Prime minister due to announce scrapping of northern leg of project after weeks of speculation
Good morning. Rishi Sunak will deliver his speech to the Conservative conference just before noon and it is now all but certain that he will use it to announce he is scrapping the HS2 line from Birmingham to Manchester. There was imaginative spin last night to the effect that the line would still be going ahead, but just on the existing tracks. But that is not high-speed rail, and so there is no avoiding the fact that phase two of the project is dead.
Sunak is expected to announce a raft of other transport projects in north which he hopes will persuade voters the Tory commitment to levelling up has not died too. And we are expecting plenty of other policy in the speech, in which he will try to make the case he is the leader best placed to fix the “broken system” at Westminster which has held back Britain in recent decades (during which his party has largely been in power).
HS2 trains will run to Manchester, so they’ll still come into Manchester Piccadilly, they’ll still run to Leeds, there will still be a much faster journey time than there has been in the past.
And not just because some of the section will be actually conventional high speed, or new high speed rail, but also because even the older section can have further upgrades to, for example, its digital infrastructure which is the way the signalling works.
What else will now be built because we will save these tens of billions of pounds? Those are tough choices, I know the opposition won’t do that, we will.
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