Elizabeth Line would ‘never’ be built, Portillo wrote when urging cancellation

Former cabinet minister Michael Portillo predicted that the rail route now known as the Elizabeth Line would never be built as the Treasury waged a campaign for cancellation of the project in the 1990s, according to government papers newly released by the National Archives.

Portillo, then chief secretary to the Treasury, made the prediction in January 1994 as both he and the then-chancellor of the exchequer Kenneth Clarke argued the cross-London scheme was too expensive and no longer necessary.

The Treasury’s efforts contributed to the shelving of what was then known as Crossrail between 1994 and 2006, when it was revived by the Labour government under Tony Blair. The line eventually opened in May 2022 and has quickly surpassed expectations that it would transport 200mn passengers annually, carrying 231mn passengers in the year to March 2025.

Portillo made the arguments in a memo to the then-prime minister John Major as ministers prepared for the introduction to parliament of a bill granting powers to build the twin, east-west tunnels between Liverpool Street in the City of London and Paddington in the west. The bill was eventually defeated in its committee stage by a range of objections.

Portillo started his memo: “If we carry on with the Crossrail bill, we will dodge a bad press next week. But we will have stored up a political problem for the next 10 years.”

In the subsequent general election, in May 1997, Portillo became the best-known Conservative party casualty of Tony Blair’s landslide general election victory, losing his previously safe Enfield Southgate seat. He has since reinvented himself as a media personality, best known for presenting BBC documentaries about great railway journeys.

Portillo and Clarke launched their attack, the documents show, after London Transport — forerunner of Transport for London, current operator of London’s transport network — published slightly downgraded forecasts for future demand to travel to work in central London.

Both men argued the new forecasts were still too optimistic but that they also demonstrated Crossrail was no longer necessary. Many of the arguments focused on whether the private sector would fund the work.

“The public sector could never afford to build it,” Portillo wrote in the memo. “We will get private sector money on sensible terms only if private sector investors believe LT’s forecasts. But our consultants say that they won’t, that the forecasts aren’t realistic.”

Portillo added the project would be delayed by “at least 10 years” if it sought to use private-sector money.

He added: “If we go ahead with the Crossrail bill, the project will not be built in the next parliament. Or in the parliament after that. Indeed, I think that it will never be built — and that a decision to go ahead with the bill now simply means, one day, taking another decision to cancel it.”

A delay in cancelling the project would waste 18 months of parliamentary time and “at least £75mn in public money”, Portillo argued.

“We will also have sunk ourselves into a deeper hole than any we could dig now — and done nothing whatever for London’s reputation,” Portillo wrote.

Clarke also argued vociferously against pressing ahead. A minute of one meeting recorded him as saying the project was “very expensive” and “potentially hugely disruptive during the construction phase”.

Both Clarke and Portillo argued for other, lower-cost alternatives. Those included a link to take Heathrow Express trains linking the airport to London Paddington on to London Underground’s Circle Line into the City of London.

The line eventually cost £19bn — more than six times the £3bn cost that Portillo and Clarke criticised as too expensive — and opened more than 28 years after his memo.