At £1bn a mile, HS2 is the ultimate white elephant
HS2 will not be compelted until at least 2033
JONATHAN BRADY/PA
H igh Speed 2 is the white elephant that tramples all others in the herd of Britain's infrastructure disasters. At £9.4 billion in today's money, Concorde was small change compared with HS2; the Humber Bridge a few bob lost down the back of the sofa. As a catastrophe for the public finances, it has few rivals outside of world war. Only the hundreds of billions expended on lockdown eclipse it in recent times. Now reduced to a shadow of its former self, with phases linking London to Manchester and Leeds abandoned, and Birmingham its sole remaining destination, this rogue white elephant continues to munch its way through billions.
Only no news is good news when it comes to HS2. If it is making headlines they will, beyond a shadow of doubt, be bad ones. So it proves again with the announcement by Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, that trains will not start running on the surviving Phase 1 of the line even in 2033, itself a revised deadline from the original one of December 2026.
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Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
ROSS CLARK: The farce of HS2 shows how Whitehall has allowed waste and fraud to flourish on an industrial scale
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To put that into context, Rachel Reeves ' eye-watering tax rises in last October's budget were supposed to raise an extra £40 billion. The culture at HS2 is prodigal and woe betide any miser who tries to spoil the party. When risk assessor Stephen Cresswell raised concerns that the ballooning HS2 bill was 'actively misrepresented', he was soon shown the door in 2022. He took the firm to an employment tribunal and was this month awarded £319,000 compensation. His condemnation afterwards was withering: 'HS2 is not an organisation that should be trusted with public money.' And yet, we give it more public money. While the official estimate for its final cost is between £45 billion and £54 billion, many fear it will cost more than £100 billion. One of the many ways in which the project was misconceived from the start was that it was needlessly designed to be the fastest train service in the world, even though all the cities it connected were less than 200 miles apart. Consequently, far more earthworks were required and far more properties had to be demolished than if the line was built for a lower speed. Even at its original estimate, HS2 was going to cost, per mile, multiples of what the high-speed line from Paris to Strasbourg – its first phase was completed in 2007 – cost. It is bizarre that then-prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne waved through HS2 as a fully taxpayer-funded project in 2012 at the same time they were taking a scythe to public services to try to close Gordon Brown's gargantuan spending deficit. In their hubris, they imagined that Whitehall would make a better fist of HS2 than was made of HS1 – the line from London St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel – which was built with private money and sailed over its budget by around 20 per cent. An HS2 worker stands in front of tunnel boring machine Karen at the Old Oak Common station box site during preparations for completing the 4.5 mile HS2 tunnelling to London Euston How could they have not noticed the lousy record of cost control in almost everything run by the state? Time and time again, we find ourselves paying through the nose for things that other countries seem able to build for far less. Just look at the Stonehenge tunnel, a billion-pound project that has been 30 years in the making but was cancelled last year because of its mushrooming costs. And the less said about a third runway at Heathrow, the better. While other countries build things, we spend billions talking about it, holding endless inquiries, backtracking and redesigning the whole thing. We are about to go through the whole tortuous process again with the construction of Sizewell C. 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In the public sector, on the other hand, you just run off to the Treasury with a begging bowl, assured that the Government has invested so much of its political capital in it that it won't be brave enough to pull the plug. That is what has happened with HS2. Contractors know that ministers are desperate to get the project over the line, and behave accordingly. We are never going to solve the problem of infrastructure unless we first tackle the culture of the public sector. Public officials need proper incentives and penalties pegged to performance, and have it drummed into them that they are spending our money, not a bottomless pit of funds. Yet introducing a dash of private-sector dynamism into Whitehall is anathema to this Labour administration more concerned with union demands that civil servants continue to run the country from their sofas. Rachel Reeves sees spending on infrastructure as key to future growth, but with more projects on the horizon – such as building small modular nuclear reactors and updating the National Grid – there's little hope that these won't become very expensive millstones around the taxpayer's neck.
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5 hours ago
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Daily Mail
6 hours ago
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HS2 scheme 'will not be completed on time' as report highlights 'litany' of failures behind '£100billion white elephant' railway line
The disastrous HS2 scheme was delayed again yesterday, as a scathing report identified a 'litany' of failures and the rail line was labelled a '£100 billion white elephant'. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told MPs the gargantuan project was an 'appalling mess', with an audit revealing endemic overspending, hundreds of millions of pounds wasted and poor decision-making. Ms Alexander said there was no hope of meeting the current completion target of 2033, without putting a deadline as to when it would eventually be finished. Critics last night urged the Government to abandon HS2 altogether. The project has been a totem of waste in recent years, with taxpayer cash squandered on frivolities including a £100 million bat tunnel to protect local wildlife, and £20,000 for a Lego replica of Old Oak Station, the west London hub connecting HS2 with the Elizabeth Line. Yesterday's 130-page report revealed yet more liberal spending, with £250 million blown on the cost of just two failed designs for a revamped Euston station. Tory grandee David Davis, a long-term critic of HS2, told the Mail: 'It's a £100 billion white elephant, and it's still moving. 'It's going to cost a lot more than £100 billion. I would rather have 50 small, effective railways than one HS2.' Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, led the calls for the project to be abandoned completely. He said: 'Has the moment not come to recognise this is a failure? Let's scrap HS2, let's use the tens of billions of pounds we can save in the next decade to upgrade railway lines... and spend the rest on other national priorities.' The review, carried out by infrastructure expert James Stewart, found there was 'no single reason' for HS2's dismal failures to date, but identified political turmoil, prioritising 'iconic' design over practicality and indecision at a senior level among the problems. Mr Stewart said the HS2 board lacked the requisite skill needed to deliver Europe's largest infrastructure project, while suppliers 'largely failed to deliver' what they promised. There were even claims of fraud by subcontractors in the supply chain, which the Government said would 'be investigated rapidly and rigorously'. The report said HS2 was 'in a state of flux and uncertainty', and a 'fundamental reset' was required. Ms Alexander admitted: 'It's an appalling mess but it's one we will sort out.' Labour backbencher Dave Robertson said people were 'absolutely sick of HS2'. HS2 was originally due to run between London and Birmingham, then on to Manchester and Leeds, but the project was severely curtailed by the Conservatives because of costs. In 2013, HS2 was estimated to cost £37.5 billion (at 2009 prices) for the entire planned network, including the now-scrapped extensions from Birmingham. In June last year, HS2 Ltd assessed the cost for the line between London and Birmingham would be up to £66 billion. Budgeting was not helped by HS2 Ltd's 'consistent inability' to produce reliable cost and timeframe estimates, the report found. Ms Alexander also highlighted an assessment by Mark Wild, the chief executive of HS2 Ltd, which described 'the overall situation with respect to cost, schedule and scope' as 'unsustainable'. She added: 'Based on his advice, I see no route by which trains can be running by 2033 as planned.'
