Rishi Sunak is being advised on HS2 by a long-standing critic of the project who has described the railway as the “greatest infrastructure mistake in half a century”.
The prime minister is understood to have hired Andrew Gilligan this year. The former journalist is thought to have been an important figure behind the attempt to curtail the project.
Gilligan wrote a highly critical report on HS2 for the Policy Exchange think tank, which called for the cancellation of all sections of the railway on which construction had not yet started.
It warned that if HS2 were allowed to continue, it would eat up much of the government’s transport budget, “sucking billions of pounds out of the services which most people use, need and want”.
Amid the growing backlash against Sunak’s plans to scrap the northern leg of the railway, the prime minister is understood to have reassured critics that he has yet to take a final decision. He has also said he is open to looking at alternatives, including delaying parts of the railway by seven years to reduce short-term costs.
• How HS2’s fate will be decided in 2025
A senior Whitehall source said that if the northern leg of HS2 were scrapped, the value-for-money case for the project would fall away, leaving senior officials no choice but to register a formal objection.
“There is a lot of concern over this, not just in the Department for Transport but in the Treasury and the Cabinet Office as well,” the source said. “Sunak is being warned that this is a short-term decision that would not provide long-term value to the taxpayer.”
Five Labour mayors will meet in Leeds today to urge Sunak not to cut HS2. Sadiq Khan, Andy Burnham, Tracy Brabin, Oliver Coppard and Steve Rotherham said in a statement that failing to deliver HS2 would “leave swathes of the north with Victorian transport infrastructure that is unfit for purpose”.
They said: “The full Y-shaped HS2 plan was designed to deliver economic benefit right across the country not only between the north and London but between Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham. All of these gains look set to be lost if media reports this week are to be believed.”
They continued: “We agree on the importance of ensuring public money is well spent but it will be an international embarrassment and a national outrage if all this gets us is a line that leads to journeys slower than the current one between Birmingham and London and nothing more.”
Asked whether Sunak would listen to the mayors, Lucy Frazer, the culture secretary, said he listens to “a wide variety of voices”. She told Sky News: “It’s the responsibility of the government to keep all projects under consideration. And that’s what the chancellor [Jeremy Hunt] is doing. He is, as he does on all matters which are spending billions of pounds of taxpayers’ funding, looking at a whole range of projects to make sure that they are value for money.”
She told Times Radio that Hunt was “considering” the future of HS2.
Another source said that Sunak had been wrong-footed by the scale of the opposition to his proposal, particularly among senior Conservatives such as David Cameron and George Osborne, who have previously been supporters of the prime minister. No 10 has also been contacted by large private-sector investors who have expressed their concerns.
A final decision is now not expected until the autumn statement, with more work expected on the proposal. However, Sunak may address the wider issue of the problems with HS2 at the Tory party conference in Manchester.
Gilligan’s opposition to HS2 goes back to 2019, when he unsuccessfully tried to persuade Boris Johnson to scrap the project while working as a special adviser in No 10. In his paper for Policy Exchange, written in November last year, he called for large parts of HS2 to be cancelled, leaving only a line between Old Oak Common in west London and the West Midlands.
“Even at the official price, even before the spending crisis, and even before Covid, it was and is a misdirection of resources of unprecedented size,” he wrote. “Cancellation is not merely expedient. It is right. HS2 is Britain’s greatest infrastructure mistake in half a century.”
One source said that Sunak was still privately “gung-ho” for scrapping the scheme, arguing it would free up money to spend on less expensive proposals such as road improvement schemes. “His mind is made up,” the source said. “But he knows the scale of opposition that he’s facing so has bought himself more time.”
Lord Hague of Richmond, a former Conservative leader, defended Sunak on Times Radio on Tuesday and said that HS2 was a “national disgrace”. Hague, who is a close ally of Sunak, said: “It should have been cancelled a few years ago when it was clear that the whole thing was out of control, that the costs are out of control, [that] they wouldn’t be able to ever go to Leeds. I would have cancelled it then.
“Now you’ve got this classic problem. If you’re halfway through something and it’s been terribly badly managed — really a national disgrace as a project — do you say, ‘OK, I’m stopping this’, or do you say, ‘Actually, now we’re halfway through, we have to at least complete and make sense of the parts that we can still do’?”
Hague declined to say whether Sunak should scale back the line. “That’s just a genuine dilemma,” he said. “I hope that, whatever is decided, Rishi Sunak will say we’re managing things totally differently in the future in this country, because we’re not good at managing infrastructure.
“[HS2 should have] one person in charge and a powerful board of experts overseeing it and all the problems surfaced as soon as they come up, which is what you would do in most private companies if you were running a big project.”
