«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.»
This post is mostly about pretending that things like these "just happen", "because reasons", where starry-eyed Great Centrist Ingenues like this blogger or Dan Davies or Brad deLong tend to argue that it is simply "out-of-control organizations".
But all the issues described here are not the product of pure happenstance or organizational dysfunction (which were it happens it is often cultivated):
* If these issues were to cost money to the people who matter they would be fixed soon; for example when the big oligopolies complained that the Competition And Market Authority was being too zealous the government acted drastically and promptly: fired its chief, downsized the staff a a lot, and appointed as new chief someone who used to be a leader of one of those oligopolies.
* All these issues benefit two big and powerful constituencies: incumbent property rentiers and incumbent builders plus smaller but influential professional categories and even without active lobbying no government would want to make things worse for them.
Incumbent rentiers are sitting pretty and are delighted with delays, overspending, bureaucracy. The UK government is also composed largely of incumbent rentiers or their political representatives so the more the merrier.
I remembered this amazingly "Great Centrist Ingenue" quote from an earlier article:
«“While these environmental concerns are valid, they must be weighed against the road safety issues raised by the residents.” NIMBYs would be quite happy to bulldoze a quarter-mile of countryside if it means they avoid a single truck driving up their road each day for a few months.»
* Look at the picture of the affected road: it is clearly a place for affluent "Blow you! I am alright Jack!" tory voters. https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/72d2a79e-78e7-47f6-aa36-7e1e4b6f1144_1500x1125.png Those voters are the lifeblood of english politics, the target constituency of all main parties (New Labour, Conservatives, LibDems, Reform) because they are the rock on which thatcherism rests. Offending them is treason! :-)
* Those affluent tory voters and the affluent tory councilors representing them are in effect asking "What's in it for me?" and getting no answer: that "single truck driving up their road each day for a few months" might mean however improbably some inconvenience to them or even lower property prices. Given that "What's in it for me" people are involved offering affected property owners "compensation" of £10,000 per month for the duration might get things unstuck.
The issue usually is not "out of control" processes it is the strict political enforcement of thatcherism for the benefit of incumbents as incumbency is the greatest english value.
The strategic case should also be an economic case: you try and make assumptions and from that, you calculate a value.
But a deeper problem with HS2 is that there isn't much of even a vague calculation that makes it add up. HS2, like much of rail, is the Underpants Gnomes of South Park: Build Rail Line - ??? - PROFIT! Sometimes, building rail lines is a great idea, but it isn't an automatic cause of prosperity. You have to ask why building a particular rail line would increase prosperity. Who is going to use it? Commuters, tourists, students, families, business people going to a meeting? Do people want to go Euston to central Birmingham or do they live in St Albans and are going to Edgbaston, in which case the car will still be quicker compared with multiple connecting trains?
How full is the train right now with people getting on at Birmingham and going to London?
Brilliant piece — forensic, funny, and quietly furious. HS2 isn’t just a train that never arrived; it’s a monument to a governing class that no longer knows what it’s doing — or worse, no longer cares.
I have a friend who is a civil engineer - worked on Crossrail, has worked on HS2, and was head-hunted to spend a few years in Hinkley, but the offer wasn’t tempting enough to spend 5 days a week away from her family.
I’m unsure if she’s paid over 150k, but it will certainly be in 6 figures given her seniority and the actual genuine responsibility for not drilling through gas mains, Victorian sewers or taking out a power system.
Which strikes me as a lot more valuable than, say, Simon Jenkins.
The craziest part for me is, as you mention, the fact that numerous countries in Europe and around the world have high-speed rail networks, and HS2 basically chose to ignore all the lessons learned from them and do its own thing. Then you have a bunch of people coming in and saying it's just not possible for x, y, and z reasons when numerous other countries somehow manage to do it. It's like the UK swings wildly between "we can do it better than Johnny Foreigner can" and "if we can't do it, it's just not possible".
“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.
«The (incorrectly) percieved pressure to create a numerical economic case has damaged innumerable projects; HS2 not least.»
My impression is that the economist case is often just a figleaf where someone gets paid to tweak a spreadsheet until the numbers come out as desired and this happens in both the private and public sectors.
My guess is that what matters most is the political case: the project is already decided for political reasons and everything else is hypocrisy.
My guess is that HS2 is a very good illustration of that as its clear rationale is the votes of property owners:
* Since the East Midland line is at capacity rationing access to it would mean greatly increasing the commuter season ticket, crashing property prices all along that; building a high speed line besides it would mean that longer distance passengers would use the latter freeing up capacity for commuters, allowing season tickets lower, and even perhaps increasing demand for commuter property so protecting and even boosting prices along the East Midlands line.
* The Interchange Station would put a large chunk of the north-west Midlands within 1h commuting distance of London, greatly boosting property prices there and creating a huge new area of conservative voters.
George Osborne (The Independent) 2013-10-09: “Hopefully we will get a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up”
Stephen Bush "Politics" 2018-03-16 (NEW STATESMAN): “One Tory minister in a safe seat told me that when she used to ask Osborne for something, he would first ask her how big her majority was — and then reply, with a smile, that it was too large for her enquiry to be worth considering.”
James Forsyth "The Tory modernisers are Margaret Thatcher’s true heirs" 2013-04-13 (The Spectator): “His Chancellor and chief political strategist, George Osborne, is constantly looking for new ways to create Tory voters.”
Yeah, it’s a really interesting point and pretty much aligns with my thinking on these kinds of issues - there’s a long held tenet in business that making a decision is often more important than making the exact right decision and I feel it applies here. The strategic case for greater railway capacity up the spine of the U.K. is common sense, similar projects like Crossrail outperform expectations in terms of demand and impact, the whole economic case part feels like chronic overthinking and defensiveness coming from a sort of weird inability to say ‘trains are good actually’.
Until last summer, I was Director of Strategy & Innovation at Transport for London. I left to set up a new business focused on helping the sector make decisions. As this feels like the single biggest issue we face. If we don't fix this, we don't fix anything:
Fantastic article. You should really get a job with Private Eye! Of course, another thing which slows down our ability to build infrastructure (and therefore make things more expensive) is the whole “consultation” process. I’ve written this in quotation marks because invariably decisions seem to be made before the process has ended, but authorities have to complete them as they are a legal requirement. A classic example of this was Lambeth’s decision to move a pedestrian crossing, where the contractors were booked to start the work a day after the consultation ended! I’d love to hear your views on how local authorities run their consultations and why some (not all) seem to think it’s ok to ignore the results.
Sad to say but I think the current vibe in Private Eye is not very sympathetic to the author's mentality that we should actually *do* stuff from time to time. While gesturing at the bigger-scale problems, the regular columnists across the domains that matter are Jenkinsy/NIMBY in mindset.
I really enjoyed the podcast this week especially the HS2 discussion.
You're totally right that Britain has to pick its path and either move with the times of decline.
I rode on Indonesia's HSR last year and it was embarrassing for me as a Brit, how good it was - fair play to Indonesia, and China who helped build it. It was excellent.
Many "developing" countries have a hunger and energy right now which is sadly lacking in the UK where judicial challenge, protecting bats, and house price concerns restrict the greater good... We could do with utilitarianism to take the lead once again!
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...........
I'd completely forgotten this happened with HS2 and I find it just an absolutely bewildering - and frankly cruel - way to treat valued staff. It's one thing so say, "okay, we want to rebalance government a bit so we'll open more new roles in the north," but to hire a bunch of talented people and then decide "actually you all live in the wrong place, so move or you're fired" is the work of deeply unserious people who don't actually care about delivery.
I get a sense that Kier Starmers political strategy reflects what has been said here. I’m not yet convinced voters are responding as the article anticipates.
Well I think the problem is this stuff takes years to manifest the results, so you really have to go in hard and fast and aim to have people see the real benefits in the second term. Realistically the attitudes voters have now have set in over 10 years or more.
Very good article. The reduction in traveling times were linked to ‘significant’ productivity gains being delivered for business travellers, except on-board WiFi and 5G destroyed that argument. I live near HS2 in Warwickshire and cannot go south without crossing a choice of several construction sites, resulting in 20% of relevant car journeys, meaning delays or diversions. One recent three week closure of the A46 meant we had to rearrange our life because the diversion went past the end of our road. Our productivity will be harmed for over 10 years. The whole thing is an embarrassing, ludicrously expensive joke.
Was ‘the Cabinetry Office’ deliberate in this piece? I like it either way. Though it does convey the message of taking some raw material and shaping it into something useful
Did we ever have a “can do” attitude; I thought our society was a mix of make it up, muddle through and make money by selling granny for glue. When was there a golden age of clarity in building projects or anything else? When did we have a settled democracy? I believe we are now in the unenviable position of having a segment of the population who have noticed it’s not run that well. Simply they are more numerous in number and with access to better communication than in past generations. The idiocy of the state has always been present, the incoherence of policy a national pastime and the general ability to cock things up is in the blood. We are just doomed to notice it now.
The flip side is we were able to deliver HS1, the Channel Tunnel, we were the world’s top nuclear energy producer within living memory, we have a world-leading biosciences sector, some of the best high tech manufacturing and design, we got Crossrail over the line, so we have absolutely been capable of doing great things, but a rot set in over the last ~30-40 years or so across multiple sectors where it’s almost like we lost the muscle memory to build stuff.
Hi, I don't know what age you are but I remember the Channel Tunnel being a regular punching bag for exactly the same complaints. Way over budget, massively delayed.
No don’t get me wrong we can do things, some great some not so great. The default is the problem. Crossrail and the channel tunnel were proposals that took multiple decades (generations in the case of the channel) to even start. We were the top nuclear energy producer - the first to have nuclear generated power at Calder Hall in the 50’s - but not now. We have sold our tech and bioscience leading companies to others… like almost everything else from water to the mail, we sought the financial benefit in the short term and lost out in the long term.
I mean there are three parts of this: firstly, as the report talks about in detail, we do have mechanisms for better insulating large infrastructure projects from politics that have been applied more successfully in other cases. But also: as my piece emphasises, this is in large part a political failure, and a political failure that is unique to the UK - most other comparable nations are perfectly capable of building this kind of project and there are no pre-determined 'real-world constraints' that prevent us from doing it.
But how does that sit with the fact that every other large European country is capable of building extensive high-speed rail networks and the UK isn't? Are there "real-world constraints" that the UK faces but France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands do not? And if there are, is it something the UK has to put up with, or a failure of the system?
Put another way, why was France capable of building a high-speed rail line between its two biggest cities (Paris and Lyon) and the UK can't do the same with its two biggest cities (London and Birmingham), when:
(1) Paris and Lyon are about three times as far from each other as London and Birmingham
(2) France was only the second country to actually try and build a high-speed rail network, and
(3) An oil crisis necessitated a time-consuming and costly switch from gas-powered trains to electric ones?
"Put another way, why was France capable of building a high-speed rail line between its two biggest cities (Paris and Lyon) and the UK can't do the same with its two biggest cities (London and Birmingham), when:
(1) Paris and Lyon are about three times as far from each other as London and Birmingham"
The whole reason that France built a high speed line is because Paris to Lyon is a long journey. It competes with air travel. High speed is very useful at that distance. The geography of France really suits high speed, having cities like Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille and Lyon at about 300-500 miles away.
How much does anyone care about Birmingham to London being 49 instead of 84 minutes? Sure, it's better, of course. But how much? Some student in Birmingham going to see his girlfriend for a weekend? Someone going to see a client for a monthly meeting? How much more do you think they'd pay to get there in 49 minutes instead of 84? If they had to repay the HS2 construction and interest costs via the fare, would they do it or just set the alarm earlier?
«How much does anyone care about Birmingham to London being 49 instead of 84 minutes? Sure, it's better, of course.»
It puts a lot of the west Midlands in < 1h commuting range of London boosting property in a large area and leads to a lot of new tory voters too. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! (remember Crossrail?)
The 1hr commute that is often referred to as the upper range is door to door. Almost no-one is going to turn 49 minutes to a sub-1hr commute. You'll get to Euston and have to go to the office. You'll have to get from your house to Curzon Street.
The train from the west into London still has plenty of spaces at Didcot, 52 minutes out. It fills up big at Reading (sub 30 minutes).
«The 1hr commute that is often referred to as the upper range is door to door.»
Good for them that there are people so rich that they can afford to live in a nice leafy place (or Reading or even ahem Slough) less than 49 minutes train time from a London station. A lot of not so well-off commuters including on the East Midlands line instead just suck it up on longer travel, and I am familiar with Didcot and noticed that early mornings the car parks near the station have lots of Jaguars and Audis and BMWs and even Ferraris and the trains to London are packed.
"Jack Smith" in the comment below describes the situation for a similar distance:
«in France the Paris-Lille journey, more comparable in distance to London-Birmingham [...] Many of the people who use the fast train buy a carnet, which allows them to go into and out of Paris a few times a week. This is way cheaper per journey than buying a standalone ticket, especially at the last-minute. Hybrid workers can feasibly live in Lille and work in Paris, and the cost savings in housing more than make up for the ticket price. Higher value-added services can also base themselves in Lille, because it's easy to send their workers to meet clients or suppliers in the capital.»
"A lot of not so well-off commuters including on the East Midlands line instead just suck it up on longer travel, and I am familiar with Didcot and noticed that early mornings the car parks near the station have lots of Jaguars and Audis and BMWs and even Ferraris and the trains to London are packed."
How many commuters travel over 1 hour door to door? Not many, and I have no doubt that they have considerably declined as remote work increased, as remote is much more of an advantage to longer distance travellers than shorter ones.
Also, having recently been on that route on a Monday morning, the train was barely more than half full in peak hours at Didcot.
This was the problem with the messaging around HS2 that the piece alludes to. The real benefit of a new high-speed line was always going to be capacity rather than the London-Birmingham travel time, and the programme made more, rather than less, sense if it expanded further north.
Similarly, in France the Paris-Lille journey, more comparable in distance to London-Birmingham, is totally doable by slower classic/regional train. I did it this way on more than one occasion when I lived in Lille, and if you had time to spare it was worth it for the saving. But the LGV Nord's capacity blows the regular lines out of the water. Each two-unit train between Lille and Paris carries about 1000 people, doesn't stop anywhere else, and takes just an hour.
Many of the people who use the fast train buy a carnet, which allows them to go into and out of Paris a few times a week. This is way cheaper per journey than buying a standalone ticket, especially at the last-minute. Hybrid workers can feasibly live in Lille and work in Paris, and the cost savings in housing more than make up for the ticket price. Higher value-added services can also base themselves in Lille, because it's easy to send their workers to meet clients or suppliers in the capital. This would be a lot more difficult without the capacity the high-speed line provides.
I think with HS2 it would have made sense to (1) focus more on capacity when pitching the project and less on cost, and (2) work more to the standards already existing high-speed lines use. The UK's greater population density was always going to be a challenge compared to France's. But the people running the project and the politicians involved made it harder for themselves by eschewing tried-and-tested ways of doing things, and the messy project management.
But you can't separate cost and capacity. if it costs £55bn but total fare revenue + other benefits is less than £55bn +interest over the lifetime then you shouldn't do it.
What is the model that has been produced showing the value of this extra capacity?
Well quite. The one significant difference in the UK is that we have greater population density, and therefore it's a bit harder to thread new infrastructure across the country than in e.g. parts of Spain. But then that's a strong argument for sticking with the 300kph standard that makes it easier to do this.
I live in France too. There are issues of course like everywhere, but you can get between the four largest urban areas in France - Paris, Lille, Lyon, and Marseille - by high-speed rail. You can't in the UK.
Also maybe you shouldn't just go insulting people you disagree with.
«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.»
This post is mostly about pretending that things like these "just happen", "because reasons", where starry-eyed Great Centrist Ingenues like this blogger or Dan Davies or Brad deLong tend to argue that it is simply "out-of-control organizations".
But all the issues described here are not the product of pure happenstance or organizational dysfunction (which were it happens it is often cultivated):
* If these issues were to cost money to the people who matter they would be fixed soon; for example when the big oligopolies complained that the Competition And Market Authority was being too zealous the government acted drastically and promptly: fired its chief, downsized the staff a a lot, and appointed as new chief someone who used to be a leader of one of those oligopolies.
* All these issues benefit two big and powerful constituencies: incumbent property rentiers and incumbent builders plus smaller but influential professional categories and even without active lobbying no government would want to make things worse for them.
Incumbent rentiers are sitting pretty and are delighted with delays, overspending, bureaucracy. The UK government is also composed largely of incumbent rentiers or their political representatives so the more the merrier.
I remembered this amazingly "Great Centrist Ingenue" quote from an earlier article:
«“While these environmental concerns are valid, they must be weighed against the road safety issues raised by the residents.” NIMBYs would be quite happy to bulldoze a quarter-mile of countryside if it means they avoid a single truck driving up their road each day for a few months.»
* Look at the picture of the affected road: it is clearly a place for affluent "Blow you! I am alright Jack!" tory voters. https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/72d2a79e-78e7-47f6-aa36-7e1e4b6f1144_1500x1125.png Those voters are the lifeblood of english politics, the target constituency of all main parties (New Labour, Conservatives, LibDems, Reform) because they are the rock on which thatcherism rests. Offending them is treason! :-)
* Those affluent tory voters and the affluent tory councilors representing them are in effect asking "What's in it for me?" and getting no answer: that "single truck driving up their road each day for a few months" might mean however improbably some inconvenience to them or even lower property prices. Given that "What's in it for me" people are involved offering affected property owners "compensation" of £10,000 per month for the duration might get things unstuck.
The issue usually is not "out of control" processes it is the strict political enforcement of thatcherism for the benefit of incumbents as incumbency is the greatest english value.
The strategic case should also be an economic case: you try and make assumptions and from that, you calculate a value.
But a deeper problem with HS2 is that there isn't much of even a vague calculation that makes it add up. HS2, like much of rail, is the Underpants Gnomes of South Park: Build Rail Line - ??? - PROFIT! Sometimes, building rail lines is a great idea, but it isn't an automatic cause of prosperity. You have to ask why building a particular rail line would increase prosperity. Who is going to use it? Commuters, tourists, students, families, business people going to a meeting? Do people want to go Euston to central Birmingham or do they live in St Albans and are going to Edgbaston, in which case the car will still be quicker compared with multiple connecting trains?
How full is the train right now with people getting on at Birmingham and going to London?
Brilliant piece — forensic, funny, and quietly furious. HS2 isn’t just a train that never arrived; it’s a monument to a governing class that no longer knows what it’s doing — or worse, no longer cares.
I have a friend who is a civil engineer - worked on Crossrail, has worked on HS2, and was head-hunted to spend a few years in Hinkley, but the offer wasn’t tempting enough to spend 5 days a week away from her family.
I’m unsure if she’s paid over 150k, but it will certainly be in 6 figures given her seniority and the actual genuine responsibility for not drilling through gas mains, Victorian sewers or taking out a power system.
Which strikes me as a lot more valuable than, say, Simon Jenkins.
The craziest part for me is, as you mention, the fact that numerous countries in Europe and around the world have high-speed rail networks, and HS2 basically chose to ignore all the lessons learned from them and do its own thing. Then you have a bunch of people coming in and saying it's just not possible for x, y, and z reasons when numerous other countries somehow manage to do it. It's like the UK swings wildly between "we can do it better than Johnny Foreigner can" and "if we can't do it, it's just not possible".
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.
«The (incorrectly) percieved pressure to create a numerical economic case has damaged innumerable projects; HS2 not least.»
My impression is that the economist case is often just a figleaf where someone gets paid to tweak a spreadsheet until the numbers come out as desired and this happens in both the private and public sectors.
My guess is that what matters most is the political case: the project is already decided for political reasons and everything else is hypocrisy.
My guess is that HS2 is a very good illustration of that as its clear rationale is the votes of property owners:
* Since the East Midland line is at capacity rationing access to it would mean greatly increasing the commuter season ticket, crashing property prices all along that; building a high speed line besides it would mean that longer distance passengers would use the latter freeing up capacity for commuters, allowing season tickets lower, and even perhaps increasing demand for commuter property so protecting and even boosting prices along the East Midlands line.
* The Interchange Station would put a large chunk of the north-west Midlands within 1h commuting distance of London, greatly boosting property prices there and creating a huge new area of conservative voters.
It is just as usual one of many variants of Lady Porter's "Westminster Council Model" of electoral politics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homes_for_votes_scandal):
George Osborne (The Independent) 2013-10-09: “Hopefully we will get a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up”
Stephen Bush "Politics" 2018-03-16 (NEW STATESMAN): “One Tory minister in a safe seat told me that when she used to ask Osborne for something, he would first ask her how big her majority was — and then reply, with a smile, that it was too large for her enquiry to be worth considering.”
James Forsyth "The Tory modernisers are Margaret Thatcher’s true heirs" 2013-04-13 (The Spectator): “His Chancellor and chief political strategist, George Osborne, is constantly looking for new ways to create Tory voters.”
Yeah, it’s a really interesting point and pretty much aligns with my thinking on these kinds of issues - there’s a long held tenet in business that making a decision is often more important than making the exact right decision and I feel it applies here. The strategic case for greater railway capacity up the spine of the U.K. is common sense, similar projects like Crossrail outperform expectations in terms of demand and impact, the whole economic case part feels like chronic overthinking and defensiveness coming from a sort of weird inability to say ‘trains are good actually’.
Until last summer, I was Director of Strategy & Innovation at Transport for London. I left to set up a new business focused on helping the sector make decisions. As this feels like the single biggest issue we face. If we don't fix this, we don't fix anything:
https://www.transporttimes.co.uk/news.php/We-Need-to-Talk-About-How-We-Make-Decisions-776/
Sometimes the right thing to do is the right thing to do...
Fantastic article. You should really get a job with Private Eye! Of course, another thing which slows down our ability to build infrastructure (and therefore make things more expensive) is the whole “consultation” process. I’ve written this in quotation marks because invariably decisions seem to be made before the process has ended, but authorities have to complete them as they are a legal requirement. A classic example of this was Lambeth’s decision to move a pedestrian crossing, where the contractors were booked to start the work a day after the consultation ended! I’d love to hear your views on how local authorities run their consultations and why some (not all) seem to think it’s ok to ignore the results.
Sad to say but I think the current vibe in Private Eye is not very sympathetic to the author's mentality that we should actually *do* stuff from time to time. While gesturing at the bigger-scale problems, the regular columnists across the domains that matter are Jenkinsy/NIMBY in mindset.
An excellent podcast and summary - tho I fear that it will be extremely difficult to achieve the changes needed to address the issues you raised.
One minor quibble - your reference to #FTBE in footnote 7 is quite confusing (two different and totally contradictory uses of this tag).
I really enjoyed the podcast this week especially the HS2 discussion.
You're totally right that Britain has to pick its path and either move with the times of decline.
I rode on Indonesia's HSR last year and it was embarrassing for me as a Brit, how good it was - fair play to Indonesia, and China who helped build it. It was excellent.
Many "developing" countries have a hunger and energy right now which is sadly lacking in the UK where judicial challenge, protecting bats, and house price concerns restrict the greater good... We could do with utilitarianism to take the lead once again!
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...........
I'd completely forgotten this happened with HS2 and I find it just an absolutely bewildering - and frankly cruel - way to treat valued staff. It's one thing so say, "okay, we want to rebalance government a bit so we'll open more new roles in the north," but to hire a bunch of talented people and then decide "actually you all live in the wrong place, so move or you're fired" is the work of deeply unserious people who don't actually care about delivery.
I get a sense that Kier Starmers political strategy reflects what has been said here. I’m not yet convinced voters are responding as the article anticipates.
Well I think the problem is this stuff takes years to manifest the results, so you really have to go in hard and fast and aim to have people see the real benefits in the second term. Realistically the attitudes voters have now have set in over 10 years or more.
Very good article. The reduction in traveling times were linked to ‘significant’ productivity gains being delivered for business travellers, except on-board WiFi and 5G destroyed that argument. I live near HS2 in Warwickshire and cannot go south without crossing a choice of several construction sites, resulting in 20% of relevant car journeys, meaning delays or diversions. One recent three week closure of the A46 meant we had to rearrange our life because the diversion went past the end of our road. Our productivity will be harmed for over 10 years. The whole thing is an embarrassing, ludicrously expensive joke.
See, that's why you should take the tra--oh
Was ‘the Cabinetry Office’ deliberate in this piece? I like it either way. Though it does convey the message of taking some raw material and shaping it into something useful
Ha, sadly not, it was the result of doing loads of woodwork in the last week 😂
Did we ever have a “can do” attitude; I thought our society was a mix of make it up, muddle through and make money by selling granny for glue. When was there a golden age of clarity in building projects or anything else? When did we have a settled democracy? I believe we are now in the unenviable position of having a segment of the population who have noticed it’s not run that well. Simply they are more numerous in number and with access to better communication than in past generations. The idiocy of the state has always been present, the incoherence of policy a national pastime and the general ability to cock things up is in the blood. We are just doomed to notice it now.
The flip side is we were able to deliver HS1, the Channel Tunnel, we were the world’s top nuclear energy producer within living memory, we have a world-leading biosciences sector, some of the best high tech manufacturing and design, we got Crossrail over the line, so we have absolutely been capable of doing great things, but a rot set in over the last ~30-40 years or so across multiple sectors where it’s almost like we lost the muscle memory to build stuff.
Hi, I don't know what age you are but I remember the Channel Tunnel being a regular punching bag for exactly the same complaints. Way over budget, massively delayed.
No don’t get me wrong we can do things, some great some not so great. The default is the problem. Crossrail and the channel tunnel were proposals that took multiple decades (generations in the case of the channel) to even start. We were the top nuclear energy producer - the first to have nuclear generated power at Calder Hall in the 50’s - but not now. We have sold our tech and bioscience leading companies to others… like almost everything else from water to the mail, we sought the financial benefit in the short term and lost out in the long term.
I mean there are three parts of this: firstly, as the report talks about in detail, we do have mechanisms for better insulating large infrastructure projects from politics that have been applied more successfully in other cases. But also: as my piece emphasises, this is in large part a political failure, and a political failure that is unique to the UK - most other comparable nations are perfectly capable of building this kind of project and there are no pre-determined 'real-world constraints' that prevent us from doing it.
But how does that sit with the fact that every other large European country is capable of building extensive high-speed rail networks and the UK isn't? Are there "real-world constraints" that the UK faces but France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands do not? And if there are, is it something the UK has to put up with, or a failure of the system?
Put another way, why was France capable of building a high-speed rail line between its two biggest cities (Paris and Lyon) and the UK can't do the same with its two biggest cities (London and Birmingham), when:
(1) Paris and Lyon are about three times as far from each other as London and Birmingham
(2) France was only the second country to actually try and build a high-speed rail network, and
(3) An oil crisis necessitated a time-consuming and costly switch from gas-powered trains to electric ones?
"Put another way, why was France capable of building a high-speed rail line between its two biggest cities (Paris and Lyon) and the UK can't do the same with its two biggest cities (London and Birmingham), when:
(1) Paris and Lyon are about three times as far from each other as London and Birmingham"
The whole reason that France built a high speed line is because Paris to Lyon is a long journey. It competes with air travel. High speed is very useful at that distance. The geography of France really suits high speed, having cities like Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille and Lyon at about 300-500 miles away.
How much does anyone care about Birmingham to London being 49 instead of 84 minutes? Sure, it's better, of course. But how much? Some student in Birmingham going to see his girlfriend for a weekend? Someone going to see a client for a monthly meeting? How much more do you think they'd pay to get there in 49 minutes instead of 84? If they had to repay the HS2 construction and interest costs via the fare, would they do it or just set the alarm earlier?
«How much does anyone care about Birmingham to London being 49 instead of 84 minutes? Sure, it's better, of course.»
It puts a lot of the west Midlands in < 1h commuting range of London boosting property in a large area and leads to a lot of new tory voters too. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! (remember Crossrail?)
Where?
The 1hr commute that is often referred to as the upper range is door to door. Almost no-one is going to turn 49 minutes to a sub-1hr commute. You'll get to Euston and have to go to the office. You'll have to get from your house to Curzon Street.
The train from the west into London still has plenty of spaces at Didcot, 52 minutes out. It fills up big at Reading (sub 30 minutes).
«The 1hr commute that is often referred to as the upper range is door to door.»
Good for them that there are people so rich that they can afford to live in a nice leafy place (or Reading or even ahem Slough) less than 49 minutes train time from a London station. A lot of not so well-off commuters including on the East Midlands line instead just suck it up on longer travel, and I am familiar with Didcot and noticed that early mornings the car parks near the station have lots of Jaguars and Audis and BMWs and even Ferraris and the trains to London are packed.
"Jack Smith" in the comment below describes the situation for a similar distance:
«in France the Paris-Lille journey, more comparable in distance to London-Birmingham [...] Many of the people who use the fast train buy a carnet, which allows them to go into and out of Paris a few times a week. This is way cheaper per journey than buying a standalone ticket, especially at the last-minute. Hybrid workers can feasibly live in Lille and work in Paris, and the cost savings in housing more than make up for the ticket price. Higher value-added services can also base themselves in Lille, because it's easy to send their workers to meet clients or suppliers in the capital.»
"A lot of not so well-off commuters including on the East Midlands line instead just suck it up on longer travel, and I am familiar with Didcot and noticed that early mornings the car parks near the station have lots of Jaguars and Audis and BMWs and even Ferraris and the trains to London are packed."
How many commuters travel over 1 hour door to door? Not many, and I have no doubt that they have considerably declined as remote work increased, as remote is much more of an advantage to longer distance travellers than shorter ones.
Also, having recently been on that route on a Monday morning, the train was barely more than half full in peak hours at Didcot.
This was the problem with the messaging around HS2 that the piece alludes to. The real benefit of a new high-speed line was always going to be capacity rather than the London-Birmingham travel time, and the programme made more, rather than less, sense if it expanded further north.
Similarly, in France the Paris-Lille journey, more comparable in distance to London-Birmingham, is totally doable by slower classic/regional train. I did it this way on more than one occasion when I lived in Lille, and if you had time to spare it was worth it for the saving. But the LGV Nord's capacity blows the regular lines out of the water. Each two-unit train between Lille and Paris carries about 1000 people, doesn't stop anywhere else, and takes just an hour.
Many of the people who use the fast train buy a carnet, which allows them to go into and out of Paris a few times a week. This is way cheaper per journey than buying a standalone ticket, especially at the last-minute. Hybrid workers can feasibly live in Lille and work in Paris, and the cost savings in housing more than make up for the ticket price. Higher value-added services can also base themselves in Lille, because it's easy to send their workers to meet clients or suppliers in the capital. This would be a lot more difficult without the capacity the high-speed line provides.
I think with HS2 it would have made sense to (1) focus more on capacity when pitching the project and less on cost, and (2) work more to the standards already existing high-speed lines use. The UK's greater population density was always going to be a challenge compared to France's. But the people running the project and the politicians involved made it harder for themselves by eschewing tried-and-tested ways of doing things, and the messy project management.
But you can't separate cost and capacity. if it costs £55bn but total fare revenue + other benefits is less than £55bn +interest over the lifetime then you shouldn't do it.
What is the model that has been produced showing the value of this extra capacity?
Well quite. The one significant difference in the UK is that we have greater population density, and therefore it's a bit harder to thread new infrastructure across the country than in e.g. parts of Spain. But then that's a strong argument for sticking with the 300kph standard that makes it easier to do this.
I live in France too. There are issues of course like everywhere, but you can get between the four largest urban areas in France - Paris, Lille, Lyon, and Marseille - by high-speed rail. You can't in the UK.
Also maybe you shouldn't just go insulting people you disagree with.