Last week brought shocking news. HS2, the nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t get anything built, or anything done.
Yet it might all have been so different.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 boys wanting to play with toys.<\/p>\n
\u2022 HS2 boss took home \u00a34.5m during \u2018appalling mess\u2019 of project<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n So how did we end up doing exactly the opposite of what he proposed? Well, the obvious answer is: boys and toys.<\/p>\n Even on its publication, critics argued Eddington\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This sense of HS2 as a kind of national virility test was felt particularly strongly by Andrew Adonis, the project\u2019s father, who argued that we had to have high-speed rail because everyone else did. It\u2019s present in statement after statement from the other politicians who kept it alive \u2014 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. \u2022 Don\u2019t fret over HS2 \u2014 we\u2019ll be using flying taxis before it\u2019s ready<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n These twin impulses \u2014 politics and prestige \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 itself deeply questionable \u2014 became prone to similar padding.<\/p>\n \u2022 CMA to review wrong turns on road and rail building projects<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n 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 \u00a3120 million project mandated by habitat rules that may not save a single bat.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Yet once the project was moving, it had a momentum of its own. Doubters were told to consider how cancellation would look \u2014 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\u2019ve said before, is that HS2 came to resemble Monty Python\u2019s Black Knight: a squirming, useless torso.<\/p>\n \u2022 At \u00a31bn a mile, HS2 is the ultimate white elephant<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n
But HS2 wasn\u2019t just a penis substitute. It was also the product of brute politics.<\/p>\n