Heseltine, one of the big beasts of government over the last 40 years yesterday made the case for HS2. Speaking at the Royal Town Planning Institute, the former Transport Secretary said that the new line is about spreading prosperity and doing ‘the right thing’ for our country:
‘HS2 is about our country’s competitiveness for a half century or more. It is about so many more people sharing growth that has, for too long, been concentrated on London and the South East. It’s all about drawing together our economy as a whole as well as improving our access to the enlarged, and enlarging, home market of Europe. It is not about 30 minutes off London to Birmingham.’
On the Today programme yesterday, Heseltine explained why HS2 is key to reinforcing Britain’s buccaneering spirit: ‘Here’s a really imaginative project in order to try and do something to rebalance the United Kingdom. I personally have given a lot of my time in politics to try and achieve precisely that sense of adventure, that sense of expansion, that sense of can-do back into those great towns of the midlands and the north that made this country in the first place.’
Heseltine has form with big, unpopular infrastructure projects. As the man behind the redevelopment of the London Docklands and High Speed 1, Heseltine believes these projects are about more than economics; social and environmental well-being are just as important.
When presented with the poor cost-benefit analysis of HS2, Heseltine said ‘this is all mumbo-jumbo. The guys with slide rules, they don’t know’. In his lecture, Heseltine suggested that if he had predicted the 2012 Olympics in Stratford, the O2 in Greenwich or HS1 40 years ago, he would have been ‘carried off by men in white coats’. Sadly, many feel the same way about HS2.
By using his own historical examples — which ring true — as well as offering suggestions for bringing down the costs (unsurprisingly, he’s advocating Urban Development Corporations in the appropriate areas), Heseltine could be paving the way for a new cross party consensus on the project.
