HS2 primed to play a critical role in our future

Let me start with a confession. With one exception, I have always viewed the railway as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

The exception was when I was five years old, and lived in Omagh in Northern Ireland. Pulling myself up on a kitchen stool, I could just about see the old Portadown to Derry service puff its way along the banks of the Drumragh river on a summer’s evening, at the bottom of my garden. That golden memory is still vivid in my mind today.

After more than a century of service the line closed in 1965, and gradually my attitude to the railway became much more functional. 

As a student in the 1970s, the Stranraer boat train was a means to get backwards and forwards from Belfast to Birmingham. These days the Stansted Express does the same job as I commute to London each week, albeit in much more comfort and with much greater reliability.

But while my view of the railway may have become more functional, my appreciation of the role it plays in our country and our daily lives has grown year on year. And it is that understanding that has informed both my approach to HS2 and my reaction to what was genuinely an historic moment on February 23 - Royal Assent for Phase 1 of the first railway to be built north of London for a century and a half (or thereabouts).

That achievement, and the huge amount of skill, effort and persistence necessary to achieve it, was rightly celebrated. But my focus was on the difference it is already making in Birmingham - now almost unrecognisable from my Stranraer travelling days - and the potential it has to do the same along both the Western and Eastern legs.

Because what I have seen during the past few years is not just a welcome and consistent approach from central government, but also a growing determination at a local level to take advantage of the one-off opportunity that HS2 offers. I see a realisation not just of the critical role the railway has played in our national life, but the even more important role it can play in the future.

Sadly, as we know, it took a series of tragedies to first shape that understanding.

I was the official spokesman in 10 Downing Street during the final days of Railtrack, as the horrific litany of accidents in the late 1990s and the early years of the following decade drove home not just the importance of the railway to the nation, but also the need to invest in it.

Successive governments have now done so, with the result that by the time I arrived at Network Rail in late 2011 the most pressing problem facing the industry was a doubling of passenger demand in the previous decade, and the pressure that was putting on the network. 

If ever an industry was the victim of its own success, this was it. And that success was due not only to the skill, commitment and hard work of our predecessors at Network Rail, but also to the ingenuity and professionalism of the train operating companies who had turned what had seemed a ‘has been’ into a service offering that the public couldn’t get enough of.

The railway still mattered - and the country knew it mattered. Millions of people relied on it, as did the businesses they worked for. It was, as it had been since Victorian times, part of the lifeblood of the nation.

But enormous as the gains had been, a law of diminishing returns was at work. We had reached the point where supply could no longer keep up with demand - the point where, in too many places, there just wasn’t enough room on the tracks for the services that were needed.

There was also the beginning of a wider realisation: that the British economy was grossly unbalanced, both in terms of activity and public investment in infrastructure. The North/South divide had been on the agenda for decades, but it gained new sharpness as an issue in the wake of the financial crash, as the country reassessed the national economy and the differentials in wealth and opportunity it contained.

At first, HS2 seemed likely to be a victim of that reassessment. People questioned why, at a time of austerity, the country needed to spend £50 billion on shaving a few minutes off the journey time to Birmingham. 

Gradually, however, the perception has changed. Recent surveys have shown that most people do recognise that by eventually providing the capacity to carry up to an additional 600,000 people per day, HS2 will address the overcrowding issue they confront every day, as well as freeing up space for freight.

But the same surveys also show that people now recognise HS2’s wider potential to help get the best out of Britain through improving connectivity between our major cities, so creating new jobs at a local level in the process. And for most people that is now the legacy they want most from HS2.

And it is that realisation of the wider role of HS2 - the end it can be the means to help achieve - that has been key to taking the project from the ‘discretionary spend’ some viewed it as to being a core part of the nation’s efforts to equip itself for a post-Brexit world.

Just as the original Victorian railway formed a spine that allowed the country to make a quantum leap in the way it travelled and traded with itself, so HS2 - building on the revitalisation of the railway in the last two decades - can help Britain reconnect itself at the increased pace demanded by the needs of today.

But understanding how that can happen will continue to take time and focus from all involved - Government, local authorities, Local Enterprise Partnerships and individual companies and communities, as well as the industry itself.

When the Victorians first started building the railways, no one realised that not only were they building a network, but that it would transform not just individual journeys but the whole concept of what it meant to be a modern country. The realisation of the difference in mindset between the world of the horse and that of the steam train took time to sink in.

Similarly, when HS2 was first announced, it is perhaps not surprising that people saw it first and foremost in terms of journey times to London. For many it seemed like an idea imposed from Whitehall.

But as time has gone on and the concept has developed, people have worked on developing its potential for themselves, their regions and their communities. In other words, they have worked out the ends which HS2, for them, can be the means to. And often, that’s as much about the reductions in journey times between regions, as it is on the services to London. 

Halving the journey time between Leeds and Birmingham is as important as the reduction to London. Halving the Manchester-London time is important, but so too is cutting the Wigan-Birmingham time to 35 minutes. 

Toton in the East Midlands will be 50 minutes from London, but less than 20 minutes to Birmingham and 30 minutes to Leeds. The investment opportunity speaks for itself.

That is why the issue of productivity is at the heart of this understanding of HS2’s potential. As the Government’s national industrial strategy underlined, Britain has a sharp divide in terms of productivity between London and the rest of the country. And part of the reason for that is connectivity.

In London, the transport system allows employers easy access to the skills, supply chain, professional services and markets they need to grow their businesses. Elsewhere, poor connectivity makes achieving that critical mass more difficult - this is one reason why in this country, while we have many excellent small and medium-sized businesses, they find it more difficult to make the leap to being global entities.

By helping the Midlands and the North achieve somewhere near the connectivity that London takes for granted, HS2 can provide the stepping stone the country needs to make that collective quantum leap in connectivity and productivity - today’s equivalent of the great surge in economic activity the railway generated in the Victoria era.

But in the end, HS2 will not make that happen alone. It will be local and central government, local and national business leaders, and the rest of the railway and broader transport network working together to realise the full potential of the transformation HS2 offers.

Because to realise its full potential for the country as a whole, HS2 has to be much more than an end in itself. It has to be fully integrated into the rest of the transport network - not just at a national level, but also regionally and sub-regionally. That means working closely now with both Transport for the North and Midlands Connect to clearly establish their priorities, and integrate those into our plans for Phase 2 as we prepare to take it into Parliament.

The surveys I referred to earlier say one other thing: people want to be proud of our infrastructure in this country. It is not a bad standard for us collectively to aim for. Can we make HS2 something that some other five-year-old will want to clamber onto a stool to watch go by?