A future Labour government would not be able to easily reverse Rishi Sunak’s decision to scrap the northern leg of HS2 as he has “spitefully” authorised the sale of properties that were subject to compulsory purchase orders on part of the route.
Steve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool city region, said the move killed HS2 “stone dead” and would “tie any future government’s hands and make the delivery of HS2 for the north all but impossible”.
Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, on Thursday refused to commit to building HS2, telling ITV News Meridian: “What I can’t do is stand here now they have taken a wrecking ball to this project, and say that we will simply reverse it.
“What I will say is we will work with leaders across the country to make sure that we have the transport we need between our cities and within our cities and projects that can actually be delivered.”
The government failed to deny that HS2 would not be extended to Euston unless enough private investment was secured to pay for the new station.
“There is already support and interest from the private sector. Ministers have had discussions with key partners since the announcement,” a government spokesperson said.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, also conceded on Thursday that paying off contracts previously awarded for the cancelled HS2 sections would cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
He told BBC Breakfast that the cost of pulling out of the agreements would “broadly balance out” with money recovered from selling land and property acquired for the high-speed railway.
National Labour proponents of HS2 were blindsided on Wednesday when the prime minister not only cancelled the Manchester leg but made it extremely difficult for the project to be restarted. “We expected him to kick it into the long grass,” said one party source. “We are now trying to understand where this leaves us. Selling off the land was unexpected.”
Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer and writer, said the decision to sell off the land was motivated by “spite” and was, in effect, “salting the earth” to make it extremely difficult for Labour to restart the project.
The Department for Transport (DfT) said that within “weeks” it would lift the so-called “safeguarding” order on phase 2a of the route, which would have run from Birmingham to Crewe in Cheshire. Safeguarding is the process HS2 Ltd and the government use to buy up land needed for the railway.
As of last week, HS2 Ltd had bought up 239 properties on phase 2a at a cost of £219.3m. “Any property that is no longer required for HS2 will be sold and a programme is being developed to do this,” said the DfT in its Network North prospectus, released on Wednesday.
“Phase 2a safeguarding will be formally lifted in weeks,” said the document.
However, the DfT confirmed on Thursday that safeguarding would remain for now on the Crewe to Manchester leg (phase 2b west) as well as the Birmingham to Leeds spur (phase 2b east), which was paused by the government in November 2021. “Phase 2b safeguarding will be amended by summer next year”, said the government, to retain any land needed for Northern Powerhouse Rail, a new east-west line across the Pennines.
Dennis said: “I knew Sunak would cancel HS2 to Manchester but I didn’t expect him to be so spiteful that he would authorise the sell-off of land on the route. There are barely any votes in lifting the safeguarding. It’s pure salting the earth to make it extremely hard for Labour to build it.
“What will happen now is essentially a fire sale. The land is not going to be returned to nature. It’s going to be developed on. That will make it much more expensive and much more complex should any future government want to build it.”
Rotheram said: “After weeks of uncertainty and confusion, Rishi Sunak’s lifting of the HS2 safeguarding order means that he has not only cancelled HS2 but he’s killed it stone dead. The consequences of this decision will tie any future government’s hands and make the delivery of HS2 for the north all but impossible.
“The Liverpool city region was set to benefit from a £15bn economic boost from the delivery of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail in full. Almost overnight, the prime minister has robbed us of that chance to grow and develop our economy. He has turned the northern powerhouse into the northern powerless with this latest act of a long line of pronouncements that are holding the north down, not levelling us up.”
In his first interview since his speech to the Conservative party conference, Sunak declined to apologise for the decision to scrap the rail line, saying that he sometimes needed to take “decisions that aren’t always easy”.
Sunak said “the facts have changed” on HS2, pointing to costs doubling since the project was approved more than a decade ago and changes in passenger behaviour since Covid as evidence that the economic case for it had been “severely eroded”.
He denied that the line would be reduced to a mere “shuttle service” between London and Birmingham, insisting that many more people would be helped by paring back plans for the project and boosting other transport schemes instead.
