HS2 chief hits out at ‘unjust’ division of rail assets between north and south
High-speed rail project’s chairman Sir David Higgins says north of England is often shortchanged and given ‘crappy’ hand-me-down trains
Gwyn Topham Transport correspondent
Britain has lacked, according to mild-mannered Sir David Higgins, a proper sense of outrage. Not the kind of anger that anti-HS2 protesters vent at the £50bn high-speed rail project Higgins leads, but outrage at the injustice that sees one half of the country routinely look down upon the poorer.
The chairman of HS2 Ltd, whose CV includes running Network Rail and heading the Olympic Delivery Authority, says doom-mongering over high-speed rail brings back memories. He said: “There were the same headlines on the Olympics, smack up to the opening – we’re going to be embarrassed by the opening ceremony, we’re not going to win medals, and we’re wasting all this money.
“My response was: ‘You’ve sat here for decades and watched them dump rubbish, from sewage to fridges to contaminated waste, in east London and expected people to live there. You live in your privileged areas of west London and you expect the public to put up with this in east London, and it’s a national disgrace.’
“People didn’t care about it. There was no groundswell of anger. It was unjust and unfair. There should have been an outcry.”
Higgins said the story of transport is not much different. “It’s the same sort of divide. I believe the north has been shortchanged. I look at expenditure per head, the pass-me-down process – the offcuts from rolling stock always end up in the north. Two hours from Birmingham to Leeds on a chugger, old crappy trains on poor railway lines. We would not accept that from London to Swindon, and we don’t: we insist on a huge amount of money going into commuter services.”
HS2 will attempt to address this divide, with a first leg that runs from London to Birmingham, then a second phase linking to Manchester and Leeds.
People in the north have been, Higgins said, “taken for granted. It is a disgrace, the lack of investment in transport, and they deserve better. The result is this divided country.”
Events of recent weeks have made many dubious that things will soon change. The chancellor’s northern powerhouse was dubbed the northern powercut after the government announced that rail upgrades, including the electrification of the Midland mainline and the Transpennine railway, were to be “paused”, citing cost overruns at Network Rail – despite manifesto pledges made just weeks earlier.
Yet the commitment to HS2 survives. Buoyed by the addition of Lord Adonis to the HS2 board, Higgins is unworried by political scepticism, including doubts expressed by the Labour leadership frontrunner, Andy Burnham. Higgins said: “Labour local authorities are 100% behind this. They realise how critical it is for skills and jobs in the north.”
He stressed that it “is essential this project is bipartisan” but suggested Adonis, whom he describes as “a big thinker, a good strategist”, will help ensure that.
Higgins’ faith has been freshly vindicated in the East Midlands, where the location for a new HS2 interchange at Toton has been nailed down with local authorities, which drew up plans for links and neighbouring regeneration. “They own the solution now. The more you get local ownership, the better.”
HS2, he has insisted, must be part of a broader national strategy. Three decades of major infrastructure projects lie ahead: “HS2, Crossrail 2, HS3, the substantial investment in ground support and transport for a third runway at Heathrow, the highways programme, the National Grid, nuclear power stations.” It sounds a tall order, but Higgins insisted: “It’s going to happen. It’s not a question of will we, won’t we.”
What about the money? “These are assets – not a cost to the nation.”
Ministers have reaffirmed their backing for HS2, and final plans and funds for rebuilding London Euston should be approved this year, which in time will likely see a huge underground superstation combining Euston and St Pancras with a Crossrail 2 station in between.
Two hours from Birmingham to Leeds on old crappy trains. We would not accept that from London to Swindon
Sir David Higgins
Higgins’s team is still reviewing options for a direct rail link from HS2 to HS1, but his enthusiasm sounds muted. He scrapped the original plans to help cut costs from HS2’s £50bn budget, which is still on target – though the second phase “is much less certain in terms of design, and even the final route hasn’t been determined – but we should work to deliver phase two in £25.5bn, in 2011 pounds”.
That qualification might ring a few alarm bells with opponents of HS2, who have pointed out that Higgins, as well as the HS2 chief executive, Simon Kirby, were at the helm of Network Rail when it signed off the recent £38.5bn five-year plan whose budget proved insufficient. Higgins retorted: “That was the team that delivered £20bn of projects in time and budget, you should remember.” He reels off a list of Network Rail achievements from Blackfriars station (“an unbelievable engineering challenge”) to Birmingham New Street. He added: “There’s capacity to do major, complex projects, that’s for sure.”
The problems Network Rail has since had with electrification are “utterly different” from what HS2 has to face, Higgins insisted. “What we’re essentially building is a new highway. You know exactly what’s [there] and you’ve got 24-hour access. Upgrading these existing assets is nightmarishly difficult.”
But should he not have known that, as the chief executive of Network Rail, when signing off its budget? “The scope was very much in flux. The plan was that the regulator would determine what was fair value when it was fully scoped and Network Rail would then borrow on the markets to fund its asset.”
Then, though, came accounting changes that made Network Rail’s £37.9bn debt part of the nation’s balance sheet. The game changed and a cap was put on the credit card. “Once it came on balance sheet all that flexibility’s gone. That’s the most fundamental change. That’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just a change the ONS [Office for National Statistics] in its great wisdom came out with.” Higgins wrote to warn the ONS of the likely results but it “ploughed on”. Instead of talking of a crisis in the railways, Higgins said, “people need to stop and identify that as a cause”.
Higgins said too many people are “beating up on the railways”. At chaos-hit London Bridge station, for example, he said: “The grim reality is what we should say to people is, don’t use it. Stay away, make other plans. We’ve not been as blunt with the public as we should have been.” Otherwise, “it becomes complete chaos and everyone starts pointing fingers”.
For all that, Higgins compared Britain’s attitude towards rebuilding its railways favourably to his native Australia and elsewhere. He added: “It’s really encouraging that this country has the courage to face up to these issues. I look at some of the infrastructure issues in America and think, good God.”
