HS2 and the slow decay of Britain
“I have tried to ascertain where design decisions get made... I have struggled to get to a definite answer.”
You can hear me discuss this (among other topics) with James O’Malley on this week’s episode of The Abundance Agenda, our weekly podcast, featuring guest Tom Forth.
Simon Jenkins, a living refutation of the idea that ‘writing is thinking’1, provides a concise history of HS2 for readers in a recent Guardian column. “At first HS2 was built to be high-speed – requiring wide tunnels and pathways – and then reduced in speed but not in cost. Then it was said to be about capacity not speed, but this did not appear to lessen the cost. Then it was cut from 11 platforms to seven at Euston. This was a really stupid train.”
James Stewart gives a more… comprehensive overview in his recent report, “The HS2 Experience”, which explores how Britain’s flagship infrastructure project became a truncated line between London and Birmingham, and how that line ballooned in cost from £21bn to… well, who knows2… in the space of 12 years. It turns out there is much about HS2 that is really stupid. Just not the actual train.
HS2 was conceived to solve a clear strategic problem. England’s spine is, from a transport perspective, awkwardly constricted. The railway lines connecting London to the great cities of the north have become bottlenecks, restricting the flow of goods and people and stunting economic growth, like a limb with an insufficient blood supply. HS2 would blast a new, Y-shaped route to the north, the ‘stem’ running from London to Birmingham with two branches going on to Manchester and Leeds. Speed is volume, and fast trains would shift vast numbers of passengers, freeing up huge amounts of capacity on the existing lines for people, goods and trade.
That was the theory at least, but the economic case was always confused. Stewart is (correctly) a fan of the book ‘How Big Things Get Done’ and quotes a line from it: “Projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong.” HS2’s problems started with the vision: while the strategic case was about capacity, the economic case focused on travel times, which were easier to measure and talk about, and more in line with how the Department for Transport typically talks about projects. The conflict between the strategic case and how the economic case was talked about led to constant confusion about the purpose of HS2 in the public discourse (epitomised by Jenkins above), but also made it hard to know how to evaluate proposed solutions.
Worse, a kind of British exceptionalism crept in. It’s a recurring theme that keeps coming up in national infrastructure projects3 - we set out to build something like a nuclear power plant or a high speed railway, and rather than learning from other countries or projects - boring! - we insist on creating our own ‘better’ thing. In this case, it wasn’t enough to just build a high speed railway line, from the outset it had to be the greatest and best high-speed line in the world, with all the signals that gave to suppliers on costs.
Stewart describes this as a culture of ‘gold-plating’, and Graham Winch, in a report for the Productivity Institute published back in February, explored what this meant in practical terms. As Winch puts it, around the world “the vast majority of high speed lines run at 300kph with an hourly frequency in single digits.” In the UK, for some reason, we set a requirement of 360kph - which was actually 400kph to allow for upgrades - and wanted up to 14-18 trains per hour.
That difference might not sound like much, but in engineering terms it’s massive. Almost every single aspect of building the line becomes more complicated and costly: the line can’t bend as much, so you run into more conflicts with existing infrastructure and terrain; bridges and viaducts have to be built to different specifications; cuttings have to be deeper; more noise mitigation is needed. Critically, it means you can’t just reuse designs from HS1, or existing high speed projects across Europe - you’ve turned a repeatable infrastructure project into a research exercise with all the uncertainty that involves.
Why was this choice made? Incredibly it’s not that clear. The Productivity Institute report notes that: “We have been unable to find a report on the rationale behind this very high specification.” This is a recurring theme that extends right into the technical designs for the various components of HS2, raised in this jaw-dropping quote from Stewart’s report:
I have tried to ascertain where design decisions get made and where the challenge comes from within the governance and decision-making system. I have struggled to get to a definite answer and my conclusion is that it is not clear and not consistent.
What appears to have happened isn’t so much ‘design by committee’ as an absolute free-for all. In practical terms it’s like the government slapped a document in OneDrive called ‘HS2 Design.docx’ and gave edit rights to thousands of people across hundreds of organisations. A major culprit was the Hybrid Bill for Phase 1 (the London to Birmingham section), which attracted new requirements the way a magnet attracts iron filings as it worked its way through Parliament.
The design specs for the Colne Valley Viaduct, now Britain’s longest railway bridge, are like a living monument to how this played out:
“…the specimen design given to the designer responds to the aspiration for the design to reflect the “international significance” of the viaduct, “a sympathetic and imaginative design for the local community” and to be “a suitable symbol of the country’s future high-speed network.” The result for the Colne Valley Viaduct has been described to me as an “iconic” design.
While it’s true that the Viaduct won the 2024 ‘Building Beauty’ award from the Royal Fine Art Commission - the bridge equivalent of ‘Rear of the Year’ - I don’t think Stewart means that last part as a compliment. The Colne Valley Viaduct cost £1.6bn to build. By comparison, France’s famous Millau Viaduct cost around $400m, while the Saale-Elster Viaduct in Germany - the longest high speed railway viaduct in Europe at around 4 miles - cost just €220m, twice the length for 1/7th the cost. Indeed, that entire high speed railway line cost a little over two billion.
Other valued contributors to HS2-Design v17 July 2024 (Final)[Approved]-Final.docx included Natural England, of bat tunnel fame. Stewart points out a recurring problem with all of these quangos and agencies with influence over the design - none of them were accountable for the costs of their recommendations. This is how we end up with nonsensical statements like “No bat death is acceptable” established as core planning principles, with the obvious implication that no amount of money is too much to preserve one bat.4
Not only does that make it economically impossible to build… well pretty much anything; it’s also incredibly dumb if you actually care about bats or the wider environment. People like to pretend that the choice is between building stuff or preserving the environment, but a system that diverts £120m to building a bat tunnel when virtually any ecologist would say that’s an absurd way to spend the cash is helping precisely nobody. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of the AI-run paperclip factory, so pedantically fixated on a literal interpretation of its mission that any alignment with sensible human values is lost.
In a normal enterprise you’d expect some robust challenge or oversight to counteract this, but in the strange world of HS2 it didn’t really exist. Some of that was due to the governance and structure, but partly it was a lack of talent and skills. HS2 Ltd was basically a start-up at inception. Not only did it have to hire technical and commercial expertise in a highly competitive market at a time when Crossrail was in full swing, it was hobbled in doing this by various quirks of government policy - randomly moving the headquarters to Birmingham as part of the ‘levelling up’ agenda for example.5
Simon Jenkins was shocked last week6 to learn that “Forty-three HS2 staff were identified as earning more than £150,000 a year,” which is the kind of thing you write when you’re an octogenarian newspaper columnist with little concept of modern salaries for organisations with £50 billion budgets. Hell, £150k is a fairly standard middle-management salary in the tech industry and if anything I’m shocked that they have so few staff at this level.
In any case, Jenkins reflects a culture throughout government of refusing to pay properly for jobs and then wondering why public bodies are full of under-qualified people. The result, in the case of HS2, was an organisation without the capacity or expert technical or commercial knowledge to challenge all these random design influences, or the various suppliers doing the bulk of design work on bridges, aqueducts and so on. The picture painted by Stewart is of a relatively small and underpowered outfit scrambling to get itself organised even as it battles against vendors and the whims of successive governments.
Ah yes, the government(s). Stewart points out that:
“Since 1st Jan 2020 there have been four Prime Ministers, six Chancellors, five Secretaries of State for Transport. Between 2020 and 2022 a dedicated HS2 Minister was appointed. My understanding is that this HS2 Minister spent 80% of his ministerial time on HS2. Feedback on this period of more dedicated ministerial leadership has been positive.”
Naturally this position was abolished when Liz Truss became Prime Minister, and never revived. Throughout the project, Westminster has acted like the worst kind of helicopter manager, obstructing progress, refusing to delegate ownership, and responding to setbacks with a combination of panic and denial. The relationship between HS2 Ltd and the Department for Transport is summed up by the approval process for commercial contracts, which passes through a Byzantine process that seems to add no real value or oversight.
Sign off for a recent suite of systems contracts (covering signalling and communications among other things) required eight stages of approvals - two internal stages in HS2 Ltd, four more within the Department for Transport, another another two with the Treasury and Cabinet Office. Not only does this take months, it makes it impossible from a project management perspective to know when decisions will actually - finally - get made. It would be one thing if this led to better procurement, but… well.
Even as government slows things down, it refuses to accept or understand the consequences of its behaviour. Winch points out in his report that: “Royal Assent for the Phase 1 hybrid bill was received some 23 months late in February 2017, against an original milestone of March 2015, yet the opening date originally set in 2010 remained 2026.” That two year delay should have been reflected in project timelines, but the government refused to accept this.
Low trust is a recurring theme in Stewart’s report, and you can see how the relationship breaks down - people working on the project understand that these timelines are impossible, but government is in total denial and therefore you can’t have sensible discussions about how to deal with this. The same thing happens that you see whenever people try to brute-force a large-scale project - bad decisions get made, nothing moves faster, but everything gets more expensive.
I’ve barely scratched the surface here, these are by no means the only problems, but they sum up the general vibe - a totally dysfunctional culture with a lack of serious leadership, much of which you can trace back to one place: Westminster. Junior project managers - hell, children organising a kick around - do a better job than this. This is the biggest issue in British politics right now, yet few seem to understand this. As Patrick Maguire wrote in The Times last week:
The Conservative Party in particular struggles on under the misapprehension that voters are preoccupied with gradations of left and right. We might say the same of grumblers who’d like the Labour Party to be loud and proud with its progressivism. Really what is at stake is far more profound than whether Robert Jenrick ends up sounding as tough on migration as Rupert Lowe or the tone Starmer takes when he talks about welfare reform. If the public cannot be convinced to trust mainstream governments to deliver, then the show is likely to be over for conventional politics. What one No 10 aide perhaps unfairly calls “the politics of anger” will take its place.
Luke Tryl, director of More In Common, posts regularly about the focus groups they conduct up and down the country. Their findings are stark:
Lack of agency - people feeling the government isn’t in control - drives the sense of malaise and desire for something different. HS2, or lack of, typifies it for lots of people. “We can’t even finish a train line” comes up often in groups as an e.g. of what’s wrong with Britain. Part of lack of trust in politicians is that people think they’re crooks. But another dimension is they just don’t think they’re up to the challenges or in control. If you can’t finish a train line, how can you sort out the NHS, control migration, hit net zero is the attitude.
The public could not give a crap about left versus right, about abstract political debates, about which minister is going to lose their job in the next reshuffle. There has been an absolute massive failure across politics - among the politicians themselves and the circus that covers them - to grasp and talk about the issues that matter to ordinary people in a serious way. To do the very basics of delivery. HS2 has become the ur-example of this national festival of incompetence.
Britain isn’t building, isn’t executing, and unless we can change this we will become a poorer country, our children will grow up poorer still, jobs and investment will dry up, resentment and anger will grow, and the 2030s will be a dark, dark time of rage and populism7. This is the most important issue in British politics right now, and if you still don’t understand that with Reform nudging 30% in the polls, public services failing and the national mood grimmer than it’s been for a generation, then I honestly don’t know what to tell you.
Thank you for reading - do please subscribe and share this piece, as it’s also great motivation to keep writing.
You can hear me discuss this (among other topics) with James O’Malley on this week’s episode of The Abundance Agenda, our weekly podcast, featuring guest Tom Forth.
A good heuristic for coming to a sensible position on almost any issue is to read what Jenkins thinks about it and adopt the opposite position.
Most recent estimates were at around £67bn, but will doubtless change during the project reset.
Also areas like housing regulations - we have an interview on the podcast coming soon with Ant Breach that touches on this.
Fortunately this is something the Planning and Infrastructure Bill should address.
I find this genuinely astonishing. Imagine hiring a load of people in Canary Wharf, getting them up and running, getting your teams working well together, and then launching a consultation exercise to shift them halfway across the country.
And probably most weeks, to be fair.
There’s a certain kind of person, usually with an FBPE hashtag in their bio ,who will respond to this with statements like “yeah but we already had this with Boris and Brexit” or whatever; and to these people I can only say ‘lol’.
This line is crucial:
“HS2’s problems started with the vision: while the strategic case was about capacity, the economic case focused on travel times”
The problem is that people always feel the need to construct an economic case separate from the vision and strategic rationale.
On my podcast this week, I discuss this directly with Jonny Mood, director of the National Audit Office for transport. He’s absolutely crystal clear: we do NOT need to be hostage to BCRs. The NAO does not need a certain BCR ratio to define value for money: they just need to know that the person who came up with the scheme knew what they were trying to achieve.
The (incorrectly) percieved pressure to create a numerical economic case has damaged innumerable projects; HS2 not least.
Very good, but also very depressing. I worked for a Government quango (to be nameless) which was established with new legislation, had a certain public profile, and quickly built up a large caseload - but we were on top of it, with experienced managers and a Board that listened. So of course the Government decided we must be moved North, and of course we entered a spiral of endless consultations. We shed the best staff, who had been recruited on the clear understanding that the organisation was London-based. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were spent on consultants and movers and redundancies, and with ballooning caseloads we finally lurched North - then an incoming Government abolished the whole caboodle within a year...........