HS2 was originally meant to be “Y-shaped” (admittedly a Y that looked like it was leaning unsteadily on a wall after stumbling out of a bar). At the central point of that Y was Birmingham — with high-speed routes to London, Manchester, and Leeds all meeting either at the flashy new Curzon Street station, or Birmingham Interchange near the NEC. We would have been at the heart of it, arguably the biggest winners from the country’s biggest infrastructure project.
You won’t have missed that this is no longer the plan. Far from the central node, Birmingham is now one end of a route from here to London, which could perhaps be described as “\” shaped. Still, it’s something — and if the recent noises coming out of government are to be believed, some sort of “HS2-light” with a new lower-cost link to Manchester might be on the cards. How much, then, are we really going to benefit?
Today we asked rail engineer and expert, Gareth Dennis, to weigh in. Dennis has been a fierce critic of the last government’s decision to curtail HS2, as well as making the news himself recently after his expression of concern about the safety of Euston station led to him being chased out of his job by a government minister (more on that here). We gave him the floor to give us his full and unvarnished opinion on what we will — and won’t — get from HS2 in its watered down form.
It’s a really meaty piece, with lots of maps and detail about how you’ll be affected wherever you live in the West Midlands. It’s precisely the kind of in-depth, expert reporting that we want The Dispatch to be all about. If you’ve been waiting for the signal to upgrade to a paid membership with us, then this is it — and once you’re there you can look through our back catalogue of long reads.
Brum in brief
⚙️Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall joined Richard Parker in Birmingham yesterday as regional mayors try to persuade the government to devolve more powers ahead of the autumn budget. The pair met young people who have benefitted from WMCA funded short courses that prepared them for apprenticeships while paying the minimum wage. An upcoming government white paper is expected to hand over powers so the regions can tackle economic inactivity with bespoke work, health, and skills plans. Liz Kendall told reporters “I won’t try and sell you fairy dust” but that the government is “making a start” on the long term plan to grow the economy.

✂ Birmingham's youth services face severe cuts, with potential reductions from 67 to just 23 staff members. With 16 youth centres at risk of closure, the council needs to slash £376m from its budget after declaring bankruptcy. Birmingham is one of the youngest cities in Europe, with almost a third of its population under 20 and nearly 40% under 25. Save Birmingham Youth Service group have criticised the decision, warning of the devastating impacts this could have on young people — especially from deprived areas like Druids Heath. “It’s almost like being kicked in the stomach. We weren’t expecting whole chunks of people to be wiped out,” said a spokesperson.
🩺 The Midland Metropolitan University ‘super hospital’ in Smethwick has opened after years of delays. Costing around £1 billion, it serves over 500,000 people in Sandwell and West Birmingham. The hospital is designed to reduce admissions and free up beds by focusing on prevention and community-based care — reflecting a shift towards outpatient services. There have been concerns raised over a 70-bed deficit, however, Richard Beeken (Chief Executive) highlights how fewer beds are needed with the emphasis on providing more modern approach to healthcare.
🎶 On Tuesday, a group of young Ukrainian refugees living in the UK performed with the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra at Birmingham Symphony Hall. The concert not only shared Ukrainian culture with the West Midlands, but helped the young musicians reconnect with their roots. The refugees make up part of a musical collective known as ‘Vivochok’, and use music to address trauma, wellbeing and cultural identity.
Is half an HS2 worth having?
By Gareth Dennis
High Speed 2, as envisaged before the desperation of an idea-less government butchered it into near-uselessness, was and remains the most important reboot for Britain’s national railway network this century. It represents — and its main purpose has always been — a revolution for local and freight rail capacity across most of England, with secondary benefits being felt in Wales and Scotland.
Undoubtedly the city that stood to benefit most from the original Y-shaped network was the industry-hardened, friendly and enormous city of Birmingham, with its urban population of three million and a wider regional population of twice that. The UK’s second city relies on a saturated system of railway lines carrying long-distance passenger trains and freight to destinations across the country, as well as local and commuter services. Along with a series of complementary upgrades, HS2 would have had a knock-on effect across the whole lot. And so we have been told by a plethora of politicians and wonks for the last decade and a half.

Much like ordering a bottle of rosé when one person wants red and the other white, the new plan for HS2 is the compromise that makes no-one happy. Anti-HS2 campaigners would rather see the whole lot scrapped, while those of us who support it see a pale shadow of what was promised. But will the remnants under construction today still deliver some benefits? What impact will there be, here in Birmingham?
A victim of its own success
Birmingham’s railways are, by almost all measures, an immense success. Ridership growth before the pandemic was among the highest in the country, with the Cross-City Line alone having seen passenger numbers more than double in the preceding twenty years of operation. Passengers returned faster than almost anywhere in the UK as COVID-19 transitioned from pandemic to endemic. Any slight reduction in peak-time figures will, to quote a Network Rail study looking at long-term capacity, “only provide some short-term respite to a system that was already oversubscribed”.
That quote foreshadows the problem: this success is despite, rather than because of, the robustness and capacity of the city’s urban railway system. Despite various tweaks, upgrades and repurposings of Birmingham’s railway network, there has never been any true expansion of the system to facilitate and indeed accelerate the city’s appetite for travelling by rail, resulting in a series of bottlenecks that limit not only the ways in which Brummies can move about, but also how effective the wider railway network can be. The end result is that Birmingham’s railways are the most congested outside of London, with as many as one in five passengers standing in the morning peak.
To understand the problems in any detail, it is worth briefly hopping back to a moment in time that represents probably the biggest missed opportunity in making best use of the railway we had already built.
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