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Last week Northern metro-mayors Andy Burnham (Manchester) and Steve Rotheram (Liverpool) criticised Nigel Farage’s Reform party after its deputy leader Richard Tice warned off businesses bidding for potential high speed railway projects in the north of En…

Last week, civic leaders in the north of England launched two reports promoting their visions for railway investment, and aimed at influencing the Labour government’s ten-year infrastructure strategy.

It is “time to deal” with High Speed 2 as “what it is – a cautionary tale that should be studied by future governments in how not to run a major project”.

On 2 December, former Crossrail wrangler Mark Wild became the new chief executive of HS2 Ltd.

The election of a Labour government in July raised hopes among High Speed Two revanchists that cuts to the project, made by previous Conservative governments, would be reversed.

Changing HS2 costs over time are estimated using bespoke indices (and therefore not comparable to publicly available indices of construction costs), the Department for Transport stated in a February 2024 e-mail response (see Q5a below).

The case for the HS2 railway has always depended on wishful thinking, misrepresentation, and garbage assumptions.

The downsizing of HS2 in October 2023 did not include any changes to the plans for the Birmingham terminus at Curzon Street.

Transport secretary Mark Harper MP joined West Midlands metro-mayor Andy Street at Birmingham’s Moor Street station on 29 February, as part of a photo-opportunity announcing £123 million to ‘kick-start funding of the Midlands Rail Hub [MRH]’.

The High Speed Two programme, “after the cancellation of its latter stages to run only from London to the West Midlands (Phase 1), will offer very poor value for money for the taxpayer”, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) stated in a rep…