HS2 and the bat tunnel: time for a Spanish inquisition?
It is good to get an outsider’s perspective in our often inward looking industry
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It is good to get an outsider’s perspective in our often inward looking industry and therefore I commend anyone interested in HS2 to read Sally Gimson’s new book on the debacle, rather predictably named Off the Rails. Gimson is no rail buff but her connection with HS2 is relevant. As a former councillor in Camden which, of course, is home to Euston station and the associated devastation caused by the non-construction of the line, she had to help deal with the fall out from the chaos at Euston.
It is a justifiably angry book as would any assessment of what has happened to this benighted project but it is made all the more commendable in that she is not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of HS2 which she thinks at root is not a bad idea. Her fury is confined to the way that what seems like a good and relatively simple idea, to build a railway line to improve connections between north and south, has resulted in such chaos and wasted money.
The message of the book is in many ways a more readable and accessible form of the devastating recent report into HS2 for the Department for Transport by James Stewart that highlighted the governance failings and the costly political interference. Gimson highlights many of the same issues, notably the hasty decision over the route, confusion as to the purpose of the line particularly whether it was for speed or capacity, the rush to start work before specification was clarified and the lack of political oversight. The latter is interesting because there has both been a lack of involvement from politicians but also ignorant interference such as Rishi Sunak’s disastrous decision to scrap the Birmingham – Crewe section.
There was one exception in terms of ministers. Gimson praises the one member of the government, Andrew Stephenson, who tried to get a grip on the project as opposed to the other transport ministers who seem to have simply ignored it. Stephenson, appointed unwillingly as HS2 minister in 2020 by Boris Johnson, actually pushed through the project, ensuring it obtained notice to proceed and, moreover, tried to keep a rein on the financial performance of HS2 Ltd. He even tried to stop the insane £100m+ bat tunnel but came up against the need to change the law or challenge Defra, neither of which were possible.
The very fact that no one else ever tried to take control in that way is an illustration of what went wrong with the project. The bat tunnel says it all – someone should simply have said we are not spending this crazy amount on the possible risk to bats. End of.
Gimson takes a measured view of the HS2 debacle which makes her arguments all the more powerful. She points that there have been other failures across the world. Australia which has been discussing a high speed rail scheme for forty years, has according to transport planner Philip Laird of the University of Wollongong whom she quotes ‘the record for high speed rail studies with no construction’. On the other side of the world, Canada has equally failed to build a single metre of line while the California high speed rail project is up there with HS2 in the Premiership League of troubled schemes. The scheme to link Los Angeles and San Francisco has so far racked up spending of $30bn for a section that runs from Bakersfield 110 miles north of LA and Merced in the Central Valley a similar distance from San Francisco and is only going to be finished ‘some time in the 2030s’ and there is as yet no clear route to reach either of the two major destinations. Estimates of the eventual cost hover around $100 bn.
Therefore it is wrong to characterise UK as the only country which has struggled with high speed rail. Even those nations where the line are seen as successful and are well used have run up huge debts to pay for them and have hesitated about building extensions because of the costs and the uncertainty over passenger numbers. These projects are huge, big gamechangers and immensely complex with outcomes that are not necessarily predictable.
So what would make a successful project? For the book I am writing on high speed rail across the world – fortunately I have a wider and happier remit than Gimson – there are some obvious success stories. While we all know about China and Japan, the most surprising is Spain where Europe’s largest network has been built at a cost per kilometre far lower than anywhere else apart from China and in a short time frame of just three decades. The most fascinating aspect of the Spanish story is that the government never attempted to justify the scheme with a conventional business analysis. Instead, having seen the success of the initial line between Madrid and Sevilla built in time for the Expo 92 business conference, the government simply announced there was going to be a network encompassing nearly all the provincial capitals and giving most people in the country access to Madrid within four hours. In terms of a business case, this did not make sense as many lines stretched out to sparsely inhabited areas but as a national project, highlighting Spain’s progress after the dark days of the Franco dictatorship, it has been an astonishing success.
Whereas the railways in the aftermath of the dictatorship were in a parlous and decrepit state, and threatened by competition from road and air, they have become the pride of the country. Madrid- Barcelona high speed rail has an 80 per cent modal share.
The success of the scheme was achieved by setting out a clear idea of the project, garnering support from local and national politicians, having a rolling programme to enable contractors to develop expertise and providing a consistent bu.dget. The government never bothered with all those detailed business cases and passenger number predictions on which HS2 has spent tens of millions. Knowing precisely what you want and why you are building it should be the basis of any proposal. China, which has completed 30,000 miles of line, is of course the other example which I have written about previously
It is late, but not too late, to learn from this success. HS2 has to be rescued and the new Chief Executive Mark Wild is hard at work on a review which is expected to be produced before the year is out. He organised a similar and successful reset by when he took over the Crossrail project which had run into similar difficulties - but on a far smaller scale. Wild must work out what is needed and how it should be delivered. That will entail a radical approach. I like the suggestion from Lord Berkeley, who was a dissenting voice on the Oakervee review launched by Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister, that the money taps for the contractors must be turned off. Working with Michael Byng who has undertaken several studies on HS2, Berkeley suggests that the controversial ‘cost plus’ contracts which have resulted in massive rises in expenditure must be changed. In a report for the HS2 review team, they say that in order to reset the scheme, ‘the existing contracts with the supply chains, construction and design and project management teams must be renegotiated, by mutual consent. If consent is not forthcoming then the only option available to HMG, is to place HS2 Limited into Administration, thus allowing the Administrator to disclaim those onerous contracts, before negotiating new contracts, which meet HMG Requirements’. In other words, essentially make HS2 bankrupt, as happened with Railtrack. That is a pretty powerful threat which the contractors will baulk at, but then radical action to save the project and stop it leeching ever more money has to be taken. HS2 is too big to fail, but it is also too expensive to continue in its present form.
Stop the noise
I am greatly indebted to Paul Hollinghurst, the Secretary of Railfuture East Anglia branch for having the patience to note down the number of announcements raining down on hapless passengers at King’s Cross on a day when his train to Cambridge was cancelled. It has been a particular bugbear of mine. He was therefore waiting for the 2209 and in the intervening 11 minutes, he had to endure no fewer than 11 announcements including three about minding gaps between platform and trains (which are not significant at King’s Cross anyway), with others warning not to skateboard or cycle, to hold the handrail on escalators and ‘to report anything suspicious’. Even on the train there was no escape as in the five minutes before departure, there were two useful ones about it being the train to Ely, interspersed with two lots of ‘see it, say it, sorted’ and two of ‘there are safety notices in every carriage’.
Paul decided to try to find out who mandates all this nonsense and whether there is some scientific basis for the constant barrage of noise. Network Rail told him that there was ‘no information that suggests that we’ve ever undertaken any research into the matter’. He discovered there were no rules on the matter of announcements and that it was up to the station teams to decided on their nature and frequency.
I realise that in the scheme of things this may not be a top priority, but it is noticeable that travelling on trains abroad there are far fewer announcements. Tuning out of all this noise would help to create the sort of user-friendly environment for passengers that should be the basis of attracting people to rail travel. Having your ears blasted every minute with ’see it say sorted’, surely the most hated slogan in the English language, is not conducive to enjoying a pleasant train journey. Perhaps time for the Railway Standards and Safety Board to assess the value – or otherwise – of these announcements.
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