It’s a stump. A pointless, redundant stump, sitting between London and the Midlands. A relic of a lost era in which we still dreamed that we might actually improve the country, before the inadequacy of our leaders doomed us to a cycle of decline. It’s a monument to our folly. They should give up on designing business cases for it and simply build a museum around it, so that it can be displayed as a demonstration of our total failure to behave like a serious country.
This is now the only logical thing to do with HS2, or rather what’s left of it. Today’s report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), lays out the tawdry reality of it. We’re not building a transport project. We’re formalising the vestigial remnants of political failure.
Once upon a time, HS2 was a vision for Britain’s future. It would provide fast-speed travel between the cities in the north and south. By taking those faster trains off the track it would speed up times on local commuter trains.
Freeing up capacity on rail would tempt passengers and freight off the roads, which would improve capacity on the motorways. It would bring us closer to net zero while creating jobs and improving connectivity.
The idea was sound, but the execution was poor. For more than half a century we’ve known that the Civil Service lacks specialist skills or expertise. Officials are rewarded for moving jobs as often as possible, turning them into professional amateurs.
Anyone who sticks around doing the boring boiler-room work on which government depends, such as rail franchise negotiation, is considered a failure. Commercial work is farmed out to consultants on eye-watering day-rates, depriving the Civil Service of that knowledge on a corporate basis. We’ve had decades to fix it. We’ve failed to do so. And now we’re suffering the consequences.
Over a decade ago, the PAC was warning about the implications of this amateur culture on HS2. “Our first report was in 2013,” the committee said, “and even at that early stage we were warning about an emerging pattern of costs increasing, benefits decreasing, and the apparent lack of the necessary commercial expertise to oversee the programme.”
Part of the failure relates to the extent of executive power in this country. Unlike the US or Europe, our parliament is basically completely powerless. The size of the government majority turns the Commons into a rubber-stamping operation.
This results in plans which simply do not receive sufficient scrutiny. Ten years after its first report, in July 2023, the PAC published one focused on the proposed HS2 station at Euston. “Amongst other things,” it said, “we noted that the budget for Euston had proved completely unrealistic even before considering the impact of inflation, and that parliament had again not had the transparency it needed on the likelihood of cost increases.”
The full extent of executive power was on show last autumn, when Rishi Sunak unilaterally cancelled the second stage of HS2, between the Midlands and the North. Just like that, with the wave of a hand he destroyed more than a decade of work. It was designed to show that he was prepared to smash “the old consensus”, so he could present himself as a change candidate at the election. This lasted a matter of weeks before he embraced the old consensus again by making David Cameron Foreign Secretary. Sunak has now moved on to other things – backbencher plots, Rwanda, Piers Morgan interviews. But the remnants of HS2 sit there: a crime scene which the perpetrator walked away from, never to think about again.
All that will be left is the London-Midlands leg, the part which was of the least utility but had to be completed to ensure a North-South system. The business case for this leg is now estimated to be between 1.1 and 1.8 – which means that for each pound spent, the taxpayer will get back between £1.10 and £1.80.
That first number, you might realise, is perilously close to £1, which would make the project economically pointless. And even these numbers are only achieved by excluding sunk costs of £24.6bn and including the cost of £11bn remediation work if the first leg were to be cancelled.
No one even knows what it is for any more. “HS2 now offers very poor value for money to the taxpayer,” the PAC found, “and the Department [of Transport] and HS2 Ltd do not yet know what it expects the final benefits of the programme to be.”
Even that is to state the case too generously. When HS2 trains joining the West Coast Main Line at Handsacre, near Lichfield, they will have to travel at the line’s speed, rather than the much faster HS2 speed. And in fact, they are likely to be slower than the existing Pendolino tilting rolling stock. That’s what we’ve accomplished. After all that spending, we’ll have created a rail project which is actually slower than the one which already exists.
The HS2 stump should be a moment of reckoning. We should think of it like the Statue of Liberty, found lost and buried on an overgrown beach by Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. It is evidence of a political culture which has failed at even the most rudimentary elements of organisational competence.
We took a decent project and mismanaged it, failed to scrutinise it, overspent on it, and exposed it to the vandal whims of a superficial and self-interested prime minister, who killed it to satisfy an electoral gambit which could not work, and indeed wouldn’t even last a few weeks. So now we’re left with a stump where our transport policy should be. You couldn’t find a better encapsulation of our national decline.
If there is anything to be salvaged from the situation, it is this – it at least provides a guide to the kind of deep structural changes we need if we’re ever to be treated like a serious country again. We need specialist skills in the Civil Service, genuine scrutiny in parliament, and the kind of restraint on executive power which would prevent a future prime minister from behaving the way Sunak has. Without it, we’re doomed to this cycle of decline.
HS2 sits there like a crime scene - the epitome of our national decline
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07.02.2024
It’s a stump. A pointless, redundant stump, sitting between London and the Midlands. A relic of a lost era in which we still dreamed that we might actually improve the country, before the inadequacy of our leaders doomed us to a cycle of decline. It’s a monument to our folly. They should give up on designing business cases for it and simply build a museum around it, so that it can be displayed as a demonstration of our total failure to behave like a serious country.
This is now the only logical thing to do with HS2, or rather what’s left of it. Today’s report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), lays out the tawdry reality of it. We’re not building a transport project. We’re formalising the vestigial remnants of political failure.
Once upon a time, HS2 was a vision for Britain’s future. It would provide fast-speed travel between the cities in the north and south. By taking those faster trains off the track it would speed up times on local commuter trains.
Freeing up capacity on rail would tempt passengers and freight off the roads, which would improve capacity on the motorways. It would bring us closer to net zero while creating jobs and improving connectivity.
The idea was sound, but the execution was poor. For more than half a century we’ve known that the Civil Service lacks specialist skills or expertise. Officials are rewarded for moving jobs as often as possible, turning them into professional amateurs.
Anyone who sticks around doing the boring........
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