Businesses push government to extend HS2 line

The northern phase of HS2 was cancelled by the previous government

The government is being urged to pay for the HS2 line to run all the way to Crewe in Cheshire by rail industry businesses as they say a shorter route would risk "squandering" its benefits.

The High Speed Rail Group (HSRG) has put several requests to the Treasury's spending review and said the rail route needed to be "reset to an irreducible Euston-Crewe core".

The high speed line north of Birmingham to Manchester was scrapped by the previous government.

A spokesperson for the government said they were committed to "improving rail connectivity" across the Midlands and northern England.

The HSRG is made up of businesses involved in the industry including Arup, Hitachi and Alstom.

In its submission to the Treasury, the group makes six "key asks" of the government.

These include to change HS2 to a "Euston-Crewe core" and fund the connection from the West Midlands to Crewe rather than the current plan to stop in Handsacre near Lichfield, Staffordshire, north of Birmingham.

They also called for a more cost-effective approach to the London Euston plan by building to a "plain vanilla design".

The group added that the government needed to extend the safeguarding restrictions on the land between Birmingham and Crewe.

These were planning tools used to protect land from conflicting development but were lifted in January 2024.

Not extending the line all the way to Crewe would make it harder to deliver "real economic value", one of the group's directors said

The group also suggested HS2 should be connected to the West Coast Mainline 10 miles (16km) south of Crewe, rather than on the approach to the town's station.

They said this "yields the potential for a further substantial cost-saving" - although no estimate is currently available.

In the submission, the HSRG further added: "There is currently a risk of overreaction and cutting HS2 short and, as a result, diminishing both the national economic growth stimulus HS2 provides, and short-changing the national account".

Jim Steer, one of the directors of the group, told BBC Radio Stoke they felt HS2 had been cut back "in a way that we think makes it very hard to deliver real economic value".

He added the line going to Crewe was significant because HS2 was always planned to join the existing railway and it was needed to bypass a "bottleneck" in Staffordshire.

Otherwise he claimed the scheme would not lead to more capacity on railway lines.

A spokesperson for the Department for Transport said they were committed to improving rail travel in the Midlands and northern England.

"We are currently reviewing the position we have inherited on HS2 and will set out next steps in due course," they added.

The spending review is set to be completed by the spring.