Regarding Simon Jenkins’ article (HS2 fails every test. This must be the end of it, 10 August), HS2 trains will serve the city centres of Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. There are at least 20 city and town centre locations that will be served by HS2 trains from the south-east to Scotland. HS2 remains on track and within its funding envelope, and there is no government report that suggests otherwise. The government’s HS2 business case shows that for every £1 spent, £2.30 will be returned. We take our responsibility to taxpayers incredibly seriously and follow strict government guidelines on spending, including on pay. The work we have done to date has supported more than 2,000 UK businesses and 6,000 jobs, bringing benefits right across the country. Many more thousands of jobs, including 2,000 apprenticeships, will be supported by the project and can help drive a new generation into engineering and technology.
You quote Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, but omit a key line. He says: “HS2 is a project whose time has come … Its benefits will be felt for decades to come.” Organisations from the TUC to the CBI continue to believe that HS2 is the right strategic intervention into the country. Elected civic and business leaders across the UK continue to see HS2 as the solution to their productivity gap, and parliament recently backed HS2 by a ratio of nearly 25 to 1.
The case for HS2 is compelling, and it is the only strategic intervention in UK transport infrastructure that can deliver the level of connectivity and capacity between the north and the Midlands needed to rebalance the national economy in the 21st century.
Mark Thurston
Chief executive, HS2 Ltd
• I regularly travel from Manchester to Derby and Leicester. Fifty years ago I could travel direct by train. Now it’s via Sheffield – an insanity that requires a change. Driving takes half the time. The original route of the main line still exists – just awaiting investment: investment that would increase capacity and join two economically active areas (and give access to HS1). HS2 draws all the possible funding away from this and for no reason.
Let’s start a campaign to divert HS2 investment to such real improvements. Not so glamorous but much more useful.
Robert Bracegirdle
Gawsworth, Cheshire
• I am a long-term opponent of HS2, having lived in London, the West Midlands and the north of England and experiencing all those areas’ services. However, Simon Jenkins exhibits no concern for the stated purpose of HS2 – ie to help regenerate the economies of the north and Midlands – nor the appalling bias in infrastructure funding to the south and London. The spending on Crossrail 2 in particular gets no mention in the article. Euston station, however, features highly in his concerns. It is clear that no major party is prepared to grasp the dire situation existing in transport services in the north and Midlands. If HS2 is cancelled and Crossrail 2 is built, that disproportionate gap is widened.
Richard Clark
York
• There’s another test failure for HS2 that Simon Jenkins fails to mention: utility. HS2 is trumpeted as bringing prosperity to the north. This is on the assumption that the best we can do for the poor benighted cloth-capped cloggies up north is to give them a quick escape route to the joys of the Great Wen. It is doubtful that many Londoners will be making exploratory journeys in the reverse direction, least of all for cultural reasons. If HS2 is built, I would hazard a guess that more return tickets will be bought in Manchester Piccadilly than in London Euston.
For northern prosperity, it would be far more beneficial (and cheaper) to build HS3, the high-speed line from west to east – Liverpool to Hull. Simpler (and even cheaper) still would be just to electrify the existing trans-Pennine line, to produce a reliable and fast enough service linking major northern cities. This would boost both commerce and industry, and generate a genuine “northern powerhouse”.
Tim Gossling
Cambridge
• Please, Simon Jenkins, don’t fall for the road lobby figure of 8% of travel in the UK being by rail. That would a fair comparison if it were possible to make all possible journeys by train but – certainly since Beeching – that is not the case. For example, all journeys from Bude, Fakenham, Tenterden or Kirkcudbright must at least in part be made by road and, since the recent cuts to local bus subsidies, more and more by car. Nor can many night-time journeys be made by rail, and for disabled people the possibilities are even more curtailed.
Perhaps you could look in detail at what a reasonable estimate might be for the percentage of people choosing to travel by train where there is a reasonable rail option. Looking at, for instance, travel between Sevenoaks and central London, where there is a frequent, pretty reliable service between daybreak and midnight, even at today’s higher fares large numbers of people travel regularly by train. It only takes a short check on Google maps etc to find that, where there is a rail option, the train is often much quicker point-to-point than the car. And very many people actually like travelling by train, and will do so if they have the option – viz the always higher-than-forecast use of reopened railways, like the Waverley route to Edinburgh.
So, however HS2 turns out, rail is very much part of the future of travel; the idea that a massive road-building programme is the answer to everything died with Beeching and Marples.
Richard Townend
Sevenoaks, Kent
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