Oh, What a Mess

!

I had not intended to listen to or watch the Prime Minister's performance at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester. It was just difficult to avoid. I was driving back from Stirling, the radio was on and Rishi Sunak was delivering something at last even though it was only a speech. His predecessors had established a custom of focusing their key conference speech on the truth, Johnson junked it and Truss didn't trust it, she constructed a parallel narrative. Sunak was more subtle, he twisted the truths and claimed that he was the great redeemer, the game changer for long-term growth. When the PM said he wanted to increase funding to towns, not cities, I thought that perhaps we should have kept Stirling as a town, it would have saved lots of time and anguish back in 2002, but then I remembered that Sunak is swift on promises but slow on delivery.

The speech had obviously been rewritten many times and polished by his backroom truth fairies. The speech was meant to be a paean to his lovely government. I was more intrigued by the subplot, his polemic against most of the things the government had done or not done over the past thirteen years. Arriving home, I switched on the TV to continue the compulsive agony and to observe the syncopated clapping from the audience who were on their last warning to behave themselves. I realised that this was a seriously slick performance, a play that Joan Littlewood would have been proud to present, the script was split into many acts and laced with irony. He made sycophantic shouts for his disloyal cabinet colleagues Suella and Kemi and even named Ian Duncan-Smith. He then segued into a passage transferring blame for the failures during the 13 years of Conservative Governments. It was the EU, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, devolved governments, Labour-run councils, environmentalists, and woke liberals that were responsible. The HS2 debacle was the fault of HS2 Ltd, a quango sponsored and funded by the government. He and the government were blameless. It was time for change for the long term and he was the person to make these changes. 

There were lots of policy changes he could have chosen to announce: housing, social care, climate change, school investment, benefits, reforming democracy, planning and building regulations. Little chance of that happening, "this is what I believe in and is what the country wants" he claimed: - smoking bans for young people, a new exam system, and abandoning HS2. I happen to agree with the latter decision but he could have done that several years ago when he was Chancellor and the costs were spiralling out of control and before construction began. Even eleven years ago this was a procurement tragedy waiting to happen.

The reasons for the escalation of costs and delays were obvious from the start. First, it should have started from the north where costs were less, and the tracks were in greatest need of upgrading to improve both the capacity and speed of trains. The huge difference in the train speeds and the age of rolling stock in the north compared to the southeast has been palpable and unacceptable for decades. Second, the massive compensation to land owners, building tunnels under the Home Counties to meet the outcry from Tory MPs, and the 4 miles of tunnelling under London to connect to Euston had never been properly costed. Third, the Finance and Construction contractors had cynically gamed the government procurement procedures. The government claims that HS2 is key to levelling up of the north were spurious. All the spending in the first ten years would be in the southeast to midlands section giving no immediate benefit to the north. This should have been called out from the start, the political leaders in northern cities were duped into supporting a scheme that was duplicitous and ultimately damaging to the prospects of improving rail travel for the many as opposed to the business elite. HS2 has been the vehicle for another dose of levelling down.

The future of HS2 will be part of the political battleground for the next twelve months. I would happily take the switch of funding to modernise and improve the capacity of the rail network in the north. Still, I would be sceptical about the PM's claims that all of the £36bn savings will be redirected to transport infrastructure schemes. I have no doubt that the savings will dwindle as claims for terminating contracts multiply and many of the list of schemes that Sunak recited to the conference had already been announced in previous programmes or will be too expensive to deliver. I would also ask the question of why bother continuing with the HS2 line from Euston to Birmingham? This is the part of HS2 where the most money is to be spent and where there is the minimum gain in speed. 

The UK is a small country and travelling at 300 kilometres per hour (186mph), the HS2 proposal does not justify the extra specification and cost of the track and trains to achieve this. Achieving an average speed of 200kph (125mph) would give a nonstop travel time from London to Manchester of 1 hour 36 minutes, reducing the existing fastest times by 30 minutes. If this more modest average speed for trains was extended to Scotland it would reduce the travel time from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow to 3 hours 30 minutes. This is well over an hour quicker than the fastest existing trains. It would be hard to justify travelling by air to London from any part of Britain other than from Aberdeen and Inverness in these circumstances. The quickest time from parking at Glasgow or Edinburgh airports to arriving in central London is about 5 hours including the painstaking rituals of airport security and this does not take account of the regular delays. Reducing air travel should be factored into the benefits of rail investment

Meanwhile, in much of the north, including the Manchester to Leeds and Sheffield routes, even achieving an average speed of 100 kph (60mph) would be a game changer. It is hard to argue against the priority of creating a modern and efficient rail infrastructure in the north. I would expect any detailed cost-benefit analysis would prove this to be a better value than an abridged HS2.

On the effectiveness of government, it is vital that we need a change after 13 years during which our public services have been trashed and infrastructure expenditure has been subject to multiple delays and overspends. I doubt Sunak will fare any better than his predecessors in achieving this. Remember he was the Chancellor who approved 'Eat out to help out', a Covid spreader that cost £846m, and Track and Trace that cost £37bn for a service that never delivered its objectives. He also approved £2.7bn that was spent on unusable PPE items, many of which stemmed from fast-track bids from friends of the government and then cost a further £737m to store them.  Rishi Sunak's CV suggests he should never be allowed any responsibility for the long term. A brighter future for Sunak and the country would be for him to call an election and escape the opprobrium that will continue to be heaped upon him by his party as well as the electorate.