HS2 will be a disaster (From Warrington Guardian)

HS2 will be a disaster

11:33am Thursday 21st February 2013 in Letters

THE Warrington Guardian headline of February 12 reads ‘Warrington wil benefit from HS2 – campaigners argue’.

Instead it will be a financial disaster for Warrington and the nation as a whole. Here is why.

The route to Leeds and Manchester has a headline cost of £33bn.

That excludes the trains at £8bn and tax, included in the economic assessment, of 20.9 per cent. Adding those yields £50bn, or nearly £2,000 for every household in the land.

The financial losses after accruing fares out to 2093 will also be close to £2,000 per household.

Those losses will be very much higher than that.

The income depends on passenger forecasts, requiring up to 18 1,000-seat trains per hour. For HS1 initial forecasts were three times too high.

This folly, if built, will amount to at tax hit on a Warrington population of 200,000 of £170 million.

How many jobs will that destroy in that part of the economy that makes a profit?

Nationwide this thing is said to create 100,000 jobs. At £50bn that amounts to £500,000 per job.

Paul Withrington
Transport Watch
Northampton