Northern leg of HS2 to Manchester will be scrapped
The northern leg of the HS2 line is set to be scrapped, Sky News understands.
Rumours had been circling for weeks that the high-speed rail line between Birmingham and Manchester was going to be axed by the prime minister and chancellor due to soaring costs.
Even the reports – which have been denied by Number 10 – led to a huge backlash from all sides of the political spectrum, including from former Conservative prime ministers Boris Johnson and Theresa May.
A Downing Street spokesperson said: “These reports are incorrect. No final decisions have been taken on Phase 2 of HS2.”
The development threatens to attract controversy and overshadow Rishi Sunak’s first Tory conference as leader and prime minister as the party faithful gathers in Manchester for the annual event.
The first indications that the leg to Manchester could be scrapped came after The Independent reported that ministers were considering shelving the northern phase because of concerns about spiralling costs and severe delays.
Politics live – Chancellor set for big conference speech
The newspaper said a cost estimate revealed that the government has already spent £2.3bn on stage two of the railway from Birmingham to Manchester, but that ditching the northern phase could save up to £34bn.
Sky News understands the Department of Transport (DfT) has worked up a package of alternative projects – rail, bus and road schemes – which could be funded from money saved by scrapping the Manchester to Birmingham leg of the project.
But Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, accused the government of treating people in the north of England as “second-class citizens” with regards to HS2.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
‘Second-class citizens on transport’
He told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips: “An east-west line is really important for north of England, as well as north-south. Why is it always that people here are forced to choose? That we can’t have everything, ‘you can have this or you can have that but you can’t have everything’?
“London never has to choose between a north-south line and an east-west line and good public transport within the city.
“Why is it that people in the north are always forced to choose, why are we always treated as second-class citizens when it comes to transport?”
Number 10 is trying to shut down an announcement it is not ready to make public
Ahead of today, Downing Street drew up a plan for announcing a decision on scrapping the northern leg of HS2 in Manchester.
It would involve a cabinet meeting here at conference, possibly a visit by the PM and the announcement itself.
Earlier today, I was told a decision had been made. This would have been at the heart of government’s inner sanctum, with this communicated only to a small number.
All the internal government documentation on HS2 is numbered to try and capture leakers, with press spokesman not in the loop.
It has also not yet gone to cabinet – we would know if this had happened.
Therefore Number 10 can legitimately say that no final decision has been made – as some decisions have, we are told.
This revelation – as the chancellor was due on stage – could not be more disruptive for conference, meaning HS2 is eclipsing yet another day of the coverage.
Number 10 are now trying to shut down an announcement they are evidently not ready to make in public.
That is why they have issued the following: “These reports are incorrect. No final decisions have been taken on Phase 2 of HS2.”
We await the next twist in the tale.
He was joined in his criticism by Mr Johnson, who said delaying or scrapping the northern leg of HS2 would be “betraying the north of the country and the whole agenda of levelling up”.
The ex-prime minister’s intervention came on on the eve of the party conference.
In a series of interviews on Thursday, Rishi Sunak repeatedly refused to be drawn on the future of HS2, saying: “I’m not speculating on future things.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Are Tories planning ‘rail betrayal’?
But writing in his weekly Daily Mail column, Mr Johnson appealed to his former chancellor to show Britain still has “the requisite guts and ambition” to invest in infrastructure and labelled the aim of saving money “deluded”.
Mr Johnson – who made levelling up a centrepiece of his 2019 manifesto and government – said when he heard reports the northern leg was set to be delayed or cancelled, he let out a “long, low despairing groan”.
Read more:
HS2 ‘pause’ designed to save money is costing the taxpayer more than £360m, leaked govt briefing reveals
HS2: The morphing conundrum – Why are so many people upset with rail project?
He wrote: “Cancel HS2? Cut off the northern legs? We must be out of our minds.”
Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands, has also warned against any downscaling of HS2.
Asked about the reports by Sky News at the conference in Manchester, he said: “You must ask the PM – I’m confident he’ll do the right thing.”
Delivery of the high-speed railway has been a core pledge of the Conservative government, but it has been plagued by delays and ever-increasing costs.
The initial opening date of 2026 has fallen back to 2033, while cost estimates have spiralled from about £33bn in 2010 to £71bn in 2019 – excluding the final eastern leg from the West Midlands to the East Midlands.
It is not just the northern section of the project that has encountered trouble.There are also doubts about the future of Euston station in London and whether services will terminate there or at Old Oak Common in west London.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force has scheduled a roundtable discussion centered on privacy and financial surveillance for December, as a renewed focus on privacy grips the cryptocurrency industry.
The privacy roundtable is slated for Dec. 15. Like other SEC roundtables, crypto industry executives and SEC officials will discuss common pain points and solutions, but no hard policy proposals will be submitted.
Privacy has become a hot-button topic following several developments, including the partial guilty verdict in Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s trial in June, the Samourai Wallet developer sentencing in November and the privacy token price rally over the last two months.
“Authoritarians thrive when people have no privacy. When those in charge start being hostile to privacy protections, it is a major red flag,” said Naomi Brockwell, founder of the Ludlow Institute, an organization advocating for liberty through technology.
The renewed interest in privacy hearkens back to crypto’s cypherpunk roots, and one of the core reasons the cryptographic technology that underpins crypto was invented — to ensure secure communication channels between parties in hostile environments.
Related: Crypto investors flee visibility for anonymity as privacy coins surge 80%
Crypto community sounds the alarm about privacy following precedent-setting legal cases
The verdict in the Storm trial and other cases where open-source software developers have been convicted or imprisoned for creating non-custodial, privacy-preserving protocols has set a dangerous precedent for privacy technology in the US, legal experts have said.
Crypto industry executives and advocates argue that the prosecutions are meant to dissuade developers from building privacy-preserving tools.
The verdict in the Samourai Wallet case is analogous to the US government accusing car manufacturer Toyota of a conspiracy because terrorists and criminals also use their cars, according to journalist and crypto advocate Lola Leetz.
“People should not be held accountable for what other people do with the tools they build,” Leetz said.
In August, Matthew Galeotti, the acting assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s criminal division, signaled the agency would no longer prosecute open-source software developers for writing code.
“Our view is that merely writing code, without ill intent, is not a crime,” Galeotti said. “The department will not use indictments as a law-making tool. The department should not leave innovators guessing as to what could lead to criminal prosecution.”
Magazine: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash, and more
Politics
All four UK governments ‘failed to appreciate’ scale of COVID pandemic threat – inquiry finds
All four UK governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat posed by COVID-19 or the urgency of the response the pandemic required, a damning report published on Thursday has claimed.
Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, described the response to the pandemic as “too little, too late”.
Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved during the first wave of COVID-19 had a mandatory lockdown been introduced a week earlier, the inquiry also found.
Noting how a “lack of urgency” made a mandatory lockdown “inevitable”, the report references modelling data to claim there could have been 23,000 fewer deaths during the first wave in England had it been introduced a week earlier.
The UK government first introduced advisory restrictions on 16 March 2020, including self-isolation, household quarantine and social distancing.
Had these measures been introduced sooner, the report states, the mandatory lockdown which followed from 23 March might not have been necessary at all.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
All four UK govts ‘failed to appreciate’ scale of pandemic
COVID-19 first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, and as it developed into a worldwide pandemic, the UK went in and out of unprecedented lockdown measures for two years starting from March 2020.
Lady Hallett admitted in her summary that politicians in the government and devolved administrations were forced to make decisions where “there was often no right answer or good outcome”.
“Nonetheless,” she said, “I can summarise my findings of the response as ‘too little, too late'”.
‘Toxic culture’ at the heart of UK government
The report said there was “a toxic and chaotic culture” at the heart of the UK government during the pandemic.
The inquiry heard evidence about the “destabilising behaviour of a number of individuals” – including former No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings.
It said that by failing to tackle this chaotic culture – “and, at times, actively encouraging it” – former PM Boris Johnson “reinforced a culture in which the loudest voices prevailed and the views of other colleagues, particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making”.
‘Misleading assurances’
The inquiry found all four governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland failed to understand the urgency of response the pandemic demanded in the early part of 2020.
The report reads: “This was compounded, in part, by misleading assurances from the Department of Health and Social Care and the widely held view that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic.”
The report notes how the UK government took a “high risk” when it significantly eased restrictions in England in July 2020 – “despite scientific advisers’ concerns about the public health risks of doing so”.
Lady Hallett has made 19 key recommendations which, if followed, she believes will better protect the UK in any future pandemic and improve decision-making in a crisis.
Repeated failings ‘inexcusable’
In a statement following the publication of Thursday’s report, Lady Hallett said there was a “serious failure” by all four governments to appreciate the level of “risk and calamity” facing the UK.
She said: “The tempo of the response should have been increased. It was not. February 2020 was a lost month.”
Read more:
A timeline of the UK’s response to the pandemic
Lady Hallett said the inquiry does not advocate for national lockdowns, which she said should have been avoided if at all possible.
She said: “But to avoid them, governments must take timely and decisive action to control a spreading virus. The four governments of the UK did not.”
Lady Hallett said none of the governments were adequately prepared for the challenges and risks that a lockdown presented, and that many of the same failings were repeated later in 2020, which she said was “inexcusable”.
She added: “Each government had ample warning that the prevalence of the virus was increasing and would continue to do so into the winter months. Yet again, there was a failure to take timely and effective action.”
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024