(CN) — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a major scaling back of the United Kingdom's high-speed rail ambitions during his keynote speech at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester on Wednesday.
The announcement follows weeks of fervent speculation and last-minute horse-trading over the remains of the U.K.’s biggest infrastructure project in decades. In the new plans, the under-construction railway known as High Speed 2 will no longer reach northern England as originally intended; instead, it will terminate in the city of Birmingham.
In his speech, Sunak said, “For too long, people in Westminster have invested in the transport that they want, not the transport that the rest of the country wants and needs.
“They will say that halting it signals a lack of ambition,” Sunak continued, “it will be people I respect, people in our own party who will oppose it, but there is nothing ambitious about simply pouring more and more money into the wrong project.”
The line’s partial cancellation garnered a strong reaction from figures across the political spectrum. The Conservative mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, said that Sunak was “cancelling the future” and that he even briefly considered his position in the party as a result. Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham said that it showed northern voters were “second-class citizens” and accused Sunak of shrinking the northern economy. Four former prime ministers — Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Boris Johnson —have joined criticism of the decision.
Sunak’s announcement also spooked business leaders, given the project’s centrality to the U.K.’s industrial strategy. The Confederation of British Industry said that businesses in the north were trapped in “a holding pattern of poor connectivity and low productivity” that the decision would prolong.
The business community is particularly concerned that the U.K. will struggle to attract investment for infrastructure projects in the future, given the failure to deliver the high-speed project and the frequency of U-turns that have dogged the rail link since its inception.
“It’s defeatist,” said Railway Industry Association executive Darren Caplan in a statement, “and it sends a terrible signal to potential overseas investors that the U.K. simply cannot deliver large national transport infrastructure schemes.
“The chopping and changing of the scope and timing of the project — adding considerably cost and delay — was entirely of the government’s own making,” added Caplan.
High Speed 2 was first proposed in 2009, intended as a link between London and the North of England — a part of the U.K. that has become an economic laggard in large part due to poor transport connections. The project was approved in 2012 by the Cameron administration, with the plan of connecting London with Manchester in the northwest and Leeds in the northeast.
However, since the project's approval, the costs involved have ballooned from an initial bill of 32 billion pounds ($39 billion) to an estimated price tag potentially exceeding 100 billion pounds ($122 billion). Lukewarm backing from successive administrations, combined with fierce local opposition along the route, led to a series of pauses and reviews which slowed down construction.
In 2021, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson scrapped the route to Leeds in an attempt to slash costs, while committing the government to completing the now-abandoned Manchester leg.
Sunak — a fiscal conservative — is known to be skeptical of major public spending commitments. But dropping the project is particularly contentious given the ruling party’s manifesto pledges towards "levelling up" the country. In the 2019 general election, the Conservative promise to reduce regional inequality and invest in northern England was integral to the party’s victory, with around 50 traditionally Labour Party-voting constituencies swinging to back the governing Conservatives in a historic rout of the opposition.
HS2 was viewed as the cornerstone of this agenda, along with another high-speed rail project known as Northern Powerhouse Rail, which also appears to have been abandoned. Sunak has pledged to invest the unspent money into hundreds of smaller-scale transport projects, though voters in the North — long promised transport upgrades that have not been delivered — are likely to be skeptical.
It was also rumored that Sunak planned to scrap the final stages of the railway in London, terminating the line in an outer suburb rather than the city center. However, lobbying from Jeremy Hunt, the finance minister, appears to have saved this part of the route.
Sunak instead announced that the current management of HS2 will be removed from the rest of the London scheme, holding them responsible for the runaway costs.
The major U-turn over high-speed rail follows a similarly contentious policy reversal made by Sunak two weeks ago over the country’s net-zero carbon emission plans. Sunak’s decision to delay the ban on new gasoline and diesel cars faced a strong backlash from carmakers, who said the turnaround undermined Britain’s competitiveness and increased industry uncertainty.
Other changes, such as a delay to the phase-out of gas boilers, approval of new oil fields and scrapping of household insulation requirements, caused consternation within the environmental sector and internally among much of the governing party.
Sunak’s announcements come in the context of his party continuing to trail the opposition Labour Party by double-digits in polls, with a general election expected at some point in 2024. The prime minister’s first year in office has largely been perceived as technocratic and risk-averse, focused primarily on stabilizing the economy amid high inflation, and following the financial crisis triggered by the ill-fated Liz Truss premiership.
However, Conservative Party strategists are attempting to reframe Sunak as a "change candidate," with his speech contrasting his new slate of big decisions against the cautious continuity approach crafted by Labour leader Keir Starmer.
The party is also concerned that voters have stopped listening to the government following the popularity nosedive associated with Truss — who held the premiership for just 49 days. The hope is that major policy announcements will help reengage the public so poll numbers, which have remained stubborn over the last year, will begin to shift.
Sunak claims that he is killing sacred cows of the British political establishment, which other politicians are too afraid to stand up to. But in doing so, he has also drawn the battle lines for the next general election. The question is not just whether a party that has been in government for 13 years can reinvent itself once again —but also whether the British public is still listening.
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