Who would you say is responsible for the cost rising from £33 billion to over £100 billion before the brakes were put on, and why do you think HS2▸ enjoys so little public support?
Whoever thought up the bizarre way we do infrastructure. The public wanted a solution to the vast overcrowding on the east and west coast mainlines, more local services within those corridors, and more freight carried by rail rather than road. They also wanted it to be electric. Nobody said that there wasn't a need for more capacity. The government had a think about it, and said HS2 was the best way of doing it. Some of the public, not a very big proportion, said that wasn't what they meant and started sellotaping themselves to trees and digging holes. They weren't really responsible for the overspending. It cost a few million to sort them out, but the total is probably statistically zero.
This began under a Labour government in 2009, addressing that very question of capacity, and coming up with three routes. The year before, the Economist had published a report showing strong public support for high speed rail as an alternative to internal flights, road pricing etc. HS2 wasn't really on the political stage when the 2010 election happened, as very little that a government proposes in its final year is taken seriously, except tax cuts. The coalition government of 2010 continued the project as it was one of the few things the Tories and Lib Dems agreed upon. The Tories had supported it in opposition, although they wanted a link to Heathrow. Whether it was for the same reasons or for business on one side and environment on the other doesn't matter - it was enough that they agreed and carried on. HS2 had broad cross-party support, with some dissent. I would say that public support was reasonably good, apart from along the proposed route. There were endangered species along it, mainly bats, newts and
MPs▸ with marginal constituencies, plus a few newspaper editors living along the way, so lobbying began to abolish the plan, moved the route, put it underground, whatever. At the time, the details weren't settled, but the cost was based on the original plan, and with a very optimistic view, just like all other rail projects. The Mawhinney review was commissioned, which sensibly recommended against routing via Heathrow but was otherwise in favour. The plans went out to consultation, and this was when the protest groups began to appear in earnest. Legal actions followed, which were highly successful from the point of view of the lawyers involved, resulting in massive fees all round.
The first big extra was the idea of putting the railway through tunnels through environmentally sensitive areas. That is such an obviously good idea for something that will be around for hundreds of years that it should have been part of the original idea. It probably wasn't included in the first place just to keep the estimated cost low. Less clever are the major changes that have been made, such as the connection to
WCML▸ , purely as a matter of political expedient. Whether it was to win a marginal at the next election or get a local MP onside for a crucial vote, it has nothing to do with engineering and should not have been allowed to happen, but it was. What looks like a small change is in fact major, and means that a large part of the route has to be redesigned. It also eats into the
BCR▸ .
After that, HS2 became an election issue. It wasn't a huge national one in 2015, but did have politicians speaking in vague terms for a while, until David Cameron succeeded in shooing the Lib Dems out of the door. After that, though, the serious work in parliament and in hi-vis on the ground began, and HS2 assumed its place as a political hot potato, alongside Hinkley C and Heathrow's third runway. When Cameron stepped down after losing the
EU» referendum, candidates for PM's job found political capital was to be gained by hinting at wholesale changes. They didn't do much at the time, because there was a new kid on the block in the form of Brexit. Also, we seemed to be short of cash as a nation, although HS2 was to be paid for by loans as it went along so shouldn't have had a major effect on the books. It was cleverly removed from the 2019 election by the commissioning of the Oakervee review, which added delay, cost and uncertainty, but meant that the Prime Minister didn't have to offer an opinion nor nail his colours to any particular mast. Delays always mean extra costs for inflation as well as design. Big delays mean laying off and rehiring.
And so to the present "cost saving" proposals. To layman, 11 platforms seems a lot for a terminus, and 10 sounds remarkably similar. To a designer or an engineer, they will be hugely different numbers, and 7 will mean a major redesign of how the services will operate. I wouldn't mind betting that any savings in the building of the terminus are more than outweighed by extra costs elsewhere, and that if Euston ends up with 7 platforms, another four will have to be built almost immediately after a shopping mall has been put up on the vacant lot.
The obvious answer is to not do big infrastructure projects in the first place, and cope with increasingly overcrowded railways and the knock-on effects on traffic. We could do the same with housing, which would be a boon to the tent industry. The more sensible way would be to get all the consultation and arguing out of the way before handing out shovels, and having a plan carved in granite that cannot be changed other than by a general election with that as the sole issue. It isn't just HS2 that should be done this way - Portishead is merely a smaller version of the same thing, affected by the same malaise on a more local scale.
