Repurposing Birmingham Curzon

The downsizing of HS2 in October 2023 did not include any changes to the plans for the Birmingham terminus at Curzon Street.

As the HS2 route out of the now-oversize Curzon runs alongside the existing railway linking Birmingham New Street with Water Orton, albeit at different elevation, there would be the possibility of making a connection between the HS2 tracks and the classic railway.

A suitably-designed connection would enable services to the East Midlands and East Anglia, which currently use Birmingham New Street station, to be transferred to Curzon.

This repurposing concept has the advantage of releasing more capacity at Birmingham New Street than the official HS2 scheme itself. It also outperforms the current ‘mark II’ version of the Midlands Rail Hub eastern chord, which entails trying to widen the viaduct into Birmingham Moor Street, and shoehorning in extra bay platforms.

Midlands Rail Hub ‘to be funded from HS2 savings’

Transport secretary Mark Harper MP joined West Midlands metro-mayor Andy Street at Birmingham’s Moor Street station on 29 February, as part of a photo-opportunity announcing £123 million to ‘kick-start funding of the Midlands Rail Hub [MRH]’. (This scheme has received a fair amount of attention on the Beleben blog, as regular readers might recall.)

The demise of the plan to build HS2 to East Midlands Parkway means that Nottingham is again within the scope of MRH. According to Mr Harper, the Hub is part of the government’s plan to ‘invest in transport projects with reallocated HS2 funding’, suggesting that the scheme would have been unfundable if HS2 phase two had continued.

Mr Street tweeted that MRH would ‘ease pressure’ at Birmingham New Street station, ‘help unlock’ the Sutton Park line, and ‘deliver more local services’. Indeed, Midlands Connect’s press statement claimed that ‘when fully implemented, the Hub will see services on most routes increase by between 50% and 100%’ […]’.

After all this, one might well be wondering,

• how would MRH ‘increase services on most routes by between 50% and 100%’ and ‘ease pressure‘ on New Street station at the same time?

• is there enough demand to justify four trains per hour between Birmingham and Leicester, or any passenger service over the Sutton Park line?

• how much effect could a sparse stopping train service on the Camp Hill line have on Alcester Road traffic congestion?

In the view of the Beleben blog, MRH cannot live up to the hype, and is in need of fairly substantial revision.

A decade of official HS2 scrutiny

The High Speed Two programme, “after the cancellation of its latter stages to run only from London to the West Midlands (Phase 1), will offer very poor value for money for the taxpayer”, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) stated in a report published on 7 February. It is “the latest addition to over a decade of scrutiny raising concerns around the management of HS2”.

[…] The Government has accepted that delivering only Phase 1 will not be value for money, as its total costs significantly outweigh its benefits. The Department for Transport (DfT) told the PAC it was still better to complete Phase 1 – a calculation made by excluding the £23 bn spent to date, and including as a benefit of the project avoiding approximately £11 bn of remediation costs from cancelling entirely. The PAC has been left with little assurance over the calculations, and calls for a clear summation of Phase 1’s benefits.

The report raises questions as to the many as-yet unknown ramifications of the decision to cancel HS2’s Northern leg. […]

House of Commons | Committee of Public Accounts | HS2 and Euston | 07 Feb 2024

“The decision to cancel HS2’s Northern leg was a watershed moment that raises urgent and unanswered questions, laid out in our report. What happens now to the Phase 2 land, some of which has been compulsorily purchased? Can we seriously be actively working towards a situation where our high-speed trains are forced to run slower than existing ones when they hit older track? Most importantly, how can the Government now ensure that HS2 deliver the best possible value for the taxpayer?

HS2 is the biggest ticket item by value on the Government’s books for infrastructure projects. As such, it was crying out for a steady hand at the tiller from the start. But, here we are after over a decade of our warnings on HS2’s management and spiralling costs – locked into the costly completion of a curtailed rump of a project with many unanswered questions and risks still attached to delivery of even this curtailed project.”

Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of PAC

Having read the report, one might well ask what the ‘decade of scrutiny’ of HS2 by the PAC, Transport Select Committee, and Parliament, has actually achieved. How much value is there in observations like “Can we seriously be actively working towards a situation where our high-speed trains are forced to run slower than existing ones when they hit older track”?

The planning specifications for HS2 trains have been known for years, it has always been intended they would be running on existing track (for half the distance to Scotland for example), and it has always been planned that HS2 trainsets would be 200 metres long (meaning capacity would be lower to Liverpool, for example). There is nothing new or revelatory about this.

With PAC’s statement that HS2 would offer very poor value for money (VfM) for the taxpayer “after the cancellation of its latter stages to run only from London to the West Midlands” came the implication that building the full scheme would increase the VfM. However, any evidence for this remains conspicuous by its absence.

The [in]efficacy of current public audit and scrutiny processes came up in an article titled ‘Why large-scale public transport projects go off the rails’ by Professor Stephen Glaister (Prospect, 14 Feb 2024).

[…] [Lord Berkeley]’s 2020 report into HS2 cited a 2016 letter from then-Secretary of State for Transport Patrick McLoughlin to George Osborne, which admits that HS2 could not be kept within budget but insists this must be kept secret from parliament. Yet, as late as July 2019, transport minister Nusrat Ghani reassured parliament that “there is only one budget for HS2, and it is £55.7bn [set in 2015]”. Not many people noticed that this statement refers to the “budget” rather than the cost estimate. […]

Why large-scale public transport projects go off the rails | Stephen Glaister | Prospect | February 14, 2024

All in all, the efficacy of scrutiny and audit processes appears to be on a downwards trajectory.

[…] A problem for a government is to be able to debate a proposal at a technical and political level in an open way and subject to independent scrutiny, and feel able to modify or abandon a proposal if necessary, without exposing itself to damaging accusations of making a “U-­turn”. 

[…] Both the [London Underground Public Private Partnership] and HS2 were interesting ideas and worthy of investigation when first proposed. However, over time, evidence and analysis threw doubt on the schemes. Meanwhile, governments had made early political commitments and were determined to push them through in defiance of emerging evidence of increasing cost, longer gestation and construction times, and reducing value for public money. […]

Why large-scale public transport projects go off the rails | Stephen Glaister | Prospect | February 14, 2024

Perplexperts predict pile-ups

Rail “experts” are “increasingly perplexed” by the government’s cancellation of the HS2 route from Birmingham to Crewe, which “would have solved an impending capacity crunch” on the West Coast Main Line, according to a story by The Observer’s ‘policy editor’ Michael Savage (published online on 6 January). “Without any additional capacity by the end of the decade”, the (unnamed) “experts” are “predicting motorway pile-ups as more trucks head on to the roads”, the story added.

This story is an example of the fake and sometimes ludicrous journalism which has flourished since the cancellation of HS2 phase two in October 2023. Why doesn’t Mr Savage name the ‘experts’ predicting ‘motorway pile ups’ as a result of the de-scoping of HS2?

All the evidence suggests the impact of not building HS2 on HGV traffic, and road traffic in general, would be negligible. If unnamed fauxperts increasingly mired in perplexion have evidence to the contrary, why don’t they come out and show their working?

Further down the range

The Department for Transport has provided some tidbits about the computed benefit-cost of HS2 phase one continuation (the ‘8 trains per hour’ version). Their calculation was done in 2015 prices, yet “the cost range underpinning the estimates is £45 – £54 bn in 2019 prices”.

On the disaggregation of costs and benefits underlying the findings of the sub-unity (significantly below 1.0) BCR range estimate capturing the total costs of phase one, the Department stated:

‘A high level assessment was made of the impact of including sunk costs back into the net cost to Government figures, noting that this is not standard Green Book practice which advocates the exclusion of sunk costs. The estimated benefits and revenues used did not change and are as above.

The cost range underlying the findings of the sub-unity BCR includes estimates of sunk costs of £23 bn (in 2019 prices and a portion of which could be recovered through land and property re-sales) as set out by the Permanent Secretary at the Public Accounts Committee, deflated to 2015 prices.

Termination costs are not relevant to this calculation as the assessment is not informing a decision to continue spending versus an alternative counterfactual.’

Department for Transport | December 2023

Down on the range

Following ‘further assurance’, Department for Transport officials have identified the benefit-cost range for continuing with the ‘8 trains per hour’ version of phase 1 of HS2 as 1.1 to 1.8, rather than 1.2 to 1.8.

Huw safeguards Northern mega-boondoggle

Officials are working to formally lift HS2 phase 2a safeguarding ‘within weeks’ and phase 2b safeguarding ‘will be amended by summer 2024, to allow for any safeguarding needed for Northern Powerhouse Rail’, according to the November 2023 6-monthly report to Parliament.

Range against the machine

Taking an estimated range for the total costs of phase 1 of HS2 and assessing them against the estimated
total benefits (i.e. including sunk costs and excluding remediation costs) would result in a benefit-cost range significantly below 1 and represent poor Value for Money. So stated Bernadette Kelly, permanent secretary of the Department for Transport, in a letter to the ‘chair’ of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee on 4 October.

The updated summary accounting officer assessment of continuing investment in HS2 phase one was published on 5 October.

Shrunk and disorderly

Heightened speculation about the future of the HS2 rail project overshadowed this year’s Conservative party conference in Manchester, which took place from 1 to 4 October. The hullabaloo was triggered by the emergence in mid-September of a photo by Steve Back, which showed part of a secret policy document being carried by a government official. Its text suggested that further descoping or cancellation of the high speed megaproject was under consideration, for a possible announcement in the Autumn Statement.

The crescendo of speculation, and accompanying pushback by high speed rail supporters, seemed to prompt prime minister Rishi Sunak to bring forward the publication of his decision on HS2. In his speech to attendees on the final day of the Tory conference, he announced that only phase one (London – West Midlands) would go ahead. The ‘Network North: Transforming British Transport’ command paper made available after the speech stated that HS2’s Euston terminus would be shrunk to six platforms (reducing the frequency of train service accordingly).

Mr Sunak claimed the “£36 billion” saved by not building any of phase two would instead fund “hundreds of new transport projects in the North and the Midlands, and across the country”.

If we are to create change and drive growth across our country, then we must get our infrastructure right. A false consensus has taken root that all that matters are links between our big conurbations. This consensus said that our national economic regeneration should be driven by cities, at the exclusion of everywhere else. It said that the most important connection those cities could have was to London, and not anywhere else. And it said that the only links that mattered were north to south: not east to west.

What 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 the Midlands. I wanted to come here to Manchester today, to say that this will be our priority, our focus, our project.

HS2 is the ultimate example of the old consensus. The result is a project whose costs have more than doubled, which has been repeatedly delayed and it is not scheduled to reach here in Manchester for almost two decades, and for which the economic case has massively weakened with the changes to business travel post-Covid.

I say, to those who backed the project in the first place, the facts have changed. And the right thing to do when the facts change is to have the courage to change direction. And so, I am ending this long-running saga. I am canceling the rest of the HS2 project. And in its place, we will reinvest every single penny – £36 billion – in hundreds of new transport projects in the North and the Midlands, and across the country.

This means £36 billion of investment in the projects that will make a real difference across our nation. As a result of the decision we are taking today, every region outside of London will receive the same or more government investment than they would have done under HS2, with quicker results. No government has ever developed a more ambitious scheme for Northern transport than our new Network North.

This is the right way to drive growth and spread opportunity across our country. To level up. With our new Network North, you will be able to get from Manchester to the new station in Bradford in 30 minutes, Sheffield in 42 minutes, and to Hull in 84 minutes on a fully electrified line.

Don’t worry, there’s more. We’ll protect the £12 billion to link up Manchester and Liverpool as planned, and we will engage with local leaders on how best to deliver that scheme. We’ll build the Midlands Rail Hub, connecting 50 stations. We’ll help Andy Street extend the West Midlands Metro. We’ll build the Leeds tram, electrify the North Wales mainline. Upgrade the A1, the A2, the A5, the M6. There is more. There’s lots more… and we’ll connect our Union with the A75, boosting links between Scotland and Northern Ireland. We’ll fund the Shipley bypass, the Blyth relief road, and deliver 70 other road schemes. We’ll resurface roads across the country. We’ll bring back the Don Valley line. We’ll upgrade the energy coast line between Carlisle, Workington, and Barrow. Build hundreds of other schemes. And keep the £2 bus fare across the whole country.

I challenge anyone to tell me with a straight face that all of that isn’t what the North really needs. Our plan will drive far more growth and opportunity here in the North than a faster train to London ever would. As John Stevenson and Ben Houchen have long argued, east-west links are more important than north-south ones. Given how far along construction is, we will complete the line from Birmingham to Euston. And yes, HS2 trains will still run here to Manchester. And journey times will be cut between Manchester, Birmingham, and London by 30 minutes. And I say this to Andy Street, a man I have huge admiration and respect for, I know we have different views on HS2. But I also know we can work together to ensure a faster, stronger spine: quicker trains and more capacity between Birmingham and Manchester.

The management of HS2 will no longer be responsible for the Euston site. There must be some accountability for the mistakes made, for the mismanagement of this project. We will instead create a new Euston development zone, building thousands of new homes for the next generation of homeowners, new business opportunities, and a station that delivers the capacity we need. And in doing so, for the first time in the life cycle of this project – we will have cut costs. The £6.5 billion of savings that Mark and I are making will be taken from the Euston site, and given to the rest of the country.

The decision I have made and the stance I am taking will be attacked. They will say that halting it signals a lack of ambition. There will be people I respect, people in our own party, who will oppose it. But there is nothing ambitious about simply pouring more and more money into the wrong project. There is nothing long-term about ignoring your real infrastructure needs – so you can spend an ever-larger amount on one grand project.

They will say that we have already spent so much on it that it would be embarrassing to stop. That, though, would be an absurd reason to continue: an abdication of leadership. They will say that there is somehow a cross-party consensus on the project. As I have already said, that consensus is wrong. For too long, people in Westminster have invested in the transport they want, not the transport the rest of the country, particularly the North and Midlands, wants and needs. And to those who disagree, who will focus on what I have stopped, I ask you to consider what we have just created with Network North.

An alternative, which in place of one delayed and overrunning project will now begin hundreds upon hundreds of new projects, large and small, road and rail, bus and train, covering the whole country. That will be delivered faster. That will see every region receiving more investment than they would have done. You can’t have both. So those who wish to disagree with me, I respect that. But they should have the honesty to admit that they would now be canceling the hundreds of alternative projects, right across the country, that people will benefit from instead.

Extract from Prime Minister and Conservative party leader Rishi Sunak’s speech at the Conservative party conference in Manchester, 4 October 2023

A news story titled ‘Find about about every new transport project in your region’, published on the gov.uk website on 4 October, was removed just a few hours later. Its problematic content included a reference to the possibility of diverting HS2 money to building a tramway to Manchester Airport (the airport has had a tram link since 2014).

Adam Drummond, head of political and social research at polling company Opinium, said: “In the data on HS2 we can see Rishi Sunak’s problem in a nutshell: voters have heard about the HS2 announcement, they are split on the decision itself but in the abstract overwhelmingly think the money would be better spent on other rail, road and bus projects. However, only 25% think it is likely that these projects would be delivered on.” (The Observer online, Saturday 7 Oct 2023).

Around half of the HS2 phase one budget has been spent

Around half of the HS2 phase one budget has already been spent, HS2 minister Huw Merriman stated in the June 2023 six-monthly report to Parliament.

So, what word best describes the chances of phase one being completed within its funding envelope?

‘Minimal’, perhaps?