Star Comment - The farce of HS2 and the massive missed opportunity to level up the UK

Today MPs accused the Department for Transport of a total failure in its oversight and financial control of the HS2 scheme.

The cross-party Commons Public Accounts Committee said the whole reputation of the project is at risk.

It appears no-one knows how much it will cost (although it is likely to be around £80 billion) when it will finally be completed or what benefits it will finally deliver.

What started as a vision to link up north and south, with lines between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, has been watered down to a track linking the capital and Birmingham.

In that sense the ‘levelling up’ agenda has utterly failed.

No wonder Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is so angry that HS2 has been downgraded. The final project will provide Birmingham with a competitive advantage when it comes to transport links, while the north will have to like it or lump it with what it has now.

There is no doubt that the engineering behind HS2 is impressive and anyone travelling on the M6, M42 or A38 in the West Midlands will have seen the scale of the project.

But, as MPs warn today, there is now "a reputational risk to the UK" because of HS2.

The line, truncated as it is, will have to be completed. It will be launched, no doubt, with a fanfare. But we are yet to see how it will in reality benefit the economy of the West Midlands.

The high speed line will benefit a few who need to travel to and from the capital, but the wider vision of also opening up rapid journeys to the north west and the east has vanished, and that is the real tragedy of this flawed engineering exercise.