Mark Hansford, the New Civil Engineer’s new editor, writes on 20^th Feb that “The effect of postponing HS2 on our future prosperity would be crippling”.

HS2 is to cost £50bn including the trains but not the connecting infrastructure. The latter may inflate the cost to £80bn. The financial loss to the nation will be similar or larger if the extraordinary passenger forecasts do not arise. How crippling will that be?

HS2 is said to generates some 76,000 passengers per day, (FoI request), corresponding to roughly 22.8 million per year. It is only those which can be “transformational”, since all the rest exist already. In contrast there are currently 1.5 billion passenger journeys per year by surface rail, and 43.5bn passenger journeys by all modes. Hence, HS2’s supposed generated traffic amounts to 1.5% of all surface rail journeys and to 0.05%, or one in 2,000, of all passenger journeys. Transformational? Ha, Ha.

HS2 Ltd say the proposal will generate 100,000 jobs. Others say most of those will be relocations. Whatever the case, the £80bn and 100,000 implies each job (if it exists) will have cost £800,000. How many would that destroy in that part of the economy which actually makes a profit? Crippling again if you ask me.

Perhaps it is because of comment such as Mark Hansford’s that engineers have such low status.

Paul Withrington