The Student Room Group

HS2- How would YOU spend £32billion to help the economy?

There are argument for and against HS2 (the high speed train between Birmingham and London, which will eventually go to Manchester and Leeds.)

This thread is not about if HS2 is good or bad, but if YOU were in charge of £32 billion how would you spend it to benefit the UK? Would you aim for economic benefits, or maybe other benefits?

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Reply 1
Spend it on underperforming state schools. Incentivising the good teachers and firing the duds.
Haven't got a fully worked out and costed plan for it, just something that's been on my mind.
Well if we're spending it on the railways, how about improving the network we've got and maybe replace the trains currently operating in the north that were made out of old buses in the 1980s.
Schools.
I would build more prisons and employ more doctors and nurses.
Reply 5
Original post by OmnipotentOmelette
There are argument for and against HS2 (the high speed train between Birmingham and London, which will eventually go to Manchester and Leeds.)

This thread is not about if HS2 is good or bad, but if YOU were in charge of £32 billion how would you spend it to benefit the UK? Would you aim for economic benefits, or maybe other benefits?


After listening to the Parliamentary statements my guess is only the London to Birmingham route will be built in the near future.... I'd bet some money to it that they will let this service run for a while before building the Y route to it.

It is £17bil over 14 years, though I won't be surprised if it became closer to £25-30bil over 20 years instead. The project will face plenty of obstacles and most likely endless lawsuits in similar fashion to what happened when the UK motorway network was expanded during the Thatcher years.

That kind of money over 14 years in reality isn't a lot. But I reckon it is enough to develop at least 10 new companies that can produce world class goods and services which could solve the unemployment and social problems within 3 years and will continue to provide employment for years to come. Other than that could also change some of the power generating plants to move away from fossil fuels.
Reply 6
Give it to Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Moldova to develop the infrastructure.
I would give money to new start ups in the form of loans & grants.

With the rest have a sexy party.
Improve other parts of the rail network which are desperately in need of modernisation and will benefit far more people than HS2.
buy billions of freddo bars.
Tax cuts for low-middle income families.
Improve roads -- UK roads are the laughing stock of the developed world. Our roads just can't cope.
Improve all public transport -- we want to go green but for anybody outside London relying on public transport to get to work is suicide. It's late, overcrowded, expensive, slow... Did I say it's always LATE? the railways need major investment and we need more trams on super busy roots.

In summary, our infrastructure needs major, major investment and I can't believe they're spending £32bn on something that will generally benefit the wealthy few (despite being paid for by all). It's ludicrous. Oh and HS1 has been a relative failure.
(edited 12 years ago)
Original post by Joinedup
Spend it on underperforming state schools. Incentivising the good teachers and firing the duds.
Haven't got a fully worked out and costed plan for it, just something that's been on my mind.


How would you go about providing incentives for teachers? With monetory gain?

I think not, this was proved to be idiocy when implemented in the US, the teachers only taught the syllabus, and alot of them cheated, in the end it was the kids that lost out.

I think HS2 is a good investment, returning £1.80-£2.50 in economic benefits, adjusted for inflation.

It also means that people that cannot afford to live in London, can live in or near birmingham and transit over in the same time it'll take from the outskirts of london to centeral london.
Although I agree with the people saying schools. The idea was to boost the economy in a Hoover sort of way. I don't think Funding schools would help this.

That said If they say it costs 32 billion, it's going to cost at least 45 billion and if it's said to take 14 years it's going to take 20. I think it's going to be a disaster.
Buy a boat
Reply 15
I would spend it printing nigh-infinite amounts of money, completely devalue the pound and break the economy completely.
I certainly wouldn't spend it on a ****ing train. (The 1st version [HS1], by the way, is completely ****ing useless and costs you an extra £3 compared to normal trains. As far as I can tell, it goes the same speed as normal trains. It's just a little bit quieter [and who really gives a toss about that? :lolwut: ]).

This is what I don't understand, can someone please enlighten me?
The Tories are apparently good for kicking the economy back into shape after blaming Labour for "making costly mistakes".

They then go and spend £32 billion (or £17bn, I forget how much. Either way, it's a lot of money) that just appeared out of nowhere (seriously, where did it come from? You don't find that sort of money just lying around) on something that we don't even NEED.

Cretins, the lot of 'em.
(edited 12 years ago)
Build super soldiers and rob other countries, investing in more super soldiers.
Either revamp our crappy secondary education system
or
Invest in high end technology production eg. nanotechnology and try to gain market dominance in an emerging market rather than letting someone else take over as we always do.


Original post by Infallible
Give it to Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Moldova to develop the infrastructure.


...and that would help our economy how?
(edited 12 years ago)
Original post by crazycake93

It also means that people that cannot afford to live in London, can live in or near birmingham and transit over in the same time it'll take from the outskirts of london to centeral london.


I commute from Essex (30minutes/20 miles from London) at the moment and I can tell you that after the recent fare rises, the cost of commuting is approaching 2/3 the cost of rent in a central London flatshare. I don't think anyone can argue this route will save anyone money.

It'd be a much better investment to increase the current capacity of the existing lines, invest in some double decker trains and raise some bridges or something to get around the short platforms and congested network we have, or do the equivalent of adding extra lanes to a motorway. Ultimately with greater capacity you can afford to lower fares and get more people using the railways.

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