HS2: too expensive and another procurement tragedy

HS2 when not in a tunnel

There are some things which seem to defy logic and they increasingly seem to emerge as government policy.  One such was yesterday's decision to spend £33bn on a High-Speed Rail Link from Birmingham to London.  At a time when our existing infrastructure is crumbling from underinvestment and dozens of local contractors are struggling to survive, it beggars belief that the coalition should choose this as a statement of UK growth. I am not against investment in rail or the railways but existing fares are almost beyond the means of most people as ticket pricing has become market-driven and increasingly complex since rail privatisation. UK fares are several times higher than fares in the rest of Europe, which has integrated railways, not service franchises. When trains are overcrowded in many parts of the UK spending £33bn to replicate an existing line to save a few minutes is surely not a priority. Many people from the south-east would pay to spend 20 minutes less in Birmingham rather than be tunnelled like moles under the Chilterns and other parts of the Home Counties that aspire to be 'areas of outstanding beauty'.

There are a multitude of other rail or transport improvements, let alone other things, that would improve our lives a lot more than HS2. In recent years, as air travel has become more time-consuming with longer security and check-in times, it has become quicker to travel by train from Edinburgh and Glasgow to the centre of London. This also has the added advantage of avoiding the expensive shopping malls that airports have become. At the same time all the evidence would suggest that people will travel to work less with flexible working arrangements (work is what you do not where you go) and super fast broadband will facilitate this as well as speed up work processes. Supporting these changes would be a better investment and would reap rewards during the next five years not in twelve or twenty years' time. Or the government could maintain disability allowances, encourage technical education and apprenticeships, allow the cost of living pay increases and improve the dreadful road and bus services that we endure. But none of these have the big bang effect of HS2 and ministers are obsessed with the prestige that goes with these inglorious visions of 400kph trains tunnelling beneath their angry constituents.

There is then the curious effect on the north-south divide. Most of the economic damage has occurred in the north but it will take another twenty years before Manchester and Leeds and maybe thirty years before Scotland reap the full benefits from HS2 and that will require another tranche of investment that has not been factored in yet. Surely the experience of the government's procurement debacles such as the aircraft carriers, the NHS IT system and the Olympics should have taught us that prestige projects are as toxic for the government as credit cards have been for many young people.

But we have shedloads of consultants and construction companies pushing the project. They realise that like defence contracts, big infrastructure contracts are cash cows. With school and hospital building slowing down and new runways for London airport on hold they need to provide the government an excuse to transfer a large tranche of public expenditure to the private sector. This is necessary to keep their salaries at the level that PFIs and badly procured government contracts have guaranteed them in the crazy years from the Iron Lady to Irn Brown. Try downloading the documents, the Department for Transport HS2 consultation documents are at dft high-speed-rail for the proposals and the route has been mapped on the link High Speed 2 Rail Britain Mapped.