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Of course wealthy people like Boris Johnson love HS2 – they're the only ones who'll be able to afford to use it

This vast project has been billed as an engine of economic growth – but it looks far more like an engine of inequality

James Moore
Tuesday 11 February 2020 14:23 GMT
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Boris tells youngster government will 'keep digging' when it comes to working out HS2 mess

I suppose you can understand why the question of HS2 fares has been almost entirely absent from the debate over the thing. It is, after all, going to be years before anyone uses their iPhone to buy a smart ticket.

Will the iPhone even still be a thing when the first London to Manchester service leaves? Given that it’s not going to happen until the middle of the next decade – assuming it arrives on schedule (you at the back, stop laughing) – and taking into account how much has changed over the last decade, it’s a fair question.

But maybe fares should have been more in focus. Ask yourself this: Who’s going to pay the £100bn price tag for this thing?

The answer to that is all of us. It’ll be there in the tax bills of CEOs and it’ll be there in the tax bills of their cleaners.

"What’s that?" I hear HS2 fans saying. "It’s borrowed money that’s paying for the project?" Yes. Who do you think it is that’s going to get landed with the bill for the interest?

One way or another, HS2 will be there in the tax bills of CEOs’ and their cleaners’ children grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, assuming the climate crisis doesn’t leave half of Britain under water by the time they become eligible for a young person’s railcard.

Trouble is, while a future CEO will eventually be able to hop between meetings in London and Manchester in comfort, their cleaner will probably end up on a National Express coach when they want to visit their relatives up north.

Consider HS1, if you will. I’m going to look at season tickets to illustrate this, because there’s a bewildering array of options for singles and returns depending on when you’re going to be travelling.

The cost of an annual pass valid for travel on high speed trains between Ashford in Kent and London is currently £6,844. That’s a premium of more than £1,000 when compared to the still eye-popping £5,744 you’ll pay to commute on regular trains.

HS2 is beloved by politicians who don’t have constituencies on the route and it has lots of advocates in the business lobby because they like the idea of zipping up and down the country in comfort and they’ll be among the strictly limited number of people with fat enough expense accounts to cover the cost.

This vast project has been billed as an engine of economic growth but it looks far more like an engine of inequality.

Boris Johnson showed he was aware of the problem by announcing plans to chuck £5bn at the buses those who’ve been priced out of using the rail network are much more likely to use. But compared to the £100bn plus cost of HS2, that’s just chump change.

I should stress, I’m not writing this as a committed opponent of HS2, just as someone who believes in fairness. And this is a project with a fairness gap.

If it looks anything like HS1, it’s going to end up being something we’ll all pay for but which only a small number of us will ever actually use.

For that to change, the project would need to be viewed through a completely different lens, one that said rail is a good thing because it gets cars off the road and planes out of the sky, but it needs subsidising to make it work for everyone. We need to can the economic analyses we’ve relied on in the past and structure the fares so it can be used by the largest possible proportion of the nation that’s paying for it.

If you move in the direction of that model you ultimately end up with the sort of cheap rail services enjoyed by the French and the Germans. But it will take Britain’s leaders going on a radical journey to get there.

They’re the people, after all, who’ve delivered the UK’s messed up transport model, which has led to commuters in those countries being subsidised by the profits their rail operators have, at various times, made from having interests in rubbishy UK rail.

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