The long-awaited Crossrail deal is unfair... London deserves better

You can spend a lot of your life waiting for London’s big rail projects to be delivered. The first tranche of the “Elizabeth Line” got going in 2008 with the aspiration of linking Reading and Heathrow with Canary Wharf and Essex via the West End. In the way of big infrastructure projects, it has since turned into a political piñata  — a symbol for those inclined to see any megaproject in the South as a defeat for the North. Londoners too might have tired of a grand promise which ends up visible mainly via an eternal building site at Tottenham Court Road and a internal decapitation of management after cost overruns.  

Indeed, Crossrail has been around so long that it spawned an exciting sequel in Crossrail 2 (aimed at speeding up links between the north and south of the  capital). That has been shunted into the sidings. Original Crossrail has just survived being mothballed in one of the Treasury’s less far-sighted manoeuvres.  

The punchy new Transport for London boss Andy Byford, who comes with the background of knocking political heads together in New York transit (a perpetual war zone, basically), says that failing to crack on with Crossrail would make London “a laughing stock”. That charge  hit home. The Prime Minister, as a former mayor, knows exactly why. You can mess up a costly Garden Bridge project and have a couple of airport ideas that don’t fly. But London will fall out of the league of confident, self-renewing cities if it fails to deliver on a key generational transport policy — and one which Johnson as mayor vociferously supported

So this week, the rescue deal for Crossrail finally arrived — I gather with the support of the Number 10 policy unit against Treasury voices arguing that in the “levelling-up” era, London needed to make it a sacrifice. It would have been a pointless one. Looking to the post-Covid, post-Brexit era, London is an asset to Johnson’s recovery strategy and one which needs to keep pace with other global cities in becoming more attractive, open — and easily navigable.  

The mysterious question is why the Government has just chosen such a cumbersome approach by insisting that a loan of £825 million out of the total remaining cost of £1.1 billion should be borne from  a loan to the GLA, to be repaid from business rates and a further “community infrastructure levy” on major London businesses. This is such a gradgrinding way of conducting public accounting (for a relatively small amount of money) that the main reason must surely be political symbolism, rather than cost efficiency. For one thing, it does not really make sense to levy inner-London businesses — and not those who benefit by being at either end of the line. More profoundly, if you seek to invest in London as a business centre and the key ambassador for Global Britain after leaving the EU, it is counter-productive to clog up the rest of the transport system with lengthy repayments, which is where this cost will ultimately land in higher fares or undone maintenance.

Bear in mind too that big transport projects in a city as old and convoluted (below ground as above it) are rarely studies in high efficiency. Crossrail will cost more than £17 billion. That is a hiccup compared with the ballooning costs of HS2 — towards £100 billion. Many of the world’s other megaprojects have fared a lot worse, including a new Berlin airport which became a byword for efficiency failures and financial black holes (a reminder of why Boris Johnson’s plan to build a new airport in the Thames estuary could have become so badly unstuck). If you want a premier cru-

delayed project, consider that the New York 2nd Avenue line extension connecting Harlem to lower Manhattan was first mooted in 1929 — and became known as the “line that time forgot”.  

For all the ease of the Tube and rail system, London still makes it hard on those who live outside the inner zones. Travelling around successful Asian cities in the past few years, it has struck me that one reason Shanghai, Tokyo or Seoul can grow fast is that they drive their economic growth by making it easier for young workers and families to live outside the high-priced central areas — but with links fast and modern enough for them to capture the benefits of urban life. If London doesn’t compete to stay in the ranks of the great metropolises of the 21st century, the country and not just the capital pays the price. It might not be a popular argument in the “levelling-up” era — but it’s a bad idea to get there by levelling London down.