Grin and bear it: any trains are better than an HS2 graveyard

Thanks to the leak given to Rail exposing the secret report on HS2’s latest cost increase and delay, the Department for Transport was forced to release the document and issue a statement about the project. It did not make for happy reading, and while the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, was right to pin much of the blame for the project’s travails on the former administration, she is by no means off the hook since HS2 will not only absorb about a quarter of all spending on transport in the rest of this Parliament, there are also key decisions to be made about how to

It certainly made the anti HS2 brigade happy as they received more support in the past few weeks than ever before. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform and a man who, as a populist, seeks political opportunity in any complex issue by presenting oversimplistic solutions, is on the march, demanding the HS2 axe. So is Simon Jenkins, the Guardian’s conservative conscience, and a former member of the British Rail board, who wrote a couple of columns saying it was time to scrap the whole thing. He has done the maths and points out, as I have done, that the scheme is costing £20m per day and will continue to do so for the whole period covered by the recent spending review, which stretches up to April 2029. And it will presumably continue at a similar rate until the opening which, as I understand, will not be until 2036 at the earliest.

The argument is reinforced by the fact there is precious little evidence in the report by ex-KPMG consultant James Stewart to suggest that the project can be turned around. His analysis is largely about what went wrong, and although he has suggestions on the way forward, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander’s statement and response to the report does not take us forward very much.

It would be easy for me to jump on this bandwagon. I have, much to the consternation of many of my fellow railway lovers, always opposed HS2. It was an ill-conceived project, with no clear aim or USP (unique selling point) and drawn up in haste with all the outputs determined by the mistaken emphasis on speed and time savings, rather than what Britain needed out of its transport system.

As a brilliant article by Nils Pratley in The Guardian on June 18 pointed out, the failings of the project were highlighted as early as 2013 when little had been spent by the National Audit Office which warned that there was no clear business case, that it was impossible to ascertain whether it offered value for money and concluding there was ‘a weak foundation for securing and demonstrating success in the future’. As understatements go, that equates with suggestions that the Charge of the Light Brigade did not go very well.

Stewart’s thorough report emphasises how the desire to ensure rapid progress on the scheme meant that detailed designs were not finalised before work started, leading to inevitable late and expensive changes. The nature of the contracts, which were cost plus – in other words, a licence to print money – was probably the most expensive mistake, but the lack of proper project management comes a close second. Indeed, for me the famous bat tunnel is doubly revealing. This was the tale of how more than £100m was spent on building a protective cover to prevent the possibility of bats from a nearby wood being hit by the speeding train. The whole process of determining what was needed took hundreds of hours of consultancy and eventually the scheme, which in fact cost far more than £100m in today’s money, was agreed.

As I wrote at the time (Rail 1023), when trying to discover how we ended up with the world’s most expensive bat tunnel, , I discovered that HS2 Ltd accounting processes were so sloppy that they had actually listed it as costing over £200m and they had to explain to me that this was an error. Not only did this show that HS2 Ltd tossed around millions of pounds with little consideration, the very fact that they did not have the common sense to just say that this level of spending on a bat tunnel was simply unacceptable. The person in charge of the project should have had the wit to say something like: ‘I am not doing this, it is ludicrous and it means we will get killed in the press. So bring me back a workable scheme costing a few hundred thousand… end of’. Unfortunately, the scheme is riddled with dozens of – not literally – bat tunnels.

Stewart’s report has considerable detail on the management structure and the fact that effectively no one was in charge, and there was no system checks and balances. He proposes a structure in which this is remedied – giving someone the power to say no to excessively expensive aspects of the scheme - but it will rely on having the right people in place with the power to make decisions without having to go through a host of bureaucratic processes.

As Alexander accepts, there is no quick fix. We await a more detailed report by the new chief executive Mark Wild than the interim one he produced to go with Stewart’s document which she said will be completed by the end of the year. Wild went through a similar process when he appointed the head of Crossrail after it was realised that the original completion date of December 2018 could not be met.

Therefore we, the taxpayer, have for the moment to put our trust in the ability of Wild and his team, to sort out the mess and actually produce a workable railway. That is a big ask, but despite my scepticism about the HS2 project and my concerns about the further spending, I think it is the only option. Something like £40bn has been spent so far, and the total for the line between Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street will exceed £100bn, as was first revealed in Rail. The idea of abandoning the project is simply not viable. First, the contracts would have to be paid up – the beneficiaries will undoubtedly seek large amounts of compensation to which in law they would be entitled. Secondly, such a patent failure which will leave rotting viaducts, rusting bridges and damp tunnels littered across the middle of the country will forever be a symbol of a nation which has lost its way. There will have been nearly all the downside, in terms of money and reputation, and nothing to show for it. For all HS2’s limitations, it will be better to have some kind of train service, which can later be extended, than a mass of rotting instracture which will lead to our great grandchildren asking ‘daddy, daddy, what is that funny bridge with plants on it that no one can go on’?. Neither the nation nor the railway can withstand that. No railway project would ever be considered worthwhile and we could kiss goodbye to Crossrail2 or any major schemes to improve the network. Meanwhile our European and Asian counterparts are building new lines and systems for fun. So folks, we have to grin and bear it, watch the slow painful progress of this insane project, and just hope that with sensible changes – such as possibly reducing the speed and the specifications, we may get away with a few billions. And, while I recognise the numbers are very different, as Crossrail was only around 20 per cent over budget, who cares now that it cost £3bn more than originally estimated? So at some stage we will get a shiny train running between Acton and Aston, and perhaps a bit further. Not worth £100 billion, but at least something useful!

Redundant safety rules

I have been on a lot of flights recently on a range of airlines, from Ryanair to China Airways, Emirates to Eurowings, and there is one thing they all have in come – the safety briefing. And it is completely insane, a relic for the kind of journey that may have been undertaken a 1930s flying boat but not for today’s jet journeys. On every flight I have to endure the excruciating demonstration of watching the cabin crew put on lifejackets and tells us not to inflate them till we leave the aircraft, while reminding us where the whistle is. In the whole history of aviation, there have probably been fewer than half a dozen incidents where these instructions have been at all relevant and certainly I can find no evidence of lifeboats being successfully launched in any them. Even the famous crash landing in the Hudson river resulted in people standing on the wings, but not actually plunging into the water. Very few crashed planes end up in water and most are not survivable like the Air France A 340 plane that plunged into the Atlantic due to pilot error. Most, like the recent Air India disaster, plunge into the ground. The whole ridiculous lifebelt procedure is a relic of the past and detracts from more relevant safety issues.

I think this is relevant to the railways. There are all kinds of redundant practices such as putting down detonators and providing hammers to break windows which purport to boost safety but are actually historic leftovers. And there is one which I think needs addressing, the idea that it is dangerous to cross a railway line on foot. Of course it is unwise to try to walk over the West Coast Main Line but is it worth installing expensive footbridges at little used lines where there is a train an hour or so? In Stuttgart recently, there was a pedestrian crossing of a track of a U bahn line right next to the station and people even used it while there was a train at the platform. Given that there will hopefully be a boom in light rail construction with many new lines across the UK, it is time we educated people about the relative risks of crossing particular railway lines, rather than imposing blanket bans.

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