Burnham’s Hs2 Promise Is Dead On Arrival – Here’s How To Really Fix Britain’s Railways

Just south of Wigan, you find the “flashes”, lakes formed by mining subsidence, once surrounded by Somme-like industrial wasteland, now transformed into rural nature reserves and a refuge for the willow tit, Britain’s most threatened bird. A tenth of this species’ entire UK population lives around the flashes, but perhaps not for much longer.

The area is also home to an even more rare creature than the willow tit: a Labour by-election winner, Andy Burnham, whose constituency, Makerfield, this is. And when he becomes prime minister, he wants to drive a new high-speed railway right through it.

Burnham pledged to reinstate HS2’s second phase, between the West Midlands and the North West, in an interview with The i Paper last month. As well as the route to Manchester, Phase 2 also includes the “Golborne link”, a branch for trains to Preston and Scotland, joining the West Coast Main Line at Bamfurlong, in Burnham’s seat. There was, he said, “a cleverer way of funding” Phase 2 through “contributions from business and residents” or “the increase in land values created by the [new] infrastructure… captured to pay back the cost”.

Henri Murison, of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a lobby group for high-speed rail, says a “make-do and mend approach doesn’t work – you end up having to build new lines anyway”. A “significant proportion” of costs could be raised privately, Murison adds, or through measures such as devolved income tax, though he won’t say how much.

But the sums required are genuinely massive. At the official price, HS2’s first phase, from London to the Midlands, is now costing between £626m and £734m a mile. On this basis, Phase 2, 89 miles with the Golborne link, would cost up to £65bn. In practice, it should be slightly cheaper, since there is less tunnelling – around 17 per cent of the route, versus 23 per cent in Phase 1 – and fewer cuttings. But that assumes that HS2’s costs rise no further: bold, given its record.

Burnham also wants an underground station in central Manchester, another £5bn on the bill. And he backs a second new line, Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) from Liverpool to Manchester and possibly Leeds. NPR shares some of HS2’s track, but even with this, the price for all the schemes together will be perhaps £80bn.

In 2024, Burnham claimed Phase 2 could save up to 40 per cent by becoming “HS2 Lite”, with a top speed of 185mph, not the planned 250mph. The main reason faster is more expensive is that the route must be flatter and straighter, with more earth moved. But HS2 Lite doesn’t change the route, so this saving isn’t available.

Even HS2’s most strident supporters were unconvinced by the plan: the rail commentator Gareth Dennis said it was “bad,” “technically illiterate” and “based on several severely misjudged ideas about costs. Suggesting that anything other than the full and original HS2 design will be cheaper and quicker to deliver is wrong.”

As for Burnham’s “cleverer way of funding,” it’s quite true that extra taxes on London business and a “community infrastructure levy” for increased land values did pay for about a quarter of the Elizabeth Line, £4.7bn. The developers of Battersea Power Station similarly funded about a fifth of the cost of extending the Northern Line to their site, £260m (though in return they got changes which raised its price, cancelling out much of their contribution).

But these were far smaller, cheaper projects than HS2. And even for those sorts of schemes, the LSE’s Professor Tony Travers, who chaired a commission on land value capture for infrastructure, says there is “no way any other part of the country could do anything like [London]. Their economies are just not big enough to bear it. The land values are not enough to raise more than a very modest, gestural amount”. As mayor, Burnham had power to levy a Crossrail-style supplementary business rate, but never did, presumably for that reason. In the by-election, he promised to cut business taxes.

The final, clinching difficulty is that neither HS2 nor NPR actually fixes the North’s rail problems. University of Liverpool Professor Ian Wray, former chief planner of the Northwest Development Agency, was the first person to propose what became NPR. But now, he says, HS2 and NPR are “projects looking for a plan”, “conceived, designed and delivered in isolation” and “likely to fail to achieve their objectives”.

Writing with David Thrower, another planner, and Jim Steer, one of the earliest high-speed lobbyists, Wray says the North’s rail capacity problem is not on links – lines between places – but at nodes, places where the trains converge, all above central Manchester. Delays from congestion there ripple out across the region, but fixing it is, they say, a “total lacuna” in current plans.

NPR and HS2 will, of course, take some trains off the congested conventional lines in central Manchester – but only about 25 per cent of them. Trevor Parkin, an engineer who has closely studied HS2 and NPR, says building an Elizabeth Line-style scheme under the city centre instead, a short tunnel linking all the conventional lines either side, would increase capacity by at least 100 per cent.

“It would give Burnham his underground station at Piccadilly, it would link to most of the Northern network rather than a handful of places on a high-speed line, and it would cost a fraction of the price,” Wray says.

There is cross-party momentum behind this concept, from my own think-tank Policy Exchange to the more left-wing Centre for British Progress. New Elizabeth Lines – not just for Manchester, but for every major city – are the top suggestion of 20 “big ideas” for Burnham’s first hundred days, collected by the progressive website Arguably.

As for the problem that HS2 is meant to fix – congestion on the West Coast Main Line – that too could be solved far quicker and cheaper by tackling two pinch-points, Crewe and Colwich, than by building a whole new line. This would also prevent services to other places on the existing route, such as Stoke, Stockport, Wilmslow – and Burnham’s own local station at Wigan – being damaged, sometimes devastated, as trains are switched to HS2.

“Every week and every pound we waste on unaffordable high-speed schemes that will never happen is time and money not spent on things which can actually be delivered and would actually transform rail in the North,” says Parkin. “Unless we realise this, we will spend another 10 years achieving nothing.”