KPMG, acting for HS2 Ltd, claim that the proposed High Speed Rail network, connecting London to Birmingham and Manchester and Birmingham to Nottingham, Sheffield and Leeds, the so called “Y” network, will generate £15bn per year in terms of Wider Economic Benefits, the so called WEBs.

However, all the WEBs, or nearly all, should be assigned to the generated or new trips since the other trips, and most of their associated WEBs, would arise in the absence of the scheme.

Dividing the £15bn by the 91,000 trips per day, supposedly generated by the proposal, and by the 300 effective days in the year provides £550 per trip, or £1,100 for a round trip.  Multiplying the £550 by the 1,460 million trips carried by Network Rail in 2011/12 generates circa £800bn, a sum equal to half the nation’s GDP; clearly an impossibility, implying that the £15bn is wildly optimistic.

Alternatively the WEBs could be assigned to the generated business and commuter trips alone. Those number circa 34,000 per day. Dividing the £15bn by 34,000 and the 300 days in the year yields £1,470, or £2,940 for a round trip. Multiplying the £1,470 by the nation’s business plus commuting trips provides an absurd £15,600 billion, some ten times the nation’s actual GDP, illustrating again how ludicrous it is that anyone should ever believe that the proposal could generate WEBs worth £15bn per year.

That leaves HS2 Ltd to either (a) explain why a High Speed Rail trip, generated merely because a journey has been shortened somewhat, should provide vastly more benefits than any other journey on the rail network ever could – a task made doubly difficult because the benefits from a generated, or marginal, trip should be lower than those associated with a pre-existing trip or (b) to throw the analysis into the waste paper basket.

We also have the discredited economic analysis of January 2012. That provided £5.2bn from improved reliability, as though the trains cannot be made to run on time without building a high speed network, £5.5bn from other rail user impacts, meaning better access to stations, for heaven’s sake, £6.7bn from reduced crowding, largely solvable otherwise and £24.5bn from time savings, on the discredited assumption that time on a train is entirely wasted.

Our view is that penalties should be imposed upon those who have led these studies, irresponsible as they are in all their detail – putting tens of billions of pounds at risk.

Paul Withrington