HS2 - Government proposals, alternative routes and general discussion

[whole diary]

[Electric train]

If the Government shelve the Birmingham to Manchester section it will render the Birmingham - London almost worthless and the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) will be the butt of jokes all across Europe.

The Birmingham to Manchester section is not just about serving the NW of England it will also bring significant improvements for the Anglo Scottish services.

My suspicion is the PM will do "a Euston" on the Birmingham to Manchester section put a pause on it past the next election.

I believe the HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) project have been as cost conscious as they can, there are a number of factors that have pushed costs up, inflation and fuel price rises; labour costs, the UK has a major construction industry skills shortage which means higher wages, we do not have the ability to recruit from the EU^» (European Union - about) anymore.  Also the handling / decision making of the project by the Government I suspect has lead to the overall cost increase, Government Depts are notorious at deciding not to make a decision.

[ellendune]

I believe the HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) project have been as cost conscious as they can, there are a number of factors that have pushed costs up, inflation and fuel price rises; labour costs, the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) has a major construction industry skills shortage which means higher wages, we do not have the ability to recruit from the EU^» (European Union - about) anymore. 

I agree. 

Yes you try recruiting engineers these days. 

Also the handling / decision making of the project by the Government I suspect has lead to the overall cost increase, Government Depts are notorious at deciding not to make a decision.

Please correct me if I am wrong but...

First there was the decision of government to to specify zero subsidence in earthworks and minimum need for maintenance.  That effectively converted all the embankments into viaducts. And to reduce disruption from normal track maintenance required slab track.  Both increases capital costs.  The slab track will reduce maintenance short term, but it will be hugely costly and disruptive when it needs replacing!  LGV^▸ (Large Goods Vehicle) in France don't seem to have slab track.

Second they added additional tunnelling.  Probably reasonable thing to do, but it did add to costs.

Thirdly they keep changing their minds on the project. How many 'reviews' have we had now? The Euston decisions most recent. Every time they have a 'review' because the costs have risen they cause the costs to rise so they need another 'review' because the costs have risen.... It is a well known fact that as soon as you make a change to an on-going project you add to the costs. 

I predict that the whole thing will be built in the end, but it will have cost more because of this government's incompetence. 

[TaplowGreen]

 

[JayMac]

Opinion piece by Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian:

This week there are to be two HS2s^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)). The first is a truly rotten infrastructure project. The second is a political icon of awesome potency. They have absolutely nothing in common.

From its conception in 2009, HS2 was a dud: a Labour government glamour project revived by the Cameron government in the hope it might counterbalance its plans for extreme local austerity. The coalition eventually landed on a proposal bizarrely linking two dead-end terminuses, Birmingham’s Curzon Street and London’s Euston. It failed to link with Scotland or with Eurotunnel and the continent through St Pancras. The chief beneficiaries would be Midlands commuters and Manchester executives travelling to London. It would do next to nothing for the north, whose need for investment in local railways and particularly roads was, and remains, chronic.

Since going ahead, this incarnation of HS2 has been criticised by every reputable assessor, from Whitehall economists to the National Audit Office and the official Infrastructure and Projects Authority, which last month formally labelled it “unachievable”. Every Treasury inquiry into its ever-rising costs ends by frantically cutting it back. It is now unlikely to reach either Manchester or Euston, let alone Leeds. Meanwhile, six chairs have come and gone, and the company has now lost its £622,000-a-year chief executive, Mark Thurston, Britain’s highest-paid civil servant. Last autumn’s budget imposed £50bn of cuts to government spending, but allowed HS2, with an estimated price tag of £100bn, to continue. As its costs soar, completion is ever more delayed – now into the 2030s.

HS2 is the most expensive infrastructure project in Europe. It is also the most outdated. Rail use in Britain has returned to a slow decline. A mere 1% of British journeys are now made by rail – 7% in terms of distance – and that is mostly commuters. The chief curb on capacity just now is staff shortages, not track, while better signalling would probably do as much to improve journey times in the north. When even the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, a longstanding backer of the project, has to admit as he did last week that its management is “out of control” the project has to be challenged. Hospitals are bursting at the seams, schools crumbling and local services failing. For a government to be spending currently £135m a week, year after year, on a white elephant is indefensible. It is obscene.

That is the reality. The politics is quite different, as politics always is. Politicians, irrational and insane, know that defending infrastructure projects and jeering at any opposition plays well with voters. The gargantuan budgets attract lobbyists like moths to the flame. HS2 is declared – without an ounce of evidence – to be the future of the north, the beacon of levelling up, the custodian of national pride. Forget value for money. This is about patriotism. Don’t criticise.

More to the point, HS2 has become a golden knife to plunge into Rishi Sunak. Predecessors who lacked the guts to cancel or even control it, such as David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, have all lined up in its defence. Keir Starmer and the Lib Dems are in favour, though to his credit, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, has shown some scepticism. The West Midlands and Greater Manchester mayors, Andy Street and Andy Burnham, are still dazzled by getting to London fast, despite knowing they should have first demanded investment for their own commuters. Now they claim oddly that HS2 holds the key to their regional economies.

This must be rubbish. HS2 was a terrible mistake, one that history will not forget. Sunak will have little to be proud of when his premiership probably ends next year. But he could at least win credit for having had the guts to stop this nonsense now. He should cancel HS2 and recoup billions by selling the land. At the same time he should ask northern leaders how else they might invest £100bn. I bet they would jump at it.

Hear, hear.

[Electric train]

Opinion piece by Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian:

This week there are to be two HS2s^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)). The first is a truly rotten infrastructure project. The second is a political icon of awesome potency. They have absolutely nothing in common.

From its conception in 2009, HS2 was a dud: a Labour government glamour project revived by the Cameron government in the hope it might counterbalance its plans for extreme local austerity. The coalition eventually landed on a proposal bizarrely linking two dead-end terminuses, Birmingham’s Curzon Street and London’s Euston. It failed to link with Scotland or with Eurotunnel and the continent through St Pancras. The chief beneficiaries would be Midlands commuters and Manchester executives travelling to London. It would do next to nothing for the north, whose need for investment in local railways and particularly roads was, and remains, chronic.

Since going ahead, this incarnation of HS2 has been criticised by every reputable assessor, from Whitehall economists to the National Audit Office and the official Infrastructure and Projects Authority, which last month formally labelled it “unachievable”. Every Treasury inquiry into its ever-rising costs ends by frantically cutting it back. It is now unlikely to reach either Manchester or Euston, let alone Leeds. Meanwhile, six chairs have come and gone, and the company has now lost its £622,000-a-year chief executive, Mark Thurston, Britain’s highest-paid civil servant. Last autumn’s budget imposed £50bn of cuts to government spending, but allowed HS2, with an estimated price tag of £100bn, to continue. As its costs soar, completion is ever more delayed – now into the 2030s.

HS2 is the most expensive infrastructure project in Europe. It is also the most outdated. Rail use in Britain has returned to a slow decline. A mere 1% of British journeys are now made by rail – 7% in terms of distance – and that is mostly commuters. The chief curb on capacity just now is staff shortages, not track, while better signalling would probably do as much to improve journey times in the north. When even the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, a longstanding backer of the project, has to admit as he did last week that its management is “out of control” the project has to be challenged. Hospitals are bursting at the seams, schools crumbling and local services failing. For a government to be spending currently £135m a week, year after year, on a white elephant is indefensible. It is obscene.

That is the reality. The politics is quite different, as politics always is. Politicians, irrational and insane, know that defending infrastructure projects and jeering at any opposition plays well with voters. The gargantuan budgets attract lobbyists like moths to the flame. HS2 is declared – without an ounce of evidence – to be the future of the north, the beacon of levelling up, the custodian of national pride. Forget value for money. This is about patriotism. Don’t criticise.

More to the point, HS2 has become a golden knife to plunge into Rishi Sunak. Predecessors who lacked the guts to cancel or even control it, such as David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, have all lined up in its defence. Keir Starmer and the Lib Dems are in favour, though to his credit, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, has shown some scepticism. The West Midlands and Greater Manchester mayors, Andy Street and Andy Burnham, are still dazzled by getting to London fast, despite knowing they should have first demanded investment for their own commuters. Now they claim oddly that HS2 holds the key to their regional economies.

This must be rubbish. HS2 was a terrible mistake, one that history will not forget. Sunak will have little to be proud of when his premiership probably ends next year. But he could at least win credit for having had the guts to stop this nonsense now. He should cancel HS2 and recoup billions by selling the land. At the same time he should ask northern leaders how else they might invest £100bn. I bet they would jump at it.

Hear, hear.

It is too late to cancel, the reputational damage to UK^▸ (United Kingdom) PLC will be immense even just cancelling the Brum - Manc section would make foreign investors look elsewhere in Europe as the signal scraping a major infrastructure project would be the UK Government cannot be trusted.

Most people are under the misimpression that it will save a few minutes on the journey to Brum, they do not understand the journey time improvements for Scotland, Preston, etc.

Yes rail passengers are down post pandemic for commuter travel but is at around 85% on certain days, leisure and off peak rail travel has recovered reasonably well.

[Mark A]

Opinion piece by Simon Jenkins, in The Guardian:

It's an opinion piece. By Simon Jenkins, who has a long held position on HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)). It's not everyone's opinion of course. It could be said that HS2 needed to be built earlier, rather than later, rather than going into the build phase at a time of rampant inflation in the construction industry. Also, the government needed to get out of the way and at an advanced stage stop enhancing the specs / working to change the balance of structural risk taken on by the builders.

But underlying all that, there will be people reading this forum who will have lived through years of low interest rates and cheap money while looking on with despair that the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) was not open to the opportunity to put in a lot of investment in sustainable infrastructure. And now here we are.

Mark

P.S. I see that Simon Jenkins was a fairly long term member of the board of British Rail (1979-90).

[bradshaw]

Interview on R4 Today programme this morning at 08.33 (2h 33m into programme)

Richard Bowker, omce Chairman of the SRA^» (Strategic Rail Authority - about)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001qt5y?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

also see his XTwitter posts

https://x.com/srichardbowker/status/1706586764066897987?s=46&t=Cf-JVAFYhhsyk1E62iWpQQ

[JayMac]

Are you able to add the quotes from Mr Bowker for those of us no longer using Twixter. Cheers!

[Red Squirrel]

I think this sums it up rather well:

[ChrisB]

Are you able to add the quotes from Mr Bowker for those of us no longer using Twixter. Cheers!

You don't need to be a Twitter user in order to see his tweets when you click that link. It's a string of 5 tweets that would take some time to post here.

[JayMac]

Nope. Click on the link and you get the first tweet only. Click on the tweeter's name and you get a sign in pop up that prevents further interaction.

[ChrisB]

Hmm. I didn't know I was logged in on my PC - but log out & you are right. My apologies. It's still an amount of time needed to copy & format all 5 tweets on that link.

[bradshaw]

This is the text of those posts

In readiness for talking about HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) with @JustinOnWeb on @BBCr4today, I reminded myself what @grantshapps said in the Foreword to the Integrated Rail Plan in 2021 (and nothing other than inflation has changed since then). He said “The Integrated Rail Plan for the North and (1/5)
Midlands (IRP) marks a new beginning for the rail network from London to Newcastle and Birmingham to Leeds as we Build Back Better.” Also “It includes plans to complete the Western leg of HS2 (i.e. Phase 2B) to Manchester.” He then goes on to say “but most importantly, (2/5)
we will build the core Northern Powerhouse Rail Network, which will include 40 miles of a new high speed line between Warrington and Yorkshire, and complete the electrification of the Trans-Pennine Route. These projects will transform east-west links across the (3/5)
North of England which have been woefully inadequate for many decades, constraining growth. They will dramatically improve connections between three of the great economic powerhouses of the North: Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. And this is just the start…..” (4/5)
Well, Grant Shapps was right and nothing has changed since then. Without HS2 Phase 2 we will not be able to justify NPR and the benefits he described will not come to pass.@AndyBurnhamGM was right to describe that as a disaster. So, let’s stop dithering and get it built. (5:5)

[JayMac]

Thanks bradshaw.

[ellendune]

Please correct me if I am wrong but...

First there was the decision of government to to specify zero subsidence in earthworks and minimum need for maintenance.  That effectively converted all the embankments into viaducts. And to reduce disruption from normal track maintenance required slab track.  Both increases capital costs.  The slab track will reduce maintenance short term, but it will be hugely costly and disruptive when it needs replacing!  LGV^▸ (Large Goods Vehicle) in France don't seem to have slab track.

Second they added additional tunnelling.  Probably reasonable thing to do, but it did add to costs.

Thirdly they keep changing their minds on the project. How many 'reviews' have we had now? The Euston decisions most recent. Every time they have a 'review' because the costs have risen they cause the costs to rise so they need another 'review' because the costs have risen.... It is a well known fact that as soon as you make a change to an on-going project you add to the costs. 

I predict that the whole thing will be built in the end, but it will have cost more because of this government's incompetence. 

I now find out that in addition to the above, ministers decided that contractors will have to take all the risk of cost increases due to unforeseen factors up to 60% of the tender price.  So every contract that is tendered includes a contingency to cover the risk of a 60% rise in costs. Since much of the detailed design work is carried out by the contractors these days that risk is significant. No wonder the tender prices that come in are so high!

It seems due to their own stupidity inexperience lack of any knowledge of running a business every time the government seeks to control the costs of HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) they end up increasing them!