The property data Andy Burnham doesn't want to see

Crewe was slated to become the northern HS2 hub, the junction where trains would split for Manchester and Leeds. It has been one of the stronger property markets in England over the past two and a half years, rising 5.6% while the national median was falling.

Manchester Piccadilly-adjacent properties rose 2.1% against a 3.5% national decline. The Staffordshire corridor, which sits along the cancelled route between Birmingham and Crewe, held almost flat. Manchester Airport districts slipped slightly in absolute terms but still beat England by 1.9 percentage points.

In every case, the cancellation of HS2 did not produce the property market shock that commentators predicted in October 2023.

Burnham's argument rests on the assumption that cancellation has depressed Northern property values and that reinstatement would reverse the damage. The transaction data does not support the first part of that claim.

Crewe homeowners have not been punished by the markets for losing their HS2 hub. Manchester Piccadilly-adjacent properties are ahead of the national average. The feared reverse-announcement effect, where HS2 cancellation would strip value from Northern towns the way HS2 announcements had once boosted them, has not materialised in the Land Registry data.

That does not mean cancellation was costless. Local authorities lost planned regeneration investment. Businesses relocated from affected zones were not fully compensated. Transport connectivity improvements were real and were lost. But the residential property market has absorbed the cancellation without the collapse that many predicted.

The same pattern of counterintuitive findings from open government datasets appears in other areas of public policy: what the data shows often diverges sharply from political framing on both sides. The HS2 property story is another example.

Postcode districts are imprecise proxies. A postcode district like M1 covers a defined geographic area but does not map perfectly to the catchment of a planned station. Properties at the edge of a district may be further from the station than properties in an adjacent district not included in the analysis. The approach is consistent with how similar studies are conducted and is fit for identifying broad market-level trends, but it cannot capture hyper-local variation within a district.

Old Oak Common conflates two effects. The NW10 and W3 districts have experienced both active HS2 construction disruption and the broader softening of inner-west London prices since 2023. The relative contribution of each cannot be disaggregated from transaction data alone. The -19.2% figure should be read as reflecting both factors.

Correlation is not causation. The analysis establishes that cancelled HS2 areas outperformed England after cancellation. It does not establish that cancellation caused that outperformance. Other factors, including Northern market momentum, lower starting valuations, interest-rate sensitivity by price tier, and local economic conditions, may have contributed.

Two and a half years may be insufficient to capture announcement effects. Some property economists argue that major infrastructure decisions take five to ten years to fully price in. The period analysed here covers the immediate post-cancellation window but may not capture longer-run adjustment.

Figures are nominal. Price changes are reported in nominal terms and have not been adjusted for inflation. UK CPI rose approximately 8% between Q3 2023 and Q1 2026. Real price changes are therefore lower than the nominal figures shown. The comparison against the England national median is unaffected by this, as both series are nominal.