HS2: too expensive and another procurement tragedy

HS2 when not in a tunnel

Some projects defy logic and they increasingly emerge as government policy. One such was yesterday's decision to spend £33bn on a High-Speed Rail Link from Birmingham to London (HS2). 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 government should choose this as a statement of UK growth. I am not against investment in rail or the railways. 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 operate through integrated national railways, not service franchises. When trains are grossly overcrowded and unreliable in many parts of the UK, spending £33bn to duplicate an existing line to save a few minutes is surely not a priority. Many people from the southeast would probably pay more 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, air travel has become more time-consuming with ever longer security and check-in times and flight delays. It has become quicker and with a lot less hassle to travel by train from Edinburgh and Glasgow to the centre of London. This also has the added advantage of avoiding flight delays and expensive shopping malls that airports provide. Add the cost of the short rail commute from airports to central London, which is often as expensive as the flights and it should be a policy objective to reduce short-haul flights rather than allow further airport expansions. 

In the not-too-distant future 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. Supporting these changes would be a better investment and would reap rewards during the next five years not in twelve but more probably twenty years. Or the government could maintain disability allowances, encourage technical education and apprenticeships, allow the cost of living pay increases for public sector workers or improve the dreadful road and bus services that we endure. But none of these have the big bang effect of HS2.  Ministers are obsessed with the prestige that goes with these inglorious visions of 400kph trains tunnelling beneath their angry constituents and they have duped local politicians from Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester as well as Birmingham to go along with the fantasy of HS2 ever reaching the north-south divide. 

Most of the economic damage has occurred in the north but it will take at least another twenty years before Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds and maybe thirty years before Scotland reap any benefit from HS2. This will require more tranches of investment that have not been factored in yet. Surely the experience of the government's procurement debacles such as the aircraft carriers, the NHS IT system, hospital building 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 office blocks full of consultants and construction companies pushing the project. They realise that like defence contracts, big infrastructure contracts are cash cows. With school and hospital buildings slowing down and new runways for London airport on hold they need to provide the government with an excuse to transfer a large share 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. Our finance and construction cartels are the modern equivalent of Dengue fever and just as likely to wreck the prospects of HS2 by escalating the costs until the government or its successor pulls the plug. 

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.