It's hard to take Britain seriously if we can't even build a railway

Telegraph

3 days ago

One of the great unknowables about our increasingly tortured life in Britain today (and there are many) concerns HS2, the proposed high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham. Will it be finished? If it is, will it be useful? Or will its significance prove to be the waste of a vast amount of taxpayers' money (the exact figure is anyone's guess, but predictions of over £100bn do not seem wild), and the enrichment of various firms of engineers, contractors, conservationists and, inevitably, lawyers?
These and other questions form the basis of Sally Gimson's exhaustive book – the first detailed account of the project – on the chaotic conduct of the project since its godfather, Lord Adonis, announced it during the last phase of the Labour government in 2009. Gimson does not conceal her affiliation to the Labour party, so it is no surprise that the Conservatives get much of the kicking for the chaos – but then they were in power for 14 of the intervening 16 years and, to be fair to the author, she does smack her fellow leftists when necessary.
It seems that Adonis's original conception was to empower the north of England – Labour's heartland, though one wonders for how much longer – by improving their transport links. But the problem seems to have stemmed, as the author points out, from the pitiful guesswork behind the original estimate of costs at £34bn.
She says this was based on the cost of supposedly similar European grands projets, notably the French TGV. However this raises an obvious problem that seems not to have occurred to the creators of HS2. A visit to Google confirms that the landmass of France is 126 per cent bigger than the United Kingdom's, or two and a quarter times as large. Any visitor to France, outside its post-industrial north, will have seen the vast tracts of open country between its cities.
Therefore, developing lines for TGVs was far simpler than driving one through densely-populated areas such as the north-western home counties or even the south-west midlands. Also, Gimson does not mention, in her admiration of the French rail network, that SNCF, the national operator, had a debt of 24bn euros in 2023; and is only that small because an embarrassed French government assumed 35bn euros of SNCF's debt in 2021. Going faster is expensive, and even more so in Britain than across the Channel.
Here, the disruption and the cost of displacing and compensating blighted householders and businesses were, by comparison with France, enormous. And then there was the question of preventing noise to appease those near enough to hear it but too distant to be compensated. So much of the route would as a consequence be submerged either in hugely expensive tunnels or in cuttings so deep that the passengers would only be able to admire the surviving landscape for the smallest fraction of the journey.
As those who have travelled by TGV know, passengers prepared to pay for the privilege can avoid such a dystopian journey, staring at concrete or darkness, by sitting upstairs on double-deck trains. Sadly, no-one on HS2 proposed double-deck trains or the engineering that might have accommodated them; just trains that will be too long for any conventional platform, ordered in numbers now too large for what is to be built, but largely unsuitable for use elsewhere on the network.
Adonis envisaged a high-speed network running to Manchester and Leeds: but that was cancelled by Rishi Sunak as costs became unsustainable, supposedly taking with it the regeneration of the two cities (both of which looked pretty good when I last saw them, but never mind) and an expensively-designed project to rejuvenate Crewe, which could certainly do with it. However, there still remained, and remain, questions about the stretch that will be built – Sir Keir Starmer has promised it will be, at any rate, and we know he always stands by his promises – between London and Birmingham.
The infrastructure costs for this part of the line alone had already become astronomical, and this is where the conservationists came in. As part of the penance for violating some of the finest countryside in England, through the Chilterns, and for not giving much of a stuff for the inhabitants, HS2 is ostentatiously determined to be super-wonderful to the wildlife. At vast expense it is building a bat tunnel in Buckinghamshire, with all sorts of landscaping to try to ensure that rare bats are directed away from trains travelling at 250mph and towards safer pastures.
This insane expense has been undertaken despite there being no evidence that the bats will respond to the new signposting (which depends on their following the line of new hedgerows), or that any train has ever had a bat splattered over its front end in the history of rail travel. That, however, is but one indication of the absurdity of how HS2 is being executed.
Another is the farrago surrounding Euston, its (supposed) London terminus. This revolting station (and anyone who ever has the misfortune to use it will know that adjective is not hyperbole) is a monument to the worst cheap-and-nasty architecture of the 1960s. The idea, the author reminds us, was to pull it down and replace it with a more handsome station that had some sort of link to St Pancras, the home of HS1 and thence via the Channel Tunnel a gateway to Europe. The lives of numerous people in that part of Camden (where Gimson has served has a councillor) have been disrupted by pile drivers, and houses and flats compulsorily purchased in a stop-start process that now appears to be on again: but as with every other aspect of HS2, nothing is entirely clear.
Sunak withdrew the funding for the new station when he was prime minister in 2023; the line from Birmingham was to end instead in a dismal part of west London, Old Oak Common, between those renowned international destinations, Acton and Willesden Junction. One felt when he suggested this that Sunak was revealing a magnificent sense of humour: no one in his or her right mind would want to use a high speed train that dumped passengers in a remote and unappealing suburb in outer London. It makes little odds that Old Oak Common is not too far from the nearly-new Elizabeth Line; it would still wipe out any time gains from the faster trip from Birmingham.
The present government recognised this and restored funding for the expensive tunnel to take HS2 to Euston. However, Euston itself would not be redeveloped, Sir Keir Starmer has said, except with private capital. So far there are no takers; and nor is there a plan to link it to St Pancras. The project is a shambles, as the author points out. There is no doubt that successive Conservative-led administrations treated it as a permanent afterthought.
However, as Gimson intimates in the prolix 22-point plan with which she ends the book – designed to instruct future governments about massive infrastructure projects – the fault really lay with the Brown administration, and Adonis. They never set out clearly the rationale for the project, consulting properly all those affected, and not attempting to fix a realistic budget until it was properly understood what was entailed. But as she also intimates, the real problem was that ministers who had to take the decisions affecting the project and civil servants who had to advise them generally hadn't a clue what they were doing.
The book is deeply researched and consequently highly detailed, though not well-written. At times it seems the author has but a casual relationship with English grammar and idiom, and cliché is her first resort too often: she would benefit from avoiding the 'cup of cold sick' metaphor in her writing. She seems to favour the project, though is outraged by the way it has been conducted. Yet from the evidence she presents, the Birmingham to London stretch was entirely unnecessary. A high speed line from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds would have been a different matter – and because of the terrain, less expensive – and the much-discussed link, frequently mentioned by Gimson, from Hull to Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool to jump-start the so-called 'northern powerhouse'.
She mentions, too, the alternative uses for the tens of billions squandered on HS2, such as improving the existing rail network. Indeed, it could have been used to re-open some of the lines myopically closed in the 1960s after the Beeching report, which left many now sizeable towns with no railway and, therefore, no option but to use the roads. The book often mentions that investment is focused on the London area and the north is deliberately starved of it; but had some railway lines in the south-east not been ripped up 60 years ago the roads there would be less overloaded, because the area is so densely populated. Also, there is insufficient recognition that had HS2 gone to Manchester and Leeds as well as Birmingham, it would have been easier for people to escape those cities for London, and not just the opposite. The economic benefits might not have emerged where expected.
How HS2 evolves from now is anyone's guess. The scope for failure remains enormous, and the way this Government is managing the economy means nothing is certain. This book describes the nature of the mess; but it does (whether intentionally or not) reinforce the perception that HS2 is a mess, and the depressing notion that Britain lacks the direction and wit to undertake anything serious. God help us if, one day, we have to embark on a project more important than a railway.
★★★★☆