HS2 will draw jobs to London rather than North, MPs told "I still think that the probability is that when we look at the benefits that accrue from High Speed 2 - the net benefits - the majority will flow to London and the South rather than to the northern cities, if past examples are anything to go by," he said. On the contrary, if we look at Tokyo since the building of the shinkansen, Tokyo's economic weight within the Japanese economy has grown dramatically. There is a very high level of economic concentration. Likewise in South Korea. The line there was built in part to achieve national economic balance, as they call it, but the gap between Busan in the south and Seoul in the north has actually widened during this period. New jobs that were created in Manchester would be at the expense of smaller towns in the region such as Oldham or Rochdale, Prof Tomaney added. A better investment, MPs were told, would be to improve links within major towns and cities within the region rather than a high speed route to London.