Monday 4 November 2013

An HS2 update

HS2 - the rail infrastructure project which will provide direct, high capacity, high speed links between London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. With the exception of London, these city destinations and the route of HS2 are nowhere near the eastern region.

Yet, apparently in furore and froth with which KPMG’s report was greeted by the media across a recent weekend after the BBC made its Freedom of Information (FoI) request, HS2 means we might lose out in the whole of Cambridgeshire to the tune of £253 million according to some local press reports and south Essex by £151 million. In Cambridge city alone, it could be as much as £127 million.

Further north but still in the east; in fact the UK’s most northerly eastern city, Aberdeen – dubbed Europe’s renewable energy capital – can expect a drop in economic output by £220 million because of HS2.

Really? I doubt businesses in the granite city are concerned as the city’s residential and commercial property markets are buzzing as the year draws to its close.

Those unfamiliar with the sophistry of accountancy have no reason to doubt the statistical robustness of the reported figures. It’s the linguistic rigour that’s bothersome. Because those cities, towns and locations were ‘set to lose’ ‘could lose out’ ‘potentially reaching losses’.

It’s bothersome because it’s just distracting and sensational. It’s doubtful that commercial interests considering investing in our region are not going to do so now because of the open publication of the KPMG report. But it is possible that HS2 deflects future investment from the eastern region to the Midlands and the North West.

Possible but unlikely.

It’s hard to argue that investment interests here already or those which will come to this region can find what they are looking for in Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester. If they could they’d be there already, surely? And if they do head west and north, others are sure to fill the void because success attracts and breeds further success.

I should’ve been upfront at the outset: my firm has been awarded a place on HS2 Ltd's framework agreement for professional services relating to land and property. But I have yet to be snubbed for this by peers and clients in the east of the country since the KPMG report went public and, with the round of year end social dos in the horizon, I anticipate as full a diary as ever.


Will Mooney MRICS
Partner

Commercial, Cambridge

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