HS2: An Opportunity Creator Or Further Subjugation?

The High Speed rail line set to run between the North and the South-East is estimated to cost £2 billion per year to build, similar to the estimated cost of the Crossrail, another transport system to be found linking the biggest UK city to its surroundings. But is it right that these grand projects take place, ready to suck the best minds in the country towards our biggest vacuum, rather than trying to create a more balanced economy, with a series of cities able to compete with each other, and drive up competitiveness and ambition over a more spread out area.

Today, Evan Davis' programme 'Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest' aired its second part, focussing on the issue of a counterweight to the dominance that London enjoys in the UK, one interviewee almost jokingly commenting that Hebden Bridge was the UK's second city, boasting suburbs such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Preston. But there is to be some case for a Northern city that can combat the quasi-monopoly of London in the UK white-collar jobs; without immobility of labour amongst the Northern cities - Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool and even Birmingham - one Northern hub could rival London, and would possibly rebalance the economy of the UK.

The next innovation that could promise this removal of immobility of labour is of course, high speed rail; with times from Manchester to Birmingham being suggested to be halved (from 1 and a half hours to 41 minutes) and Manchester to Leeds even more so (2 hours to 51 minutes), we can see that transport between the Northern cities becoming less of an issue than travelling from some suburbs to the cities themselves. Obviously, a possible solution to creating a pseudo-super city in the North, an area of labour that can commute from Liverpool to Leeds, would be to lay the tracks of high speed rail across the East-West belt of cities in the North, and allow the working populations of those cities to move freely, in turn creating an area of prosperity and competitiveness, similar to that we have seen in London and the South-East.


However, with the plans that we have seen, the aim of the line seems to be to create a greater pull from the cities which I envisioned to be linked together and rather take the entrepreneurs in the regions and relocate them to London. With the Crossrail system doing much the same across regions East and West of London, one must start to wonder if the North is being viewed by those in the South-East as a suburb, workers only living there to commute to London to work. It has been suggested that HS2 will create opportunities in  the cities outside of London, with some estimates of 22,000 jobs and £1.5 billion per year in Birmingham due to the rail line. And with this incentive, it is easy to see why places like Crewe and Stoke are both trying to outbid each other for the rail way to pass through their ranks. However, is the real answer to the wealth inequality in the country creating spillovers from the capital, or do we in the North require something more substantial?



Watch the second part of 'Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest' on the BBC iPlayer here:
Mind the Gap