Though Cowards Flinch

In his recent broad statement of economic intent for a putative Conservative government, George Osborne included a commitment to the development of high speed rail between London and the Midlands, and then on to Scotland.

Both main parties now have powerful, committed advocates for the early stages of the multi-billion pound scheme. 

Osborne’s father-in-law, according to the Telegraph, is “Lord Howell of Guildford, the former transport secretary, who acts as an adviser for Japan Central Railways and impressed Mr Osborne by showing him the new Tokyo to Osaka 350mph maglev train”.  Another Lord, Lord Adonis, has been publicly enthusiastic about high speed rail and has been busy building his reputation as a forward-thinking minister on it, happy to announce that:

High-speed has well and truly arrived in Britain.

And for most people, high speed rail sounds like a really, really good thing. Quicker journeys, tick.  Better for the health of the traveler AND for the environment than flying, two ticks.  A reason not to build extra airports on top of houses, tick.  Less land taken up than might be used for motorways, tick.  Improved business links, tickety tick.  National prestige, yup, a tick there too.

And all these handy ticks are precisely why I have real concerns, and why I think the left should be looking hard at what’s proposed, looking behind the environmental promises, behind the ads for happy smiling business people whisking through a pristine countryside, at what it might mean for the rest of us.

First off, the process concerns me. 

The government has set up a special company, High Speed 2 (HS2), to report on specific proposals for the London to Birmingham stretch and to make recommendations on ‘broad corridors’ through to Scotland.  The company delivered its report right at the end of 2009, but it is confidential until the government has had time to review it and make its comments.  Only after March will it go out for any kind of wider consultation.

Why exactly is it confidential? That’s not been made clear.   I can’t help feeling that it may be because the government is keen that the whole thing goes ahead, and that it needs time to come up with ready answers to the possible negatives in the report.  Sexed-up dossier, anyone?

And there is some evidence to back my concerns in the form of Network Rail’s business case for high speed rail, published in August 2009 independently of HS2’s work.

In particular, my concerns are raised by this literature review for the study, written by Chris Nash from Leeds University and covering the motivations for and the impacts of, high speed rail in other countries. 

The study is quite heavy on the motivations of the different countries who have brought in high-speed rail.  These motivations differ, but are often around the fact that the existing line capacity is getting used up, and there being an opportunity to develop high speed lines in replacement/additions.

That fine as a reason why they’re built, and Network Rail’s main business plan reflects the same reasoning, but it doesn’t cover what happens after they’ve been built – what the impacts of building them actually are.   Here Chris Nash’s report is a great deal more tentative:

[T]he issue of wider economic benefits remains one of the hardest to tackle; such benefits could be significant, but vary significantly from case to case, so an in depth study of each case by experts is required.

So we know why a high speed line might be wanted, but we don’t know if it’ll do any good or – perhaps more significantly – whether it will do any harm.  

That’s important, because it’s perfectly possible to envisage a scenario where high speed rail in the UK will end up doing significant harm to the economy as a whole, and in particular will end up driving UP levels of inequality rather than reducing them.

Let me explain.

On his report Chris Nash says:

The geography in Spain is more like that of France, with long distances between the major cities and even less intermediate population.

What this suggests is that the reason the French and Spanish high-speed lines have been seen as a success is that they don’t really have to worry about what’s in between Paris and Lyon, or Seville and Madrid, because there’s not really very much. 

That is, it’s reasonable, economically speaking, for the relatively small number of passengers using the service (as a percentage of the whole population) to go straight through from Paris to Lyon, because there’s no huge connection between these two regional economies.  The relatively small number of people traveling between the two does so without much effect either way on these regional economies.

But the UK (or at least England, where most of the UK population lives) is totally different.  You only have to look at these population density maps for France and for the UK to recognise that a line between London and Manchester is a whole different proposition from a line between Paris and Lyon. 

But it’s not just a question of population.  The relatively small size of England (and Wales) compared with France, combined with the legacy of the industrial revolution (and all its railway lines!) means that the national economy is much more integrated than the several regional economies in France. 

Ever wondered why the motorways are always so clear in France compared to the UK?  It’s the shorter, much more localized supply chains.  I don’t know for certain but I can be pretty confident the French healthcare system wouldn’t have a parallel to the massive bulk-buying, nationwide-reach of the Supply Chain NHS, for example.

A closely integrated, nationwide supply chain in the UK may sound all hunky dory, and the immediate view may be that a high speed rail network might simply enhance that, and make the UK more productive, more competitive, a generally a shinier, happier place.

The reality is more difficult.  It’s already fairly well-established that there’s a pretty big economic ‘divide’ between North and South (and some would argue between East and West).  The danger, surely, is that a high speed line will simply make the South East more able to ‘suck in ‘ economic growth towards it, with towns and cities along the line becoming little more than a strangely located suburb of South London. 

If Preston is 1hr 13 minutes to St Pancras/Euston, and a house is so much more affordable there, why not move there instead of, lets say, Wandsworth, from which it takes about the same time to get into the City of London? Even at the differential pricing between a slow train going not far and a speedy train going a very long way, it might make sense.  There are already plenty of people who choose the daily Bristol-London option as the best way forward for themselves and their family.

That, of course, might be fine for Preston and its surrounding (surprisingly) leafy suburbs, but what about, ooh, let’s say Skelmersdale, 25 miles closer to London, but which isn’t going to get a station on the main line? What about Skelmersdale, indeed, a town of 44,000 people with no railway station at all?

There is a real risk, I contend, that the building of a high speed rail link through a country which is already both quite densely populated along the length of the line, and heavily integrated, will actually have major negative unintended consequences; intra-regional inequalities will grow as those towns on the line ‘suck in’ prosperity, and the majority of the people living more than a few minutes travel from the few stations will end up not just worse off in relative terms, but perhaps also in absolute. 

The evidence is there that this can happen and has happened.  Look at Hastings in the South East - much the same distance from London as Milton Keynes as Milton Keynes or Oxford, an attractive seaside town that could be on a par with Brighton, but until fairly recently two and a half hours by chugger train from the capital (now around one and a half courtesy of the speedy train as far as Ashford International). 

Hastings has unemployment one and a half times the South East average for unemployment, and twice as many people on benefits, and is higher than the England average for both.

In France, high speed rail may have made sense.  Lower population density between major centres and a regionalized economy – a legacy of a late industrial revolution and lack of railway investment in the first place - may have benefited from the additional speed of network.  In the UK, the opposite may be true.   Original investment in a rail network with twice the length of track that there is now, combined with a smaller physical area, has created an economic legacy where a single line may create more problems than opportunities. 

A better massive public transport initiative might well be to get on with putting back in place some of the rail infrastructure lost to the Beeching Axe (and the decline before the report).  It might connect places like Skelmersdale, as is now starting to be envisaged by Network Rail, but still ‘aspirationally’ in a way which cannot be said of High Speed Rail given both main parties’ clear support.. 

While high profile works on high speed rail might be attractive to central government because its easy to sell on the basis of environmental benefits and an element of national pride, maybe whatever money is available might be spent on dozens of 5-10 mile rail links connecting towns – especially those disconnected from the ‘proper’ economy by Thatcher’s de-industrialisation – to sources of work and leisure. 

Certainly that’s the success story of the recently opened link between Newport/Cardiff and the valley to Ebbw Vale  left bereft by the end of the coal industry (I worked on the socio-economic impact study for this line a few years ago).  Phase 1 of the line carried twice as many passenger journeys in its first year as initial (my?) initial conservative projections.

Getting people who’ve never worked because there was no work within their ‘travel horizons’, 10 miles down the road to a new job might not be as sexy as a 300mph line from Edinburgh to London for people in suits who might otherwise have had two hours longer on their laptop.  It might be much more of what is needed.

This is not to say that high speed rail should be written off.  I’m no Luddite, and nor am I pretending to be a transport expert.  There may be real benefits to high speed rail, but my concern is that, because it’s high-tech, and because it smacks of greenery, it may be a handy political device for politician popularity at the expense of the real (left) politics of using the technology of transport for redistributive ends.  In April, I’ll be studying the HS2 report closely.