7 hours ago
MPs treated HS2 as a test of virility. No wonder it's been a flop
L ast week brought shocking news. HS2, the nation's flagship infrastructure project, will be further delayed. A damning report found that the project has been comprehensively mismanaged, and needs to be completely reset to stop costs ballooning further. The secretary of state blasted the appalling failures to date, but promised that Whitehall would now finally get a grip.
Well, I say shocking news. At this point such stories are as traditional a part of the news calendar as the Boat Race. HS2 has become the fiasco of fiascos, the disaster of disasters, a painfully on-the-nose metaphor for a country that can't get anything built, or anything done.
Yet it might all have been so different.
In 2005 Alistair Darling commissioned Sir Rod Eddington, former head of British Airways, to review the transport network. Eddington argued for expanding our big international gateways, such as Heathrow and the container ports; upgrading the roads, by introducing pay-as-you-go pricing; fixing our godawful planning system; and tackling the worst pinch points, not least the commuter routes into the big cities. But he warned that many of the proposals for high-speed rail were solutions looking for a problem — boys wanting to play with toys.
