Last 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.

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So how did we end up doing exactly the opposite of what he proposed? Well, the obvious answer is: boys and toys.

Even on its publication, critics argued Eddington’s review was insufficiently bold. A fusty focus on costs and benefits was all very well for an Australian spreadsheet-jockey, but not for the nation of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

This sense of HS2 as a kind of national virility test was felt particularly strongly by Andrew Adonis, the project’s father, who argued that we had to have high-speed rail because everyone else did. It’s present in statement after statement from the other politicians who kept it alive — and in the impulse not just to build it, but to build the most gold-plated possible version. Boris Johnson in particular spoke as if cancelling HS2 would leave the nation (and its prime minister) somehow unmanned.
But HS2 wasn’t just a penis substitute. It was also the product of brute politics.

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Eddington had called, rightly, for Heathrow expansion. But the Tories had voters under the flight path. So, in opposition, they came out against the new London runways. To avoid looking like outright blockers, they paired this with a commitment to joining Heathrow to some kind of high-speed rail route. The only cost-benefit calculation involved parliamentary seats.

These twin impulses — politics and prestige — reinforced each other. Because HS2 was to be a symbol of British virility, it had to go fast, 20 per cent faster than the European standard. Going fast meant going straight. That meant that it couldn’t follow existing road or rail lines: it would have to be a greenfield project. That sent it through lots of pretty Tory seats, which didn’t even get any stops to make up for it, because that would slow the train down. MPs in those seats duly demanded that much of the line be put in tunnels, adding hugely to the cost. The decision to have Euston as the London terminus — itself deeply questionable — became prone to similar padding.

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Of course, as HS2 got going, plenty of other problems came into play. The project inevitably collided with our godawful planning system: reviews of reviews, consultations on consultations, environmental impact statements so lengthy they chewed up entire forests. There was the emblematic awfulness of the bat tunnel, a £120 million project mandated by habitat rules that may not save a single bat.

Engineers could not even survey much of the route until it had been confirmed by an act of parliament. Perhaps the worst problem, however, was leadership. In the 16 years between 2006 and 2022, there were 20 rail ministers. Instead of holding the management company, HS2 Ltd, to account, the underpowered and inexperienced team at the Department for Transport became its cheerleaders — and patsies. Private sector contractors swarmed in to feast, with each shift in scope generating millions in fees. The framework for the main contracts proved particularly disastrous.

Yet once the project was moving, it had a momentum of its own. Doubters were told to consider how cancellation would look — to those in the north, to other countries. Decommissioning would cost billions, on top of the billions in sunk costs. And when Covid broke out, the project became a stealth stimulus package, propping up the construction sector as tools were downed elsewhere. In short, it was always easier to amputate a limb than deliver the killer blow. But the result, as I’ve said before, is that HS2 came to resemble Monty Python’s Black Knight: a squirming, useless torso.

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But then, HS2 was never actually a railway. It was whatever you wanted it to be: a job creation scheme, a symbol of national pride, an eco-friendly alternative to airport expansion.
For many local politicians, it was not only a source of a good photo-op but a Trojan horse for wider investment — just as Ken Livingstone backed the Olympics because it was the only way to get the money to regenerate east London.

But instead of providing a scaffold for further schemes, it ended up swallowing everything else: rail now dominates the transport budget, and HS2 dominates the rail budget, leaving other projects to fight for scraps. The expansion of Manchester Metrolink, for example, effectively ground to a halt. And alarmingly, the government looks likely to make many of the same mistakes with Northern Powerhouse Rail, the long-mooted high-speed route across the Pennines.

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For some people, the criticism of HS2 is overblown. All construction projects balloon in price — even though few end up with the government and the management company unable to agree even on a completion cost. Still, they say, when the project is done, we will be grateful to have it.

Lord Adonis, in a 2023 essay in Prospect, cited the example of the Elizabeth Line — another over-budget project whose critics have now “vanished like the mist at dawn”. He insisted that “the problems of HS2 result from mismanagement in execution, not from conception or design” and indeed that “the only valid criticism” of the original, full-fat version serving Manchester and Leeds “is that it is being built several decades later than it should have been”.

But it seems right to leave the last word to Eddington: “The risk is that transport policy can become the pursuit of icons. Almost invariably such projects — grands projets — develop real momentum, driven by strong lobbying. The momentum can make such projects difficult, and unpopular, to stop, even when the benefit-cost equation does not stack up.”

HS2 has indeed become an icon. But not in the way that any of its creators intended.