The NIC have failed again
By: Gareth Dennis
Tags: Railways, High Speed Rail, Politics, Transportation, Policy

The NIC have failed again

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the clarity of their conclusions when a report’s authors have to pop up on the evening radio on the day of its release, backpedalling desperately — and, in the case of the National Infrastructure Commissions’s Rail Needs Assessment for the Midlands and the North, that’s precisely what commissioners had to do. Despite the words they’d written saying otherwise, a lot of energy had to be expended trying to convince regional politicians, business leaders and industry lobbyists that “no, our report doesn’t say to scrap the eastern leg of High Speed 2, or to scrap Northern Powerhouse Rail”.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what it does say, and deliberately so. Whilst the (entirely London-based) Commission may have their names on the inside cover, this report was written by the Treasury, and it shows. When Sir John Armitt was asked why the report had entirely rejected the high-speed link to Liverpool, the mandarins stepped in and prevented him from answering. The report is also framed entirely (and falsely) in terms of “what we can afford” rather than “what we can achieve”. This is despite the fact that there has never been a cheaper time for governments to borrow for the future — the money for capital expenditure at this point really is free cash.

A reminder: HS2’s eastern leg from Birmingham to Leeds via the East Midlands is by far its most critical and transformative section, and without it the new railway just becomes a bypass for the West Coast Mainline, providing no capacity release on the Midland and East Coast Mainlines and essentially disintegrating its primary purpose.

Similarly, making use of the existing railway network for fast links between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and beyond will unavoidably clog the existing railway that really ought to be put to better use providing frequent, high-capacity suburban services. Rail needs to double its capacity before the middle of the century in order to drive modal shift away from highly-polluting road transport, yet this report seems to be trying its hardest to stymy that ambition.

The West Coast route modernisation programme cost around £16bn in today’s money and delivered only a fraction of its originally promised scope (picture from Bechtel).

The NIC are under the same misapprehension that on-line upgrades can do the same job as high-speed segregation as has blighted this country for over half a century. Have they forgotten the chaos of the West Coast route modernisation, which delivered marginal gains for a tremendous amount of disruption? On the one hand, the report states “we must urgently end short-termist thinking” and “congestion, capacity and carbon are our priorities” whilst on the other it proposes tearing up rail plans that have been in development for over a decade without questioning road projects or funding.

The most critical flaw, though, is that in their analysis of released capacity on the line, the NIC have assumed that one high speed seat only releases space for one local/commuting seat. This hopelessly underestimates the value of the high-speed segregation that HS2 and NPR will provide. Even HS2 Ltd’s conservative estimates of capacity release put the number at around double (and in some cases triple) that figure.

This calculation error, deliberate or otherwise, breaks the whole report.

It perhaps shouldn’t be entirely thrown in the shredder — there are plenty of sensible proposals such as the need for a rolling programme of electrification and a tunnelled link underneath Manchester — but in falsely pitching local and regional upgrades against long distance ones I’m afraid this is just another misguided report without either vision or imagination, trying its hardest to tell government what they want to hear. It is a dispiritingly pitiful abandonment of the East Midlands, Merseyside, Yorkshire and the North East.