Published: 01 August, 2013

The leadership of the Labour Party in Camden are insistent that the HS2 rail link must be stopped, but nationally Ed Miliband’s party support the £43 billion scheme.

Exclusively for the New Journal, Lord Peter Mandelson (pictured) explains why he no longer thinks the project represents value for money

MANY living in Camden must be wondering what they did to deserve such up-ending of their lives: first St Pancras re-built, then the ongoing re-development of King’s Cross and its hinterland, and now HS2 – the proposed new high-speed train. Of these, the last will have the most far-reaching impact on the borough because of the extensive engineering works required.

But if this was the only point at issue in the debate, I would back HS2 against Camden’s residents.

I have a lot of sympathy for those who are going to lose their homes – a lot of social housing properties will disappear – and others who will see their shops and small businesses bulldozed out of the way. 

But if this is the price to pay for progress, the project should proceed.

But do the advantages really make this a reasonable price? My questioning of HS2 comes in a sense from the opposite end of the telescope – from the point of view of those living and working north of Watford rather than south of it.

The government – Labour then the coalition – assert that HS2 will help bridge the north-south economic divide but they have not produced any evidence for this. Indeed, I think the north could end up worse off not better as a result of HS2.

The original theory was that if passengers can travel more quickly between London and Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds on a new high-speed train, this would be good for business.

It was argued that as time spent on trains is time wasted for business people, faster trains will lower business costs and therefore be good for the economy.

But this is absurd. Businesses do not start or grow depending on whether a business manager spends half an hour more or less on a train. Laptops, wifi and mobile phones connect travellers when they wish to communicate on trains and give them thinking and writing time when they prefer to be alone.

It is not as if we live in such a vast country. The Chancellor, George Osborne’s enthusiasm for high-speed trains stems from his experience of them in other countries, including China. But China is the size of a whole continent. We are physically a long way even from the size of France, Spain or Germany. Our existing intercity trains do their job well for the relatively smaller distances they have to cover.

The next argument to come along contends that the present rail network is running close to capacity and that HS2 will be needed to enable more travellers and freight to be transported in the future.

Services going into Paddington and Waterloo experience chronic overcrowding unlike those arriving at Euston and St Pancras. But these are short rather than long distance problems and will hardly be solved by building HS2 from Euston to Birmingham.

For the money saved on HS2, there are plenty of other candidates for rail investment and expanded capacity that will meet transport needs more efficiently, quickly and cheaply. Business people outside London recognise this and, significantly, for all the economic claims made for HS2, they put this project way down in their list of priorities.

This goes to the crux of the issue for me. The estimated cost of HS2 has soared since the last Labour government took the decision to go ahead.

The price tag now stands at around £50 billion. If you spent a smaller sum on increasing rail capacity in other ways you could deliver a much better transport service for millions more people, for example upgrading the existing north-south mainlines to improve speed and capacity of inter-regional travel as well as providing transport connections within regions in the north. In London and its suburbs, we live in one huge travel-to-work area served by transit links over and under ground.

This is not the same elsewhere in the country where, with poor existing links, it is much more difficult to travel between conurbations whether for work, family visits or healthcare.

Yet, if HS2 goes ahead, everywhere outside London will see not more transport connections but fewer because – especially in the decades we face of continuing financial pressures – HS2 will draw the available resources away from the rest of the rail network.

We will end up paying more for less. A big cut in intercity services running on the “classic” mainlines is already built into the government’s business case for HS2. So, if HS2 is built, we will see a brilliant, shiny bullet of a train flying through our countryside connecting London with a handful of major cities but with other mainline connections in the midlands and north becoming more of a skeleton service.

This is why I question the public value for money of HS2. There will be too little gain for the pain.

If HS2 is built at the expense of the rest of the transport system we will risk widening the north-south divide not reducing it. That’s not worth the sacrifice being demanded of Camden’s residents, and all the others along the HS2 route, and why the government should drive HS2 into the nearest siding and start thinking again.