YOUR headline of February 12 reads “York tax payers may face HS2 bill”. Of course they will.

The route to Leeds and Manchester has a headline cost of £33bn. That excludes the trains at £8bn and tax, included in the economic assessment, of 20.9 per cent.

Adding those yields £50bn, or nearly £2,000 for every household in the land. The financial losses after accruing fares out to the remote year of 2093 will also be close to £2,000 per household.

Probably those losses will be very much higher than that: after all, the income depends on the ludicrous passenger forecasts, requiring up to 18 1,000-seat trains per hour. Think HS1, for which initial forecasts were three times too high.

This folly, if built, will amount to a tax hit on Yorkshire, population, 5 million of £4 billion. How many jobs will that destroy in that part of the economy that makes a profit? It is said to create 100,000 jobs. At £50bn that amounts to £500,000 per job, for heaven’s sake.

Paul Withrington, Transport Watch, Redland Drive, Northampton.
 

• COUN IAN GILLIES appears not to understand the new HS2 link to York and the economic benefits the city will gain as a result.

The HS2 route will end just north of Church Fenton, where it will join the East Coast Main Line into York. So 99 per cent of an HS2 journey from London to York will be high-speed and the very small remainder at standard mainline rail speeds.

Given that journey times to Birmingham will be halved, and journey times to London reduced by a quarter, it is rather pedantic to dismiss its relevance by saying it will not come to York.

Given that Julian Sturdy MP, a Parliamentary Private Secretary to a Transport Minister, was involved in lobbying for HS2 to come this close to York, it is surprising that Coun Gillies is so poorly informed.

HS2 will obviously create new economic development opportunities for the city and that is to be welcomed.

Coun Dave Merrett, Cabinet Member for Planning, Transport and Sustainability.