I do wonder if there is any sum of money at which the HS2▸ fan club would eventually admit that it's too much.
A good question put in a slightly patronising way.
Indeed. "How much is too much?" is a good and interesting question. The answer may be complex, and there is always a danger that costs can be made to 'seem' large, or 'seem' small according to people's pre-existing views and how they choose to frame the numbers.
As an example, expenditure of £1bn can be made to sound large (by calling it £1bn!), but it is (approximately) equivalent to £20 per person in the
UK▸ (which doesn't sound nearly so bad), or 40p per week per person in the UK (which sounds positively affordable).
I find that '£1bn is twenty quid a head' is a good ready reckoner to carry around in one's head.
So - what to make of the cost of HS2? Let's work with a round £100bn.
£100bn is - roughly - 1 year's total UK govt education spending, or 3 year's total UK govt transport spending (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_Kingdom ), or Network Rail's total budget for about 14 years (
https://cdn.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Annual-report-and-accounts-2019.pdf ) . To put it another way - it is roughly 10% of annual UK govt spending.
£100bn is - roughly - £2000 per person, or £40 per person per week over a year, or £4 per person per week over a decade, or 80p per person per week over half a century. So - near enough 10p per person per day for the next 50 years.....
Is that too much? Well, I suppose it depends on the benefits - which I don't feel qualified to quantify, but must surely include uplift in GDP due to greater connectivity, north-south rebalancing of the economy and savings from work that would otherwise have to be done on
WCML▸ /
MML» /
ECML▸ to provide capacity.
My own (current) hunch is that HS2 is well worth it. Does anyone have any quantitative arguments to suggest that it isn't?