Should HS2 be completed despite the higher costs and longer timescale?

The room did not vote for HS2 so much as lose patience with the bill for it: No carried the question by 90 votes to Yes’s 82. The margin was tight, but every argument the floor rated highest came from the losing project’s opponents, giving the verdict a more settled tone than the tally alone suggests.

The No case joined waste, disruption and misplaced priorities. One of its strongest voices described “Billions of pounds squandered”, while another began, “No, reluctantly”, before arguing that the project’s sunk costs made cancellation harder but did not make its original case any better.

Yes had a more complicated argument, and in some ways an awkward one. Its best line was that “Voting no is adhering to the sunk cost fallacy” and that “we need to finish it and move on”; another Yes voter conceded that “HS2 was never needed”, leaving the side defending completion while sharing much of the indictment of the scheme itself.

That was where the two sides talked past each other. No voters treated the overruns as evidence that the railway should give way to other priorities — “half the money upgrading the existing line”, road maintenance and a reversal of Beeching — while Yes treated the same history as an argument for completing what had already been started.

The verdict was therefore less a vote of enthusiasm for cancellation than a refusal to let previous spending settle the question. HS2’s opponents supplied the chamber’s clearest arguments; its supporters supplied the most reluctant conclusion.