{"id":81838,"date":"2026-07-13T05:52:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T05:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/81838\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T05:52:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T05:52:10","slug":"burnhams-hs2-promise-is-dead-on-arrival-heres-how-to-really-fix-britains-railways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/81838\/","title":{"rendered":"Burnham\u2019s HS2 promise is dead on arrival \u2013 here\u2019s how to really fix Britain\u2019s railways"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just south of Wigan, you find the \u201cflashes\u201d, 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\u2019s most threatened bird. A tenth of this species\u2019 entire UK population lives around the flashes, but perhaps not for much longer.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Burnham pledged to reinstate HS2\u2019s <\/a>second phase, between the West Midlands and the North West, in an interview with The i Paper last month<\/a>. As well as the route to Manchester, Phase 2 also includes the \u201cGolborne link\u201d, a branch for trains to Preston and Scotland, joining the West Coast Main Line at Bamfurlong, in Burnham\u2019s seat. There was, he said, \u201ca cleverer way of funding\u201d Phase 2 through \u201ccontributions from business and residents\u201d or \u201cthe increase in land values created by the [new] infrastructure\u2026 captured to pay back the cost\u201d.<\/p>\n

Henri Murison, of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a lobby group for high-speed rail, says a \u201cmake-do and mend approach doesn\u2019t work \u2013 you end up having to build new lines anyway\u201d. A \u201csignificant proportion\u201d of costs could be raised privately, Murison adds, or through measures such as devolved income tax, though he won\u2019t say how much.<\/p>\n

But the sums required are genuinely massive. At the official price, HS2\u2019s first phase, from London to the Midlands, is now costing between \u00a3626m and \u00a3734m a mile. On this basis, Phase 2, 89 miles with the Golborne link, would cost up to \u00a365bn. In practice, it should be slightly cheaper, since there is less tunnelling \u2013 around 17 per cent of the route, versus 23 per cent in Phase 1 \u2013 and fewer cuttings. But that assumes that HS2\u2019s costs rise no further: bold, given its record.<\/p>\n

\"AnAn aerial view of an embankment in a Staffordshire field where the HS2 tracks will come to a very abrupt end just before the Trent And Mersey Canal (Photo: William Lailey \/ SWNS)<\/p>\n

Burnham also wants an underground station in central Manchester, another \u00a35bn 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\u2019s track, but even with this, the price for all the schemes together will be perhaps \u00a380bn.<\/p>\n

In 2024, Burnham claimed Phase 2 could save up to 40 per cent by becoming \u201cHS2 Lite\u201d, 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\u2019t change the route, so this saving isn\u2019t available.<\/p>\n

Even HS2\u2019s most strident supporters were unconvinced by the plan: the rail commentator Gareth Dennis said it was \u201cbad,\u201d \u201ctechnically illiterate\u201d and \u201cbased 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Burnham\u2019s \u201ccleverer way of funding,\u201d it\u2019s quite true that extra taxes on London business and a \u201ccommunity infrastructure levy\u201d for increased land values did pay for about a quarter of the Elizabeth Line, \u00a34.7bn. The developers of Battersea Power Station similarly funded about a fifth of the cost of extending the Northern Line to their site, \u00a3260m (though in return they got changes which raised its price, cancelling out much of their contribution).<\/p>\n

\"BANBURY,In practice, Phase 2 should be slightly cheaper, since there is less tunnelling (Photo: Ryan Jenkinson\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

But these were far smaller, cheaper projects than HS2. And even for those sorts of schemes, the LSE\u2019s Professor Tony Travers, who chaired a commission on land value capture for infrastructure, says there is \u201cno 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\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

The final, clinching difficulty is that neither HS2 nor NPR actually fixes the North\u2019s 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 \u201cprojects looking for a plan\u201d, \u201cconceived, designed and delivered in isolation\u201d and \u201clikely to fail to achieve their objectives\u201d.<\/p>\n

Writing with David Thrower, another planner, and Jim Steer, one of the earliest high-speed lobbyists, Wray says the North\u2019s rail capacity problem is not on links \u2013 lines between places \u2013 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 \u201ctotal lacuna\u201d in current plans.<\/p>\n

NPR and HS2 will, of course, take some trains off the congested conventional lines in central Manchester \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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,\u201d Wray says.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 not just for Manchester, but for every major city \u2013 are the top suggestion of 20 \u201cbig ideas\u201d for Burnham\u2019s first hundred days, collected by the progressive website Arguably.<\/p>\n

As for the problem that HS2 is meant to fix \u2013 congestion on the West Coast Main Line \u2013 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 \u2013 and Burnham\u2019s own local station at Wigan \u2013 being damaged, sometimes devastated, as trains are switched to HS2.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery 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,\u201d says Parkin. \u201cUnless we realise this, we will spend another 10 years achieving nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just south of Wigan, you find the \u201cflashes\u201d, lakes formed by mining subsidence, once surrounded by Somme-like industrial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":81839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[7786,13,1185,6965],"class_list":["post-81838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-andy-burnham","tag-britain","tag-hs2","tag-railways"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116911115079341040","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}