HS2 costing real jobs now

Amid speculation that the announcement of the second phase of HS2 is imminent – after being delayed from autumn 2012 and then December 2012 – there are increasing concerns about the very real threat HS2 poses to existing job schemes now.

The most recent is reported by This is Leicestershire: HS2 rail link through Leicestershire could cost 6,000 jobs

Coun Rushton said he understood it would re-emerge in the middle of a site earmarked for a £300 million rail distribution depot, to the north of the airport, which would employ 6,000 people, planned by developers Roxhill. He said: “This line will cut right through north west Leicestershire.

“It will enter at Appleby Magna and broadly follow the route of the M42 corridor. When it gets to Diseworth, it will disappear down a great tunnel and come back up exactly where the Roxhill development will be.

“It will wreck that very important employment opportunity.”

This is ahead of Friday’s House of Commons adjournment debate on the “High Speed 2 (Proposed Marshalling Yard, Birmingham)” organised by Liam Byrne, MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill.  He seems quite happy for Birmingham to get both the HS2 stations in the West Midlands, but has been objecting to plans for the marshaling yard to be based on a brownfield site in Birmingham. His argument is that the HS2 maintenance yard will only provide 300 jobs in the 2020s: his alternative scheme would use the same site to create up to 7000 jobs, starting now.

This is not the first time a Birmingham MP has raised concerns in Parliament about the threat to Birmingham jobs from the HS2 plans. Jack Dromey, MP for Birmingham Erdington raised the issue of the threat from HS2 safeguarding plans to Jaguar Landrover’s rail terminal with the business secretary Vince Cable.

One comment to “HS2 costing real jobs now”
  1. Hilarious that they’re completely ignoring the opportunity to link East Midlands Airport into the network and instead tunnelling right underneath it in order to build a station in the wilderness between 3 major cities, and completely inconvenient for all of them. It’s positively surreal.

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