Cancel the costly failure that is HS2 and spend the money on improving Yorkshire’s transport - Andrew Vine

To pretend otherwise is a fiction and the only sensible course of action is for the Prime Minister and Chancellor to admit it and make amends for the mess that has been made of HS2 by giving the north the regional transport network it deserves.

Kicking the problem down the road, as happened yet again with last week’s announcement of a two-year delay in building a line to Crewe, isn't fooling anyone that HS2 will eventually run north of Birmingham.

This is just another step in the lingering death of HS2 when it would be much better to put it out of its misery now and move on.

The benefits of doing so would be immense. A report from the Policy Exchange think-tank estimates that cancelling it once the Birmingham to London stretch is completed would save £50bn.

That money would be infinitely better spent on transforming trans-Pennine rail links, which could be achieved within a few years and give a huge boost to Yorkshire’s economy.

And further improvements to the prospects of businesses and the people who work for them could be secured if a slice of the HS2 savings was spent on delivering West Yorkshire’s planned mass transport system.

Yes, there has been a betrayal of Yorkshire over high-speed rail and the lingering anger over that is likely to be a factor in how many people in our county decide to vote at the next general election.

The axing of the eastern leg of HS2 to Sheffield and Leeds in November 2021 was unforgivable, but nothing that has happened since then holds out any prospect of the line ever being reinstated or the country being able to afford it.

The spiralling cost of HS2 makes it unachievable. The fact is that the project has been a story of incompetence and mismanagement from the word go, and the cost overruns are now so gross that it has priced itself out of reality.

Costs have more than doubled from £33bn to £71bn and are forecast to hit £100bn. The only certainty about this misbegotten project is that it will never produce sufficient benefits to justify the cost of building it.

To press on with it amounts to throwing good money after bad. It is draining the life out of the overall transport budget, when improvements are desperately needed to trains linking the great cities of Yorkshire and the rest of the north, and to the buses people rely on to get to work within them. There is no realistic project of getting HS2 back on course in the foreseeable future.

Even if the line went ahead, it will be another 20 years before it reaches the north, and it is impossible to predict what its economic impact or benefits would be by then.

On the other hand, without substantial investment in transport around the region over the course of those two decades, it is perfectly possible to predict that the north will fall further behind other parts of the country.

We might as well bite the bullet of saying a final farewell to HS2 and lobby instead for the money that would have been spent on it to be diverted to transport improvements that would make a substantial difference now.

And the betrayal we have suffered gives us an especially powerful argument for getting the lion’s share of savings from the cancellation of HS2. It is not only the flagship infrastructure project we have been denied, but any substantial spending on levelling up.

Put bluntly, this Government owes Yorkshire and even against a difficult economic backdrop, it has the means to find a massive amount of money that would deliver substantial improvements.

Rishi Sunak and Mr Hunt could take a first step in demonstrating that they recognise how badly we have been let down by committing money to the West Yorkshire transport project.

As things stand, council tax payers will have to foot most of the bill, which is disgracefully unfair. Thirty years ago, the people of Sheffield didn’t have to pay the bulk of the costs for their tram system being built, and the people of Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield shouldn’t be treated any differently now.