THE future of HS2, the high-speed railway planned to link London with the Midlands and the north of England, is now in doubt.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt are reported ready to at least delay the construction of key parts of the already-reduced route, above all the link north of Birmingham to Manchester, the project’s Phase Two.

The case for HS2 was seldom properly explained. It is far less about shaving a few minutes off journey times from Birmingham to London than about expanding railway capacity.

Before the pandemic, railway usage was at its highest level for a century.  Yet the network is around half the size, in terms of track miles, that it was 100 years ago. That means inevitable congestion and overcrowding.

HS2 would take inter-city traffic off existing routes, freeing up space for more local, stopping, services and for shifting more freight from road to rail, an environmental win.

The spiralling cost has undermined but not negated this logic. Some of the increased bill may have been the inevitable consequence of Covid and of the recent high inflation rate.

But some is undoubtedly down to baffling managerial misjudgements and government indecisiveness.

How else to explain the inability to decide what size the line’s putative terminus at Euston should be, with interminable debates as to whether 10 or 11 platforms are needed and the degree of associated retail development?

As it is, a vast area of Camden north and west of Euston is now a desolate building site on which no actual building is taking place, blighting the community indefinitely.

Successive cheese-paring decisions have done less to curb costs than to undermine the whole case for the railway. 

The line’s eastern leg, originally scheduled to go to Leeds, has been severely truncated and a proposed link to the West Coast Main Line south of Manchester has been dropped in the face of Nimby objections from the local Tory MP.

Now Sunak is reported ready to go still further and freeze both the construction of the line from Birmingham to Manchester and the final stretch into Euston.

This would turn tragedy into farce. The remaining line would run from an industrial area six miles from the centre of London to a terminus a mile from the middle of Birmingham.

As a result, most passengers would find it faster to travel on existing services than trek to or from the new Old Oak Common station, designed as an interchange but effectively the southern terminus if Sunak has his way.

This would mean that tens of billions of pounds would have been spent on the most thoroughly bleached white elephant in British infrastructure history. Even Concorde took people places they wanted to go, if one could afford it.

Any further cut would insult the north of England and make a mockery of Tory “levelling up” commitments. Political and business leaders are up in arms.

Yet as ever the Labour “opposition” can find nothing coherent to say, hamstrung by fealty to the same Treasury imperatives as have steered HS2 into this siding to begin with.

It is always claimed that funds saved by cancelling large projects will be spent on other worthy causes instead. Yet this seldom happens. Most likely the money not spent on HS2 will be put by Chancellor Hunt in a drawer marked “for pre-election tax cuts.”

Cancellation of HS2 might be a fitting epitaph for 13 years of Tory misrule, but the consequences for jobs, the climate and the economic development of much of the country mandate that it must be built all the way.