Faisal Islam: Why a full HS2 line could still be built despite the latest fiasco

Faisal Islam: Why a full HS2 line could still be built despite the latest fiascoJust nowShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleFaisal IslamEconomics editorGetty ImagesHS2 was, appropriately enough, at the ultimate Y-junction.In one direction lay the entire cancellation of HS2, despite the viaducts, tunnels, verges, bat protection facilities, and floating platforms that have already been built.In the other direction lay spending the money on completing a slowed down, stump of a line, that would only connect west London with Birmingham by the late 2030s.The HS2 boss Mark Wild has calculated that the costs of cancellation and realistic remediation would be in the same range as completion from this point — about £60bn. So that's £100bn all in on the world's most expensive railroad.A Y junction was the original shape of the line as envisaged in the first plans for a line from London to Birmingham that branched to Manchester and Leeds. The purpose of the original plan was practical — capacity and speed, but also strategic. The UK is a long, thin country that excels in the service sector, and connecting these sources of growth would lever in investment and create agglomeration effects that would help rebalance Britain's lopsided economy,The whole point of the project was the benefits to the rest of the country. After the scrapping of the Leeds leg, and then the Manchester leg, the top DfT civil servant wrote: "The previously stated strategic case for HS2 — to generate transformational benefits and rebalance the economy by joining [northern England] and Midlands with London — no longer applies".What are we left with? A line strategically justified as helping northern England, which now stops at Birmingham, its budget blown south of Birmingham partly to hide it from shire eyes, with a a connection to the West Coast Main Line (WCML) which is not expected to run until between 2040 and 2043.And in order to keep the project going, it will be slower, later, a...