Current HS2 plans a 'huge missed opportunity', says mayor

Andy Street has criticised the proposed HS2 timetable, which will see trains from London miss out the city's Curzon Street station, stopping at the Interchange in Solihull on their way north to cities such as Manchester and Glasgow.

Under current plans services will not travel from Curzon Street to northern destinations until the HS2 line to Manchester is open, which is not scheduled to happen for more than a decade.

Mr Street said the issue had caused "discontent" in the West Midlands and would do nothing to ease congestion on crammed services through the Black Country.

It would also have a negative impact on the "payback" of the project, and on HS2 becoming the public's "favoured route", he added.

At a meeting of the Transport Committee in Birmingham, the Conservative mayor updated MPs on the progress of HS2 in the West Midlands

He told MPs that under current plans, once the Crewe section of the line was open, trains will run on HS2 from Curzon Street on to the West Coast Mainline at Crewe, thus providing a service from Birmingham to cities including Manchester and Glasgow.

Mr Street added: "That is not in the current proposed timetable.

"You could get a train from London Euston through the Interchange into Manchester, but you will not be able to do one of the things that is really important to the West Midlands, is to provide the link from the centre of Birmingham through to Manchester, because the most congested trains from Birmingham at the moment are the ones that go out through the Black Country through Wolverhampton to Manchester and the north.

"The long-term proposal is trains will start in Curzon Street to go to destinations in the north, replacing the current services which are very congested, very slow and doesn't give us the connectivity north of Birmingham. The current proposal is that those services do not start until the line is open all the way to Manchester.

"I think that is a huge missed opportunity and prevents the adoption of the service by the public."

The £570m station at Curzon Street and the £330m Interchange are both due to be completed by 2026, when the first phase of HS2 from London to Birmingham was originally due to be completed.

At the meeting, which also featured HS2 chief executive Mark Thurston, Mr Street revealed that no discussions had yet taken place regarding the fare structure for the line.

He also told the committee that HS2 remained vital for the region's fight back after Covid, and that he did not believe people would travel less as a result of the pandemic.

"There's nothing in 250 years of history since the industrial revolution that says people will travel less, and I still don't believe they will," he said.