This morning certain national and other newspapers are uncritically rehashing a DfT press release, claiming that money released from scapping phase 2 of HS2 is going to fund new bus services next year.
A rail replacement bus in Huddersfield. You could have had a new 225mph green railway. Instead, all you’ll get is more motorways, traffic congestion and pollution. Thanks Rishi.
This is very frustrating because those newspapers and journalists are helping the government publicise the con. Not one of the journos has stopped to think, do any analysis, or ask any awkward questions. For example, discussing the theoretical size of the slice of a non-existent pie rather than pointing out the fact the pie itself doesn’t exist. Is it any wonder people in the UK are so woefully ill-informed when members of the 4th estate become an uncritical arm of government propaganda?
Here’s the DfT press release journalists have cut and paste to cobble their stories together from.
Note some important points;
This funding won’t be available to sometime (unspecified) in the next financial year – subject to all the usual caveats about bids, business cases, approvals etc. No-one knows what it will actually be spent on. No-one actually know where it’s really coming from. The press release makes some wild guesses on what it ‘could’ be spent on – like this;
“While it is up to local authorities in partnership with operators to decide how best to use the funding, the new funding for next year is enough to support up to 25 million miles of new bus services across the North and Midlands”
Note the word ‘support’. They mean subsidise. Sunak himself is quoted as claiming this;
“We’re backing buses with one of the biggest ever support packages and keeping bus fares down to ensure the country’s favourite means of transport is more affordable for millions of people”
*More* affordable? The Government has already announced it’s keeping the fare cap, so how does this make buses ‘more’ affordable? It doesn’t. It’s yet more weasel words and part of Sunak’s con. This is yet another example of Sunak’s ‘illustrative’ claims that will never be delivered before the next election when he’s out on his ear.
There’s also a huge financial elephant in the room here that not a single journo has picked up on. This is using Capex as Opex.
Let me explain. Capex (capital expenditure) is when you invest money in long term assets which are an investment for the future – such as building a new green railway with a design life of 120 years that actually generates a return. Opex (operational expenditure) is money spent on short-term, day to day expenses, like wages – or subsidising bus fares! You need to replenish that money every year because once it’s spent it’s gone. There’s a good explanation here.
Instead of having a new green railway, the modern spine of our crumbling network which is beset by Climate Change we’ll have what to show for the money? Nothing – apart from the abandoned, half built structures on HS2’s route to Crewe – a monument to Rishi Sunak and this governments short-term thinking and lies.
It’s no wonder some perceptive commentators are calling Sunak ‘Truss lite’. This is similar to her economic madness of borrowing money from the markets to fund tax cuts.
Yet again Rishi Sunak is trying to con you with ‘jam tomorrow’ – and large sections of the media are helping him to do it.
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November 2021 brought us, after a long wait, the Integrated Rail Plan (IRP). Less than two years later, it has been blown away by something that is quite the opposite – something that is not integrated, and not all about rail, although if ‘Plan’ means a hastily compiled wish list of things that ought to happen anyway, a Plan it might be.
Of course, there’s two gargantuan holes in this ‘plan’. The £36bn ‘saved’ by scrapping HS2 North of Birmingham doesn’t actually exist as it hasn’t been borrowed yet, and many of the items on the list will fall foul of the footnote hidden away at the bottom of page 24. Few, if any of them are likely to pass the business case test.
The howlers in this Disintegrated Not-a-Plan (DNP), such as promising to build tram routes that opened years ago, have caught attention, but the elephant in the room has escaped comment – despite it being a £12 billion elephant, a third of the promised total spend of £36 billion. That elephant is that, having cancelled HS2 Phase 2 into Manchester, and the new approach from the West that HS2 would have built for Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) trains from Liverpool to share, £12 billion has had to be ‘protected’ for NPR to build an approach all on its own, without the benefit of HS2 trains to share it. Of course if NPR does that, a big lump of cost drops out of HS2 Phase 2b, which will overnight appear a much sounder investment.
It had also been proposed that NPR would take over HS2’s proposed Birmingham – Manchester services, and extend them to Leeds to make up for loss of the dedicated HS2 route via the East Midlands. This however becomes impossible without HS2 Phase 2b to Crewe and Phase 2a from Crewe to Birmingham, as there is no way on Earth that the existing lines have the capacity for those extra trains, particularly at the key bottleneck of Stafford.
Other elements of the IRP, less than two years old, are blown out of the water. The IRP carefully explained how truncating HS2’s Leeds/York line at a disused power station near Loughborough, and taking trains into Nottingham on existing lines, would release more capacity on the Midland Main Line for better interurban and local services that HS2’s dedicated route would have done. That never struck me as plausible, but now the DNP claims that the its predecessor IRP would have led to worse services at stations such as Leicester, Market Harborough and Kettering. No such nicety as evidence is produced to show why the DfT, the specifier of train services, would specify a worsening of services, nor any suggestion as to how the DNP would improve them (spoiler alert – it won’t), let alone improve connectivity between the South Midlands and Yorkshire and the North East in the way that HS2’s original plan would have done.
The IRP explained in great detail why Bradford should not have a new station on a TransPennine high speed line; now apparently that is essential, to the tune of £2 billion. Now I don’t mind at all if Bradford does have a high speed station after all, it’s only down the road from me in Halifax, but what has changed since the IRP to make what was once impossible so essential now?
Turning to other things that the DNP does propose, about £8 billion is apparently going to be spent on mending potholes. But if local authorities were properly funded, the potholes wouldn’t need mending in the first place, as mending of potholes is not a one-off job but an ongoing commitment. So where is the next tranche of pothole-mending funding going to come from – you can only cancel HS2 once! Weirdly this part of the DNP admits that the government is going to do a most un-Conservative thing in borrowing so as to fund revenue expenditure. It’s almost as mad as Liz Truss borrowing £bns to fund tax cuts for the rich.
One very good thing in the DNP is a promise to upgrade junctions north of Ely, downgraded from proper junctions to single-lead connections by Network SouthEast, but now part of the Felixstowe – Nuneaton freight artery. In fact it is so good a thing to increase freight capacity from the East Coast Ports that one wonders why it has been so long coming. But where are those freight trains going after Ely? If running via Nuneaton and the West Coast Main Line to the North West and Scotland, they will simply run into the same congestion one the route via Stafford that Phase 2a of HS2 was meant to relieve by taking non-stop InterCity trains onto their own line.
But the position of the DNP on running HS2 to Euston instead of tipping all passengers out in Zone 2 makes quantum mechanics look simple! In the Prime Minister’s speech to his conference, Euston seemed safe. But subsequent reports suggested that the tunnels from Old Oak and the station itself would only be built if private funding could be found for 10,000 houses with a station on the side. Then Tweets sorry Xs from the Treasury, normally the villain of such pieces, were unequivocal that Euston would be built. As it should be, because to be blunt, without it the £44 billion or so now being invested in Phase 1 of HS2 has no significant value; with Euston, it has.
But what isn’t in the DNP? Nearly everything that matters if you want a step-change in rail capacity in the North. What’s the biggest problem today? Stations, and Manchester Piccadilly and Leeds in particular, both of which eke out capacity by putting two or even three trains into the same platform. This is operationally fragile as well as confusing for passengers, and if you lengthen trains to provide more seats, becomes impossible. By removing the London trains into their own station, HS2 would have freed two platforms at Piccadilly for local services to become at the very least more reliable, , and ultimately more numerous.
A Pendolino arrives at Manchester Piccadilly on the 11th July 2023. Without the new HS2 station (which would be built to the left of the picture) this battered and congested station throat is all the capacity there is.
Is an obscure and shadowy process in a Manchester hotel room really how to decide to spend £36 billion of investment capital?
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The widespread derision that greeted Sunak’s plan to fool people that by scrapping phase 2 of HS2 he suddenly had £36bn to spend on some wonderful and well-thought out new initiatives wasn’t what he was expecting. But when you’re as out of touch with the real world as multi-millionaire Sunak is – that’s not really that surprising.
Some sections of the media, both right and left, smelled a rat and – aided by people on Twitter who did the digging for them a slew of stories appeared, illustrating that some of these projects already existed whilst others were ones that had been sitting on drawing boards for years, were already in the pipeline or had already been rejected/cancelled by previous Tory PMs – the ‘new’ Bradford station being a classic example.
Useless Transport Minister Mark Harper and his sidekick Hugh Merriman were trotted out with Yorkshire leaders to pretend that there was suddenly £2bn to spend on a new station at Bradford. In truth it was no more than a cheap PR stunt which local leaders allowed themselves to be dragged into. There is no £2bn. There are no costed plans for such a station. there’s no planning permission, no land acquisition, no public enquiry or any of the other formalities required before anything actually happens. There’s more chance of me winning the lottery than anything remotely useful happening before the next general election, but the fiction has to be maintained in the hope of keeping a few Tory votes. For Bradford, it’s always ‘jam tomorrow’.
Harper managed to look even more stupid yesterday. After a number of impossible schemes in the ‘Network North’ report were pulled from the official website, Harper claimed in an interview that the schemes that had disappeared weren’t real commitments to do things (no shit!) they were just ‘examples’ of what could be done – with money that doesn’t exist! That’s not what Sunak had said, but then everything Sunak had said was a lie anyway.
I keep banging on about this but it’s important to understand why the £36bn claim is such an outrageous lie.
HS2 phase 2 was due to be constructed between 2023 and 2035, with services starting between then and 2041. That meant spending would be spread out over nearly two decades with peaks and troughs during that time depending on the intensity of construction or fit-out work. There is NO pot of money sat in the Treasury labelled “for HS2” that’s just waiting to be spent on other things. The vast majority of the money hasn’t even been properly budgeted for or even borrowed yet! Governments borrow money depending on the needs of regular spending reviews. Right now, that money doesn’t exist. You don’t borrow money needed in 2033 in 2023 (never mind money needed even later) as you haven’t even worked out how much you’ll actually need. All you really have is a forecast. They’re projections, not actual costings – or cash.
There is no £36bn. It’s a projection, a possible future budget, not real money in the here and now.
Sadly, a lot of the public have no idea of the reality here, and part of that blame lies with the media, who are woeful at telling people the truth. There’s a number of reasons for that. Part is laziness, part’s pressure to churn out stuff and damn the truth – and part is deliberate misinformation from ‘client’ journalists who’re really just mouthpieces for the Government – and say what they’re told to. Especially if the outlet they work for happens to be one owned by certain millionare media ‘tycoons’ who use their ownership of newspapers and TV channels to further their own personal/political agendas. That said, some journo’s working on left of centre outlets aren’t averse to spinning a story to fit a misguided ‘green’ agenda.
The end result is the same. Joe Public is woefully misinformed on subjects like HS2 – either by accident or design.
Here’s an example from today. A newspaper from those well-known ‘Northern’ counties – Devon and Cornwall – published this piece on the Camelford by-pass, entitled ‘Camelford bypass set to benefit from HS2 cancellation funding”
Wow! Camelford is going to get a new bypass now, eh? No. Of course not. A local Cllr put the story right on Twitter.
Wait! What? There’s *already* an outline business case?
Yes. It was originally submitted in 2019 and refined in 2022. It’s been sitting on civil servants/ministers desks since then. And is doesn’t need money from HS2 either. The ‘Atlantic Highway Camelford Improvement’ is eligible for money from an existing budget, as the report mentions:
“The Department for Transport (DfT) has made the A39 a part of the Major Road Network. This means we can apply for funding from the current 5-year national roads programme (2020 – 2025)”.
You’re being lied to – again.
This is classic delay tactics by Ministers. Want to make it like like you’re doing something whilst you’re actually doing nothing? Simple, just commission another study or ‘review’ and kick the can even further down the road. Plus, it means no-one actually has to pony-up the money they don’t have and just lied about! Plus, remember the small print of page 24 of that piece of crap ‘Network North’ Sunak laughably claims is a plan;
“As usual, individual projects referenced in this document will be subject to the approval of business cases“.
I’m going to end on a slightly brighter note. Labour have opened their conference in Liverpool and some of the ideas they’re putting forward are going to make a few Tories nervous (and hopefully, criminals).
Firstly, Labour have said that when they form the next Governement they’ll appoint a Covid corruption commissioner to claw back some of the £bns that went missing on dodgy PPE and unworkable systems like ‘track and trace’.
Secondly, they’ll revisit the planning laws. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged to “rebuild Britain”, including by speeding up the planning process for key infrastructure projects – such as railways, including HS2 and whatever survives from the mess the Tories call ‘Network North’. Plus, a motion calling for the HS2 high speed rail line to be built in full was backed by Labour delegates.
Labour are starting to look like a party preparing to take power, which is excellent news. Maybe the future’s not so gloomy after all…
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The other week I visited a village called Shawford, in Hampshire and passed a pub famous as the location of the demise of the TV character who’s catchphrase is the title of today’s blog. It seemed very appropriate to use to describe the latest tone-deaf crass stupidity from our Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. Fresh from not levelling up, cancelling the majority of the UKs new green railway to drive a motorway through previous commitments to net zero, he tweeted this.
From his private plane.
I can only assume his recent list of culls included all of his PR advisors, as even the most tone-deaf intern could spot the optics of this. But Rishi? Oh no. As a multi-millionaire he’s so used to wealth and privilege it simply doesn’t occur to him.
But that’s it, isn’t it? Trains are for plebs. Who needs a railway when you’ve got access to a private plane? I assume the helicopter he normally uses must be in for servicing or summat
The sooner we eject these out of touch idiots from Government the better – before they do any more damage the the country…
I’ve a small favour to ask (as I’m not a multi-millionaire with a private plane)… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
We’re less than 24 hours from Sunak’s appalling speech to the Tory party conference and things are already falling apart for him. But that’s the problem when you tell lies, they’re often so easy to expose when honest folk start to do some investigating.
Remember the Sunak’s claim that, right up to the last moment ‘no decision’ had been made on HS2? He lied. Not only was that obvious when the ‘Network North’ document and fantasy shopping list was slipped out (which had clearly been cobbled together days before) but he also made a video for social media. ITV had a look at it – especially the background, and revealed it was made at least a week before conference. You can see their report here. This morning Transport Minister Mark Harper (another conference liar) has been touring the TV studios, essentially saying ‘so what’? Yeah, who cares that we have yet another Tory Prime Minister who lies so glibly?
Now the wheels are coming off some of the ridiculous claims of what projects the imaginary £36bn of ‘savings’ from scrapping Hs2 phase 2 will fund. Some of the projects are utterly batshit. The whole list seems to have been cobbled together by someone Googling old transport schemes or people’s aspirations without any consultation with people who know about transport. Hence the addition of two absolute howlers.
Apparently, Network North will build an extension of Manchester Metrolink to Manchester airport. There’s only one problem. That was completed in 2014. Another completed project included in the wish-list was highlighted by Nottingham MP Lilian Greenwood.
Another list of projects has mysteriously disappeared, as local BBC reporter Dan Holland has found.
The fact that most of these schemes are little more than vaporware is given away by a footnote on page 24, which says “As usual, individual projects referenced in this document will be subject to the approval of business cases“.
But, as many of them are basket cases, not business cases, they’ll never happen. Some would never get through Network Rail’s GRIP process (Governance for Railway Investment Projects), like the idea to electrify the Hope valley line between Manchester and Sheffield. Whose daft idea was it to prioritise that? We’ll never know as no-one’s putting their name to this list of fantasies. Certainly, no-one in the rail industry was consulted, or Northern Mayors. Back in 2015 the Northern Electrification Task Force (set up by the Transport Minister reported on the priorities for electrification in the North. Number 1 on the list of 12 routes was the Calder Valley (Leeds to Manchester and Preston via Bradford and Brighouse). I blogged about it at the time. You can find the full list here. Hope Valley came in tier 2, so why’s it been mentioned in this report ahead of all the others? How many marginal Tory constituencies are on the route I wonder, or on the route of some of the other invented schemes?
Here’s the list of tier 1 routes. Guess how many have been electrified since 2015? Not a single one!
Calder Valley (Leeds to Manchester and Preston via Bradford and Brighouse)
Liverpool to Manchester via Warrington Central
Southport/Kirkby to Salford Crescent
Chester to Stockport
Northallerton to Middlesbrough
Leeds to York via Harrogate
Selby to Hull
Sheffield (Meadowhall) to Leeds via Barnsley / Castleford & connections
Bolton to Clitheroe
Sheffield to Doncaster/Wakefield Westgate (Dearne Valley)
Hazel Grove to Buxton
Warrington to Chester
How many are on the fantasy list? Just one (Sheffield to Leeds) with no funding agreed.
The truth is – ‘Network North’ is a con, which is why the ‘North’ now includes the South-East and Devon and Cornwall! Just look at the map! It’s the whole of England (and a bit of Scotland)! Oh, and why is Manchester now where Preston is?
Money has been diverted from the North to imaginary schemes right across England. Worse, money that was building a new green railway now will (supposedly) built motorways and dual-carriageways, sometime in the future, maybe – ish. And fill in potholes. So much for ‘net zero’ – and so much for ambition.
Can you start seeing the size of the con yet?
We’re going from spades in the ground actually building something that’s been 15 years in planning to a series of schemes (some resurrected, others just dreamed-up) where the vast majority of them will never happen – but they will look good on election pamphlets in marginal constituencies in 2024.
One of the great ironies of all these is one of Sunak’s main justifications for scrapping HS2 phase 2 which is the fact it’s been repeatedly delayed. Yes, and whose bloody fault is that? His Governments! If the Tories hadn’t continually dithered and delayed, changed their minds and kept interfering in the plans, Phase 1 and 2a of HS2 would have opened in 2026 and 2027.
Now we see the Tories doing their damndest to sabotage the future through a scorched earth policy of selling off land earmarked for HS2 as quickly as possible to make it as difficult (and expensive) as possible for Labour to re-instate what’s been scrapped. It’s political cynicism and economic destructiveness at its worst.
There’s another problem too. Credibility. Who in the financial markets of business sectors will trust the word of this bunch of liars again? Why would anyone take the risk of investing in the UK when a government acts this way? Over the past few years the Tories have proved they simply can’t be trusted to keep their word, be it international agreements they admit they’d willingly renege on (brexit) to HS2.
A final problem. This is government by diktat. No-one was consulted about this. This is Sunak usurping power and ignoring the democratic process. Ignoring the will of Parliament, ignoring regional elected political leaders and ignoring the institutions of state such as bodies tasked to run the transport needs of the country. It’s profoundly undemocratic. We don’t even know who drew up this daft list of projects. All we know is no-one who matters was consulted – apart from the Tory Mayor of Birmingham, Andy Street, who was stopped from resigning (if the threat was ever real) by being fobbed of with the promise of a rail scheme he’s been fobbed off with in the past and which still hasn’t been delivered.
The whole of the UK not just the North should be appalled at what’s occurred. This is no way to plan anything – much less the economic wellbeing of a country. But that stopped mattering to the Tories years ago. Now all that matters is trying to cling to power.
It’s been said that what the Tory party conference was really about was a battle for the soul of the Conservative party. What that conference proved was that they don’t have one.
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I’m not going to pull any punches here but neither am I going to get into too much detail right now as I’m too bloody angry and still gathering data.
Here’s what I do know. Sunak has lied. Big time and repeatedly – and this is all down to him. Cabinet responsibility my arse. From what I’ve been told by various sources no-one had a clue what he was going to say until the very last moment. Many not even then.
No-one in the railway industry had any idea. Nor in HS2 Ltd, or the Infrastructure Commission. The Regional Mayors of the cities affected (including the Mayor of London) hadn’t the foggiest. None of the people who should have been consulted on cancelling the biggest civil engineering project in Europe were consulted – at all. This was a decision made by one man – and whoever’s been whispering in his ear.
Because Sunak lied to everyone.
He insisted just a few days ago that ‘no decision had been taken’ He lied. How do we know? Because shortly after his appalling speech at the Tory party conference this document, titled ‘Network North’ was slipped out on the DfT (who hadn’t been consulted either) website.
It’s 35 pages long. There’s no way on God’s green earth this was cobbled together over last weekend – although cobbled together it was. It’s appalling and I’ll be pulling it apart in another blog.
Sunak is claiming that by cancelling phase 2 of HS2 he has £36bn to spend on transport projects around the UK. It’s a lie. There are no £36bn savings. The money doesn’t exist. None of these projects could possibly happen before the next election. The budgeted spend on HS2 phase 2 over the next 5 years is around £3bn. The small print on page 24 of ‘Network North’ gives the game away. These schemes are a wish list that have no business case (and never will) nor planning permission or any other of the legal hoops such schemes have to jump through. Plus, the amounts they’re supposedly meant to cost are pure guesswork. It’s a con, an election con.
HS2 Phase 2 had (to quote Sunak’s laughable phrase) ‘spades in the ground’. He’s scrapped a scheme that was actually being built for ‘jam tomorrow’ but he knows he won’t be around to make any of them happen. It’s pure bullshit, and the party faithful (and the gullible) will fall for it – as well as a few parochial Northern luddites. He’s set rail investment and tackling Climate Change back by a generation. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the faux Greens who’re welcoming the decision to cancel a green railway to divert the money to road building instead. I have a special circle in hell reserved for them…
We are all being lied to – big time. We need to start understanding that – and we need to start doing something about it. Much of the national and nearly all of the regional media are doing an appalling job on this because they’re not doing the obvious and following the money. What money? The £36bn is a fantasy, as HS2 Ltd and Government accounts show – so why are they not pointing this out?
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
Well, it wasn’t a ridiculous start to the day. I was up at 06:30 as I don’t need to be in Aylesbury until 14:00, although getting to Farnham to catch the train means I’m reliant on Dawn for a lift and Dee’s dropping her nephew, Sam, off at school first. This may be ‘leafy Surrey’ but the roads around here really aren’t very civilised when it comes to walking. Most of them are narrow and don’t have footpaths, leaving no safe space for walkers. Plus, many people around here are driving the four-wheel versions of tanks, leaving even less clearance. Society here is very much focused around the car. There’s not even a bus service through Tilford.
Feel free to pop back during the day to see what I get up to…
09:00
Having sat in on a Surrey school run it was instructive to say the least. Sam’s school is in Farnham, on a narrow street parallel to the railway line. The street is totally unsuitable for the numbers driving their kids to school (ignoring the no parking signs in the process). Lardbutt SUVs merely exacerbate the problem. It was good to see the number of kids who were walking but far too many weren’t. One thing I did notice, there’s not as many obese kids here compared to West Yorkshire but as obesity’s linked to poverty that’s unsurprising.
Dawn dropped me off at the station before heading home and I’m now sat on a 5-car Class 444 heading for the hour-long journey to Waterloo.
These services were always normally worked by 4-car Class 450s in multiple as the 444s are the ‘intercity’ units reserved for long-distance services from Waterloo to places like Bournemouth and Weymouth, although I do remember seeing them on Alton services in the past. As I’ll be a regular commuter from Farnham this week I’ll be interested to see how the service pattern pans out in practice.
Whilst there’s clearly not as many people commuting daily anymore, the car-park at Farnham was very busy and my trains filling up after each stop. The picture was taken after we left Farnham. I’ll add a comparison shot later.
09:30.
We’re well on the way to London now, the next stop’s Surbiton. We’ve had a ticket check which allowed me to observe that the people around me are all using paper tickets, suggesting they’re not daily commuters.
The change in seasons is evident too. Earlier we passed a ‘leafbuster’ train. The MPV was busy spraying the track towards Alton. The sun’s noticeably lower in the sky too, meaning that (photographically) I have longer, deeper shadows to contend with. Mind you, the forecast is that the Mercury’s due to hit a balmy 23 degrees today, so I can’t complain.
11:30.
I’m now on my way to Aylesbury via the old Great Central railway from Marylebone. Having time in the bank I tarried in London, changing trains at Clapham Junction in order to get a few library shots. The sidings there are full of the ‘new’ Class 701 ‘Arterio’ sets which are yet to turn a wheel in passenger service. It’s arterio sclerosis at it were! I boarded one of the old Class 455s from Clapham, one of the BR built trains that should have been sent for scrap years ago but that are still going strong. At Waterloo I spied my first 5-car Arterio which was out on test, contrasting with the 455s in adjacent platforms.
18:30.
Sorry for the break in blogging but I’ve had another busy day. Having met Ian (from the excellent ‘Ian visits’ website) and EFKB PR on the train to Aylesbury the three of us walked to the EKFB site, chatting on the way. The walk allowed us to see other aspects of the vast site other than the area we were visiting.
Once we met up with all the other invitees and folks from Network Rail and EKFB and having got ‘booted and suited’ we headed off to the main worksite where the new rail bridge over what will be HS2 has been completed and track relaid.
The bridge over HS2 with the HS2 cutting being excavated beneath. This is looking South towards London with Aylesbury off to the left and Princes Risborough off to the right. It’s a hot day to be wearing full PPE!
I’ll write a bit more later and perhaps add another pic. Right now, having said goodbyes after a really informative visit I’ve walked back into Aylesbury and caught the train back into London.
20:00.
Travelling back into and across my former home town was weird. OK. I’ve not lived here for 23 years, but I never remember it this quiet – even on a Monday. The Chiltern train into Marylebone picked up a few folk en-route with many joining it when it hit the London suburbs but it still felt quiet. I had the same feeling on the Bakerloo line tube. This route passes through what are some of the capitals entertainment areas, but the vibrancy of the old days was missing.
Now I’m at Waterloo which is definitely subdued. It feels more like a provincial rail station rather than London’s busiest terminus.
Where’s the buzz?
Bidding adieu to the capital I’m taking the less direct route ‘home’ via Guildford rather than the Alton directs. I’m aboard yet another ‘Arkwright’ (aka a Class 444).
22:30.
‘Tis the end of the day and time to bring this blog to journey’s end. My route home via Guildford was easy, the trains weren’t crowded and the connection time allowed me to grab a few night shots. Yep, we’ve got to that time of year where it’s getting dark too early for my liking as my working day’s getting shorter, but hey ho. Let’s see what tomorrow brings…
I said I post another couple of pictures before I went. Here’s one of the HS2 trace West of Aylesbury, looking South. Can you sport the new railway bridge I was visiting? Some folk complain that building HS2 is ‘desecrating’ an AONB. Really? So who gave planning permission for those pylons then? In a few years when HS2’s complete you won’t even notice it at this location. Oh, and don’t even mention the sound of heavy traffic from the road behind me…
‘Metroland’. A pair of London Underground S stock trains stand at Chalfont and Latimer station which is shared between the Metropolitan line and Chiltern Railways.
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
The past few days has seen even more confusion than usual about the future of the HS2 rail project. There’s the usual dither and delay as a dysfunctional Tory government can’t make its mind up what to do about anything with HS2 just being one item on a long list of issues and policies it’s incapable of tackling with any consistency or rationality.
In many ways, that doesn’t really matter. Most people, including many Tory MPs, can smell the stench of a dying government. What the smart money is on now is what Labour will do when they come back to power at the next election. Labour (who started the HS2 project) have always backed it in opposition, but over the past couple of days sections of the media have cast doubt on the idea and speculated that Labour are somehow backtracking. Today, a group of Labour Shadow Ministers took to the airwaves and Twitter (I refuse to call it ‘X’) to make it very clear that wasn’t the case. I’ve gathered those comments together here. First up is Lou Haigh, the Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, who reinforced the message put out by Shadow Paymaster General Jon Ashworth in an interview on Sky news.
The message was further rammed home by Shadow Rail Minister Stephen Morgan in this trio of tweets.
Mark Walker of PR agency Cogitamus tweeted the fact that Shadow Minister without Portfolio Nick Thomas-Symonds had also been making Labour’s position clear on the BBCs ‘PM’ radio programme in an interview with Evan Davies.
Meanwhile, the BBC put out this tweet of the interview.
That’s four Labour Shadow Ministers making the party’s position crystal clear in what’s obviously a concerted approach which will almost certainly have the blessing of the Labour Leader’s office. It’s easy to see why. HS2 has massive support up in the North and Midlands where the Tories vacillation on the project has gone down like a cup of cold sick. Labour are smelling blood and capitalising on this to highlight the Tories ‘selling out’ the North and abandoning all pretense of ‘levelling up’. Labour are being handed an ideal opportunity to lambast the Government and erode any support they may still have in the ‘red wall’ seats. After all, why wouldn’t they support building HS2? It was their brainchild after all. Will the Tories realise the trap they’ve set for themselves? Possibly not as they’re so dysfunctional right now. They’re too busy listening to the swivel-eyed loons who got Liz Truss into such policy debacle.
Of course, Labour coming out in force to stamp out any confusion over their HS2 stance will be ignored by some sections of the media and also by the tiny number of Nimbys, right-wingers and faux ‘greens’ who still think them muttering on Twitter can possibly change anything. Labour can safely ignore them as most of them would never vote Labour anyway and none of them have the clout to affect an election in any meaningful way and barring something like an asteroid hitting the Earth, it’s almost certain that Labour will form the next Government…
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
There’s a short blog from me I’ve been up to my neck in archive pictures for most of the day. Not because I’d planned it that way but because I had a rather unusual request which involved digging through various hard-drives to find pictures of a particular event going back 20 years, which took a fair bit of digging. I haven’t looked at one of the hard drives for several years so I was relieved to find what I was looking for – and more! I rediscovered some pictures I’d filed away and thought were lost which would have been frustrating as they’re of historic interest now. To be honest, it was a good day for being stuck in the office as we had another morning of torrential rain. I had to walk into Sowerby Bridge for an appointment and ended up wearing my full set of waterproofs to do so – not something I expected to be doing at the end of August!
I’ll be spending much of tomorrow to complete the exercise and also to add some more of the pictures I’ve discovered to my Zenfolio website, starting with images from what’s now the new East-West rail link. I visited the line in 2011 when the idea was still being considered and long before construction actually started. Here’s one such shot taken at a location that’s unrecognisable today – and not just because of E-W rail, but also HS2.
This is Calvert in Buckinghamshire. Looking West towards L&NE junction and the single line to Bicester beyond. A spur runs off to the left towards Calvert and the old Great Central line. Only one thing in this shot remains intact (but not for long) which is the road overbridge in the distance. This picture was taken on the 11th August 2011 from the Addison Rd overbridge, which has also disappeared although it’s replacement has yet to open.
Here’s the same view almost exactly a decade later on the 23rd June 2021
The tall piling rig is standing where High Speed 2 will pass from Left to Right, underneath the reopened E-W rail link, the trackbed of which is being raised to almost the level of the old overbridge beyond. Meanwhile, the land to the right of the picture is being transformed as it’s the site of the HS2 Infrastructure Maintenance Depot (IMD) and sidings.
Here’s a more recent picture. I can’t do an exact comparison as Addison Rd is still closed. But here’s how the area looked on the 1st August this year.
Taken from further East, this is the new Addison Rd bridge under construction. The E-W trackbed has been widened on the Northern side to accomodate the tracks which will lead into the IMD.
How things change in 12 years! You can find more E-W rail construction pictures here. It’s the place you’ll be able to find the 2011 pictures too when I’ve had chance to add them tomorrow.
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
Regular readers will know that I’ve become very cynical about the quality of journalism in the mainstream media over the past few years. Chiefly because so much of it is lazy and uninformed. It’s also incredibly incestuous, with people copying each others articles and amplifying erroneous comments and conclusions rather then (heaven forbid) doing their own research or fact-checking. We’ve seen this recently with the media falling over each other to rehash the same story that HS2 was described as ‘unachievable’ in the Infrastructure and Projects Authority annual report which I described in this blog.
It’s no wonder the British public is so ill-informed on so many subjects when the members of the 4th Estate either can’t be bothered to give them the facts or analysis, or (worse) put their own slant on things which ends up (accidentally, or deliberately) misinforming people. Nowadays, journalists are held in low-esteem but in many cases they’ve only themselves to blame. Today it’s often difficult to tell politician from Journalist and vice-versa – just look at ‘GBNews’ to see where this leads.
Sadly, it’s not just the ‘red tops’ that do this. Supposedly reputable newspapers (what used to be called the broadsheets) are doing exactly the same, as are the likes of the BBC. It’s not just the right-wing press either. That bastion of the liberal middle classes, the Guardian has a history of allowing people like Simon Jenkins to come out with absolute garbage on subjects like HS2. I examined one of his latest fact-free rants here.
Yesterday it was the turn of the Guardian’s Economics Editor, one Larry Elliott, who came out up with this awful opinion piece titled “HS2 is the white elephant in the room. If the Tories won’t scrap it, Labour must”
The headline rather sets the tone. HS2 is a ‘white elephant’? Gosh, how original. The sub-headline is even worse!
“The vanity project is scandalously over budget. Finally cancelling it would show the party is serious about public finances”
“Vanity” project? My BS Bingo card is filling up fast – and we’ve not even got into the article yet! Let’s just deal with that tired and trite old canard first shall we?
Perhaps the intellectually lazy people who insist on trotting out the line that HS2 is a ‘vanity project’ can answer this. Since HS2 was first begun by a Labour government in 2009 we’ve had a coalition Government and a Tory majority one. We’ve had six Prime Minsters (Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak – and no doubt soon a 7th). We’ve also had six Transport Ministers (Adonis, Greening, McLoughlin, Shapps,Trevelyan, Harper – and no doubt soon a 7th). The phase 1 bill passed with the biggest majority of any Coalition Govt bill. The phase 2a bill also flew through Parliament with no real opposition – as did the Phase 2b (Crewe – Manchester) Hybrid Bill in 2022, by 205 votes to 6.
All the above politicians backed or back HS2. So do Labour (who’ve said they’ll build all of HS2 when they inevitably get into power) the Lib-Dems, the SNP and the Tories. As do the regional elected Mayors of all parties and a vast array of local politicians, business groups and business. The list is huge.
So, exactly whose bloody ‘vanity project’ is HS2 meant to be?
Having already set the bar low, Elliott rolls up his sleeves and lowers it even more….
His opening gambit is to mention the IPA’s ‘red’ rating for HS2. What he fails to do is put it in any context, like mention that the report doesn’t actually talk about HS2 at all. The only mention is in an Appendix as 3 lines on a chart that lists all the projects that fall within the IPAs remit. Instead, Elliott tries to pretend the explanation of the red rating is specifically talking about HS2 rather than describing that category. Now, for context, he could’ve mentioned that Crossrail once had a red rating, as did the two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, or the new Intercity IEP train fleets from Hitachi. All those ‘unachievable’ projects have been delivered, but that doesn’t fit the narrative and requires some research, not just copying what others have said.
Elliott then claims that “in a sense the IPA report told us nothing that wasn’t known already” Well, actually, if he’d ever bothered reading the report he’d know this is untrue as Hs2’s ‘red’ rating is just for phase 1 and 2a. Last year the phase 1 rating was amber/red and the year before that amber. Phase 2a has gone from Green to Red whilst Phase 2b has gone from Red in 20/21 to Amber for the past two years.
The only conclusion to be drawn from Elliott’s simplistic (and wrong) claim is that he’s never actually read the report.
Anyone with any knowledge of HS2 could have told Elliott why Phase 1 is now Red – it’s because the Tories have dithered and delayed and changed the plans for Euston station yet again, bumping up costs, adding delays and leaving a trail of uncertainty over what the station and oversite development will look like. Apart from the Euston fiasco the rest of Phase 1 is progressing well with around 40% of construction complete.
Elliott then asserts that HS2 is “a vanity project that has caused immense environmental damage”.
I’ve already dealt with the first idiotic claim. The second is just as easily dealt with. Elliott offers not a shred of evidence for his assertion but we can see from actual statistics and research (the stuff Elliott doesn’t do) that this is nonsense. For example, the amount of woodland affected by HS2 has decreased from the original estimates (see this report). Oh, and that’s without taking into account the amount of new planting/habitat creation.
Still, who needs facts and research eh?
Right, what’s next? Oh, yes…
“There are still those who insist that HS2 is needed to boost capacity on the rail network, which even if true misses the point: that every pound spent on HS2 is a pound that can’t be spent on other rail projects”.
Nope, there’s no point to miss there – because this simply isn’t true, it’s just another allegation that fails to understand how HS2 is funded, which is not from the existing railway budget but by borrowing specifically to fund HS2. That an Economic Editor doesn’t understand this is bizarre. There is no pot of money sat in the Treasury labelled ‘for HS2’ that’s waiting to be rebadged and spent elsewhere. Of course, there’s another irony here. The OECD recommends that baseline infrastructure investment is 5.5% of GDP annually for an economy with aspirations to growth. We’ve only spent this amount twice since WW2. HS2 is not only investment in infra, it’s investment in green infrastructure, exactly the sort of thing we need to be investing in – not more roads. You’d think the Economics Editor of a national newspaper would understand that, wouldn’t you?
Let’s plough on…
“The pandemic and its inflationary aftermath have massively increased pressures on public spending while at the same time encouraging more people to work remotely”.
Eh? Just a few minutes of research would have shown Elliott that WFH is a strawman argument on several fronts. Firstly, rail passenger numbers have already recovered to near pre-Covid levels and in some cases (especially leisure) have surpassed 2019 figures – as DfT figures show. Remember this is at a time when the industry’s plagued with strikes and cancellations too – so there’s suppressed demand. My RAIL colleague Phil Haigh quoted the figures yesterday.
There’s another thing the graph highlights, road traffic has bounced back too. Quite how people can drive whilst they’re all supposedly working from home is a mystery, but there you go. We need to cut road travel to tackle climate change. There’s also the fact road congestion costs the economy billions (£10bn a year according to the Economist magazine). To do that we need HS2’s rail capacity as the existing network can’t cope and compared to the annual cost of congestion the annual (and finite) cost of building HS2 is peanuts. You’d think those facts might have occurred to an Economics Editor, wouldn’t you?
The second flaw in the WFH argument is that long-distance rail travel has sod all to do with working (from home or anywhere else) as it’s not about commuting or business travel and never has been.
The third flaw is the fact HS2 is also about freight – even though it’ll never carry it. HS2 frees up capacity on the existing network for more freight services (which ties in with green investment, getting lorries off roads – see my point later).
Now, you’d think an Economics Editor might have bothered checking these things, wouldn’t you? But no…
Next up Elliott quotes Tony Berkeley, a man who’s damaged his reputation with his obsessive opposition to HS2 and use of dubious figures and frankly daft statements and assertions such as these “There is no safe and buildable station design for it at Euston, no forecasts for demand post-pandemic and no easy connection to other rail lines“. This is complete cobblers of course. HS2 was taken to the High Court by a local Euston resident claiming the HS2 tunnel design was unsafe and the case was thrown out. The court judgement is here.
Elliott then goes on to say “a future Labour government should (cancel HS2) …Although the opposition has given no hint that it intends to take such a radical step”
Err, Labour’s given no such ‘hint’ because it’s categorically and continually stated the opposite and has been doing for years! At last years Labour Conference Shadow Transport Minister Louise Haigh said in her speech that:
“We will build an Elizabeth Line for the North and deliver Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2 in full“.
This brings me on to another of Elliott’s ignorant claims, that cancelling HS2 would “give an incoming Labour government money to spend on other – more worthwhile – projects. These would inevitably include improvements to rail infrastructure in the north”
I’ve already pointed out the pot of money fallacy but there’s another thing Elliott fails to understand and has never researched. 50% of the new Northern Powerhouse Rail tracks would be tracks laid for HS2 that NPR would run over! It’s a point not lost on all the Northern leaders – which is why they to a man (and woman) support building HS2. Still, what do they know compared to a journalist based within the M25?
What message would cancelling Hs2 in 2025 after an election when the majority of phase 1 civil engineering will be completed with stations well on their way send to the markets? It wouldn’t be one of economic competence, it would be one of failure and a stifling lack of nerve and vision. Cancelling the largest civil engineering project in Europe would be pure madness. It would leave a massive monument to failure, and the UK a laughing stock on the world stage. Brexit has already diminished our credibility, this would be another nail in that coffin. I cannot believe any credible economist would suggest such a thing, although a blinkered political dogmatist might.
This next one’s an absolute stunner and I couldn’t help laughing when I read it.
“When I asked an old friend who lives on Merseyside what he thought of HS2, he said: “It is mainly about cutting journey times between Birmingham and London. We aren’t bothered at all about it. However, the rail connections between Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds are an absolute disgrace and that is much more important to all of us up here”.
Oh, God. Where to start? Research is now reduced to asking someone who lives outside the M25 (for the sake of some sort of credibility) and asking their uninformed opinion to bolster your own weak arguments. This is like saying “well, a bloke in the pub told me” it’s cringeworthy.
1. HS2 has never been “mainly” about reducing journey times (ever) it’s always been about capacity as a few minutes fact-finding by reading actual reports rather than cribbing from other journos copy or asking some random bloke would have told Elliott. 2. We’re already spending £bns rebuilding the railway lines between Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds (and beyond) as part of the Trans-Pennine Route Upgrade. You’d have thought an Economics Editor might have heard of such a major investment in the rail network, but apparently not…
The final argument in Elliott’s piece is just as ignorant and uninformed. According to him, scrapping HS2 “should make it cheaper for Labour to borrow the money it needs to fund the decarbonisation of the economy”
Wait? What? This is meant to be a particular interest of Elliott’s so how can he possibly not know that the biggest source of the UKs carbon emissions is transport? Or that without HS2 we won’t have the rail capacity we need to get modal shift from road/air to rail to cut those emissions to tackle climate change?
HS2 will have the same or lower carbon emissions as Eurostar as it will be powered by green electricity and the actual trains will be more energy efficient as they’re the latest design.
Instead, Elliott is proposing to scrap the one real thing we are doing (that has cross-party support) to invest in green technology and clean up our biggest source of Co2 emissions! Madness.
Having researched Elliott I find he’s also a Brexit supporter. Having observed his lack of research and belief in the man in the pub arguments instead that doesn’t surprise me.
What does surprise (and depress me) is that these people become Economics Editors on national newspapers. This country and its people deserve better from its media than this. If I can do this research, why can’t highly paid national journalists do it – or is it because it doesn’t fit the narrative?
PS, Guardian – I’m open to offers!
I’ve a small favour to ask… If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket as I’m not paid vast sums to write rubbish for national newspapers. Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/
Paul Bigland 