Hitting the buffers

Last Wednesday, at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak confirmed the full amputation of high-speed rail link HS2 north of Birmingham. One arm, to Leeds, had already been lopped off in 2021. Now the other, to the very city in which Sunak was speaking, was to be sacrificed too. Only one section of the grand infrastructure project that was designed to cut journey times between the North and South will ultimately enter operation, with construction already underway on HS2 between London and Birmingham.

To understand why Greater Manchester’s business travel community is distraught, consider a LinkedIn post the following day by Stockport-based travel and payments professional Paul Raymond en route to the Institute of Travel Management autumn conference in London – by air.

“There was another train strike yesterday, which meant today’s early departures were likely to be delayed and so getting to London for a 10am start was a roll of the dice,” Raymond wrote. “That said, even if a train was running it was actually cheaper to fly to London. Surely the UK has to find a way of getting people from the North to the South of our small island without having to fly… It seems like if you live north of Birmingham you are expected to stay there.”

Another business traveller commented: “I have lost all trust in Avanti [the West Coast mainline operator] and stopped going to events in London unless I can travel the previous day.”

The Business Travel Association's commercial director Andrew Clarke confirms that “trips down to London are crazily expensive”. A price spot-check by the BTA found a flight from Manchester was £68 for a day return versus a cheapest rail fare of £158. Less environmentally desirable car rental and domestic air bookings are both up, he adds.

Even without the year-long industrial action by some UK rail staff, overstretched capacity on the West Coast line means cancellations and delays are routine. Service between the major cities of the North is, if anything, worse.

“The lack of resilience of the infrastructure, which is very old, is what causes the issues,” says Shaun Hinds, chief executive of Manchester Central, the event venue which hosted the Conservative Party conference. “Leeds-Manchester should be a shuttle you can jump on every 15 minutes and takes 25-30 minutes [instead it takes 72 minutes]. The line is riddled with issues. Parts of the North’s network still aren’t electrified.”

HS2 was intended to modernise rail services both between the North and South of the country and between cities within the North. Not only was Manchester-London going to take 71 minutes instead of 135 minutes today – when on time – but “HS2 was enabling us to have more capacity, freeing up the existing mainline” to serve local routes better, says Hinds.

What is more, Hinds adds, “We have been talking about a ‘Northern Powerhouse Rail’ to improve connectivity between Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. HS2 was critical to that because there were parts of its infrastructure that Northern Powerhouse Rail could have ridden on the back of and in some cases relied upon, whether it be an interchange, junction, viaduct or signalling.”

For Pat McDonagh, CEO of Manchester-based travel management company Clarity, “the big loss with the removal of the Manchester link of HS2 is the connectivity to Manchester Airport. It was going to have a station on HS2 prior to Manchester and would have extended the catchment area for the airport by 20 million passengers,” he says.

“You would have been able to attract airlines which maybe wouldn’t have considered Manchester before as an option, and routes that weren’t believed to be viable. We didn’t necessarily need to make it easier to travel from Manchester to London. It’s that missed opportunity for Manchester as a global hub that I think is lost.”

Sunak cited massive cost and time overruns as the primary reasons for cancelling the northern arm of HS2, while also claiming business rail travel has halved since the pandemic. The Railway Industry Association disputes this assertion, saying that passenger numbers exceeded pre-Covid levels on 14 days out of 30 in April 2023.

McDonagh and Hinds accept snowballing costs gave Sunak a strong case to scrap HS2 to Manchester. “But at the same time we can be disappointed we are not going to have this,” says McDonagh. “It is lamentable that we can’t build modern high-speed rail infrastructure where others in Europe have done it so successfully. It suggests a lack of vision, capability and commitment from us as the nation that was the birthplace of the railways.”

Mark Harris, director of business travel consultancy Travel Intelligence Network, is a regular commuter to London wearing his other occupational hat as chair of the Football Association Alliance Committee.

Harris feels the message from London is clear. “The decision is symbolic of a consistent contempt for the North of England,” he says. “There are bound to be cost overruns. I can’t remember an infrastructure project in this country that hasn’t run hugely over budget.”

Harris detects the same contempt in the alternative Network North strategy that Sunak revealed last week in Manchester, when the Prime Minister pledged to spend all the money earmarked for the HS2 extension on a series of smaller transport infrastructure investments. Examples include electrification of lines from Sheffield to Manchester, Leeds and Hull, and a new Bradford-Manchester line, but also projects much farther afield – even in Devon and Somerset in the South West of the country.

“It’s hard to avoid being cynical about the so-called Network North project. It looks like the government has dug a pile of rejected old projects out of a cupboard and dusted them down,” Harris says. “Bizarrely, the Network North plan includes the upgrading of a road near Bognor.”

Harris also pour scorn on the Network North plan including projects already completed, including the Metrolink extension from Manchester city centre to the airport which opened nine years ago. “Although on the one hand the argument for ditching HS2 to Manchester is probably incontrovertible, it is the way the government has gone about trying to buy off the natives with a few glass baubles that rankles,” he says.

Speaking to BTN Europe, Raymond is also sceptical about Network North. “If they feel the new projects are a priority, why have they not consulted with the local governments that will be benefiting?” he asks. “How can anyone in Manchester trust the rail service to a government that has just extended the West Coast contract with Avanti, a rail operator that has failed the North consistently since it took over the franchise? I despair about the trick of ‘levelling up’ that has been played on us up here.”

The BTA's Clarke is not a fan of Network North either. While he can see benefits for commuters and leisure travellers, he believes the absence of a coherent new inter-city service, either north-south or trans-Pennine, means “business travellers have been sacrificed. They’re not connecting up and giving the structural change that HS2 would have brought. It’s great individual cities are getting money but the chances of them being unified in how they spend it is pretty remote.”

Clarity’s McDonagh can’t help but compare the current predicament with the achievements of the 19^th-century rail pioneers who brought so much prosperity to the North. “Isambard Kingdom Brunel and George Stephenson would be spinning in their graves,” he says.