reason as HS2 is being built: because of the necessity for vastly more rail capacity and connectivity than the existing 19th-century railways provide in this new age of the train, when inter-city traffic is 9/

shifting decisively from road to rail. The valid criticism of HS2 is that it is being built several decades later than it should have been, because of the poverty of aspiration of the leaders of the British state 10/

which haunts our infrastructure projects & broader politics.
Despite the amputation of the Manchester & Leeds branches of HS2, high-speed trains will run off the high-speed line north of Birmingham and proceed slowly to Manchester, Liverpool 11/

& Glasgow on existing tracks. When that happens, the contrast between the old and the new rail infrastructure will be so stark, and congestion north of B’ham so severe, that I expect the Manchester & Leeds branches will be built fairly rapidly. This will complete the 2010 /12

blueprint. There will be massive pressure for the north to be “levelled up” to the 21st-century rail standard of London and the Midlands. 
The problems of HS2 result from mismanagement in execution, not from conception or design. The main effect of the Sunak axe will be to 13/

dramatically increase costs and regional disparities until the 2010 scheme is eventually completed. Every year of delay in extending HS2 will have a severely detrimental effect on the economies of the northern conurbations as people and business move to B’ham in particular 14/

with its super-fast, frequent & reliable commuter-style service to London. It will include a direct connection with the Elizabeth Line, a 30 minute-journey from a huge park-and-ride station at the Birmingham International station serving B’ham Airport, which also connects to 15/

the West Coast Main Line and motorways at Solihull. 
So despite the recent alarums and excursions, HS2 is progressing and will probably be completed according to its original conception—meeting the key requirements of rail capacity and connectivity, and bridging the north/ 16/

south divide—which animated it from the start. I have no regrets in having initiated HS2, and I predict that Sunak’s decision to halt construction north of Birmingham will be seen as one of the worst, most short-sighted transport infrastructure decisions of the last 50 years.  17/

The main conceptual criticism of HS2 to have gained traction is that it was engineered to be “too fast” at 250 mph (making it Europe’s fastest railway). The continent’s existing high-speed lines are mostly engineered to 200 mph or less. This allegedly adds greatly to costs & 18/

was at my personal instigation as a rail enthusiast (!)
In fact, the cost difference between building a conventional line & a high-speed one is estimated at only 10 per cent. This marginally higher price—& the necessity for a fairly straight line on the HS2 alignment—would 19/

also apply to a slightly less high-speed line running at c.200 mph. The reason for HS2 running at up to 250 mph is simply because it is more modern than most of Europe’s and Japan’s high-speed lines, which were built decades ago. Most new high-speed lines are being built to 20/

higher speeds. Meanwhile, Japan, once again pioneering high-speed rail, is now building an ultra-fast Maglev line running at 311 mph between Tokyo & Osaka, to relieve the 60-year-old high-speed line and provide additional capacity. It would be perverse for the UK to opt 21/

for old technology as a matter of principle. Maybe we should have gone straight to Maglev. I considered this seriously in 2009/10 as a joint project with the Japanese. However, I judged the costs, the likely critics and the sheer challenge of modern Britain pioneering in this 22/

uncharacteristic way, as insuperable barriers.
Now to the cost, which for the full HS2 scheme has roughly doubled since it was fixed at £56 billion in 2015, shortly before the legislation to build the railway was enacted by parliament by a 10-to-one majority. (Cancelling the 23/

northern leg by Sunak did not require a parliamentary vote: had it done so he would probably have lost it). 
Most of this cost increase is caused by inflation since 2015, and it is vital to appreciate that construction cost inflation has affected virtually all infrastructure 24/

projects, large and small, to a similar degree since 2015. The Hinkley C nuclear power station now under construction has seen its costs nearly double from £18bn to £33bn in the same period. Furthermore, the same cost and inflation pressures will apply to all those new and 25/

upgraded northern rail projects which will now become necessary after HS2’s cancellation, including a large stretch of the newly announced rail line from Liverpool to Manchester & Leeds, which alone will eat up most of the HS2 “saving” of £36bn. It will also apply to all the 26/

road and rail schemes supposedly made possible by HS2’s cancellation, but which had mostly been promised long before. 
The original £56bn was itself far too high by international standards, as is the cost of Hinkley C and virtually all other large infrastructure in 27/

modern Britain, including new roads. The short Stonehenge road tunnel for the A303 in Wiltshire alone has a projected cost of £2bn. But the answer is to tackle the UK’s problems in executing infrastructure projects, including excessive planning requirements & political 28/

delays, nimbyism & the lack of embedded engineering expertise in the British state. The answer is not to cancel vital projects halfway through, long after escalating costs become clear.
Even with these higher costs, Britain still spends far less than most developed 29/

nations on infrastructure as a share of national income. It is surely not beyond the capacity of modern Britain to have a modern railway line serving its principal cities. To argue that this may intrinsically be too “low value” on an economic cost/benefit ratio—the gravamen 30/

of Stephen Glaister’s critique—is to defy the experience of virtually the entire developed world. It’s like arguing that the motorways should not have been built (there were many who said so at the time). As ex head of the RAC Foundation, Glaister would never have made that 31/

mistake. It is the transport equivalent of Brexit.
Last year the Elizabeth Line came in finally at a bloated £19bn, billions over budget & 4 yrs late. Like the M25, the Victoria & Jubilee lines & virtually all transport infra serving highly populated areas, it is massively 32/

outperforming its original traffic projections and critics have vanished like the dawn mist. It is already the busiest railway line in the UK. HS2, serving the huge cities of London, Birmingham and Manchester, will very likely go the same way and defy its critics. But what a 33/

catastrophe Sunak has inflicted on the country by his short-term decisions for a bleaker future, all done for cynical political gain. It is vital that HS2 is rescued for the national good. 34 ends/