The fundamental economic argument for the £100 billion High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project has been critically undermined by an outdated assumption that time spent on a train is wasted for business travellers, a new investigation has claimed.
The Flawed Foundation of Speed
Proponents of the massive infrastructure scheme initially championed the economic benefits of 250mph train journeys, which would significantly cut travel time for those on work trips. However, a crucial and now-questionable assumption was baked into the business case: that professionals could not use this travel time productively.
This was despite the fact that many businesspeople can and do work easily on trains. A BBC Radio 4 podcast series, 'Derailed: The Story of HS2', has examined how this focus on pure speed for its own sake not only skewed the economic justification but also drove construction costs ever higher.
To achieve maximum velocity, designers adjusted plans to ensure the railway would be as straight as possible, avoiding bends around woodland and villages that would necessitate slowing down. This required more sophisticated junctions and stronger slab track, adding billions to the final bill.
A Shifting Goal and a Shrinking Network
This obsession with speed ultimately ran counter to the project's primary stated aim: increasing capacity on the congested 700-mile West Coast Main Line between London Euston and Glasgow. The line was originally intended to connect London with Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham, freeing up space for more local and freight services on existing tracks.
The podcast highlights how the business case was rooted in a pre-smartphone era, where lost working hours during travel were seen as a major drain on productivity. Andrew Meaney, a partner at consultancy Oxera, told the programme that in the original analysis, nearly 30% of HS2's economic benefits were predicated on saving unproductive travel time for business travellers.
Meaney, who was asked by the Transport Select Committee in 2011 to analyse the HS2 business case, explained the logic used at the time. "A driver of a car, they can't do anything with their time... if you're a briefcase traveller, certainly at the time, you weren't making calls on your mobile phone. So that was really dead time. And the same logic was lifted and shifted onto railways," he said.
An Unupdated Case and Soaring Costs
By the time Meaney was asked to review the case again around 2020 for the government-commissioned Oakervee review, the world had changed dramatically with ubiquitous wifi, laptops, and smartphones. Yet, the HS2 business case had not been adequately updated.
"We were expecting a Rolls Royce business case at that point. The features that we were expecting to be added hadn't been added," Meaney stated, calling the lack of a fresh assessment on the value of business travel time "very surprising."
The Oakervee review, led by former HS2 Ltd chairman Douglas Oakervee, still concluded the project should continue, but estimated costs could balloon to £106 billion. Despite this, Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave the project the green light in February 2020.
The project's scope and delivery have since been severely curtailed:
- In November 2021, the government scrapped the eastern leg to Leeds.
- By March 2023, the Birmingham to Crewe section was delayed by two years.
- In a major blow, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the cancellation of the northern leg to Manchester in October 2023 at the Conservative Party conference.
- The latest version will only run between Old Oak Common in London and Birmingham, with services not reaching central London's Euston until the 2040s at the earliest.
- In June 2025, the government confirmed opening would be delayed beyond the 2033 target.
In response to the criticism, an HS2 Ltd spokesperson told the Daily Mail that a "narrow focus on business travellers fails to capture the huge range of wider economic benefits." They pointed to the project unlocking at least £20 billion of investment and creating thousands of new homes and jobs around station sites, claiming it is "transforming Britain's rail network" by doubling capacity between London and Birmingham.
