HS2: ‘It will be an open-ended financial drain for 20 years before trains run from Euston!’

• IN giving the go-ahead for HS2 at Euston the government has made a huge mistake. And this one will dwarf all the others.

It comes with a bill of £6billion each year for the next decade, starving funding for several potentially actually productive infrastructure schemes up north.

It will be an open-ended financial drain for 20 years before trains run from Euston!

My predecessor and good friend ex-Camden councillor Gerry Harrison wrote to me after the announcement: “…my latest view on this extension to HS2 is that now it is work already in progress it should be completed. Otherwise it is a scandalous waste of money.”

He encapsulates precisely the trap of the wrong-thinking “sunk cost fallacy”, which is defined as “making irrational decisions that lead to sub-optimal outcome”.

High Speed 2 has cost about £33billion to date. That’s the sunk cost.

To complete stage 1 will be a further £40billion plus. That figure excludes Euston and the tunnels. This breathtaking cost equals chancellor Rachel Reeves’s claimed needed tax grab.

The bald fact is that agreeing to pick up the £1billion cost of tunnelling from Old Oak Common to Euston is a new extra cost commitment.

It breaches Reeves’s pledge to be prudent and only invest in positive returning schemes.

It has unlocked the new liability of who will pay for Euston?

The station will certainly not be fully funded by foreign private investment, which will inevitably mean a massive extra public purse bill.

Watch out for the re-emergence of a PFI, public finance initiative.

I say again that what Euston actually needs is family-sized social rented homes and the existing station to be refurbished.

Even if a political fudge is achieved of £3billion or so from Middle Eastern or Chinese investment it will inevitably be in return for agreement to build another office city and tower blocks of tiny two-bedroom million-pound plus apartments for foreign investors, just like Lendlease’s carbuncle development at Elephant and Castle.

PAUL BRAITHWAITE, NW5