Simon Jenkins’ argument is shortsighted and ignores the fundamental reason that HS2 was designed in the first place – the west coast mainline is full and the UK is rattling towards its worst transport bottleneck (HS2 is the wildest white elephant in British history. Please put it out of its misery, 21 May). Cost and schedule overruns invite legitimate scrutiny and reflect failures that must be addressed. But they do not invalidate the need for additional rail capacity that will deliver transformational benefits to the north, including vital freight capacity and improved regional connectivity.

With unemployment on the rise, major infrastructure programmes aren’t just about capacity and connectivity. They are critical to creating high-quality careers and supporting the UK supply chain. HS2 is already doing both. From tunnel facilities in Hartlepool to working with local West Midlands firms, HS2 is supporting more than 30,000 jobs, sustaining highly skilled workers and apprenticeships, and strengthening small and medium-sized enterprises across every region. The bridges, viaducts and tunnels delivered so far are a testament to this country’s continued engineering excellence.

These benefits are rarely discussed, yet cannot be ignored. HS2 is already starting to generate £20bn in development benefits across the West Midlands and west London. Abandoning HS2 now would not save money. It would leave taxpayers with an enormous bill while delivering none of the benefits that the project will continue to provide. Cancellation costs and the inevitable need for an alternative solution to the capacity crisis would impose their own huge bills, leaving the north permanently disadvantaged and sending a damaging signal that Britain no longer has the confidence to deliver major infrastructure at all.

The question is not whether HS2 should be cancelled, it is what a congested, unreliable rail network would ultimately cost this country. The priority now is for industry, government and HS2 Ltd to work together to deliver HS2 within its revised scope.
Deb Carson
Head of operations, High Speed Rail Group

Simon Jenkins is right to call HS2 “the wildest white elephant in British history”, but the same culture of institutional denial and sunk-cost thinking is already metastasising elsewhere in Britain’s rail sector. East West Rail, particularly the controversial eastern section route option known as CS3, risks becoming HS2 in miniature: another prestige infrastructure scheme insulated from scrutiny while taxpayers are expected to foot the bill indefinitely.

The most alarming aspect is that the Department for Transport continues to resist freedom of information requests seeking disclosure of the business case underpinning CS3. If ministers and officials genuinely believed that the numbers stacked up, they would publish them. Instead, campaigners and affected communities are left piecing together fragments of evidence while decisions of enormous consequence are made behind closed doors.

What has emerged already should concern anyone serious about public value. The scheme’s own figures reportedly point towards a benefit-cost ratio as low as 0.3 – an extraordinary admission for a project supposedly justified on economic grounds. A railway that returns barely 30p of value for every pound spent would never survive scrutiny in the private sector, yet in Whitehall such projects acquire a momentum of their own, propelled by consultants, lobbying networks and a revolving-door culture of rail industry cheerleaders recycling between public agencies and infrastructure bodies.

Meanwhile, billions are frittered away on speculative masterplans, consultations and promotional exercises while local transport priorities struggle for funding. Like HS2, East West Rail has become insulated from the basic question that should govern all public expenditure: is this genuinely the best use of scarce national resources?

Britain urgently needs ministers prepared to think the unthinkable. Cancelling failing projects is not weakness, it is responsible government. East West Rail deserves the same ruthless reassessment now being demanded of HS2 before even more public money disappears into another avoidable infrastructure fiasco.
Stephen Mallinson
Little Eversden, Cambridgeshire

I completely disagree with Simon Jenkins on HS2. While it is disgraceful that the project has cost so much and been poorly managed, he does not offer an alternative to the problems facing existing railways. The west coast mainline is full to capacity. There is no easy way of increasing the number of seats available without building a new line. If HS2 is not built, it will simply mean even worse overcrowding on all services between London, Birmingham and Manchester. Fares will have to be set higher to limit demand, as has been the system since the second world war, regardless of whether the railway is nationalised or not. If we are to follow Jenkins’ advice on cancelling the project, we are dooming future generations to higher rail fares, worse road congestion and even more crowded trains.
Alex Stewart
London

More than 20 years ago, I had a conversation with a colleague at the Northwest Regional Development Agency. We were pretty junior in that organisation, so our opinions counted for nothing. We agreed that while there was an argument for increasing rail capacity, there was no argument that we could see for a high-cost option to shave a few minutes off the journey time from Manchester to London. My colleague expressed his reservations in a pithy manner inappropriate for a family newspaper.

A London meeting realistically meant a day away from our Warrington office, and a half-hour saving would not change that. So the high-speed train went ahead as a costly vanity project for engineers and politicians. It remains so today, and Simon Jenkins is quite right to call for it to be cancelled.
Julian Roberts
Great Bookham, Surrey

Simon Jenkins is correct to call for the grossly expensive HS2 vanity project to be scrapped. HS2 was first mooted in 2009 and, we are informed, will possibly be operational between 2036 and 2039. In 2009, work started on a 34-mile bridge and tunnel linking Hong Kong and Macau. That is was open to the public in 2018. The incompetent management and oversight of major infrastructure projects in the UK is pathetic and highly embarrassing.
David Campbell
Portishead, Somerset