The £40bn HS2 disaster sums up better than anything else why Britain is failing

OPINION

Nothing symbolises the incompetence of the British state, the failings of our civil service and the complacency of our politicians better than the disaster that is HS2. An exchange in a House of Commons committee room last December provided a vivid illustration.

MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown wanted to know how much the new High Speed Two (HS2) rail line between London and Birmingham was going to cost. There had been talk of £45 billion, or maybe £57 billion, or perhaps even £66 billion. So what was the figure? It seemed a reasonable question. After all, construction began four years ago.

But Dame Bernadette Kelly, the most senior civil servant in the Department for Transport, made a startling admission. She couldn’t confirm a number because nobody actually knew what the total sum would be. In what passes for a grovelling apology from a Whitehall mandarin, she told the MP: “I am afraid that I have to report that we do not have such an estimate.”

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has since confirmed that we will not now “how much HS2 will cost or when it will be delivered” until some time in 2026.

But the great tragedy of HS2 is that its most fervent critics are wrong. They’ve called it a white elephant or vanity project, but it’s neither of those things. A major new rail line is urgently needed, including both “phase one” of HS2, linking Birmingham to London, and the doomed “phase two”, connecting Birmingham with Manchester and Leeds, which is unlikely ever to go ahead.

Governments and think tanks have published numerous reports explaining why, but the explanation is simple. Existing rail lines, and the West Coast Main Line in particular, are full and cannot accommodate the number of train services the nation needs.

The West Coast Main Line runs between London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow. If you’ve heard of it, there’s a good chance you associate it with long distance services between big cities, currently provided by train operator Avanti West Coast.

But this track is actually used by 11 passenger train operators, many providing local services. For example, if you take the train from Rugby in Warwickshire to Stafford in next-door Staffordshire, you will be travelling on the West Coast Main Line.

On top of that, it carries 40% of all UK rail freight traffic.

Explaining why HS2 was needed in 2013, the Department for Transport said: “Parts of the West Coast Main Line are full in terms of the number of trains, many of which are already full to overflowing at certain times of day.”

What was true then is true today. There were 1.65 million passenger journeys nationwide in 2014-15, and 1.73 million last year.

HS2 was never just about providing more trains to London. By replacing long-distance services on the West Coast Main Line, it would also have allowed improvements to local services in places like Shrewsbury, Milton Keynes and Crewe. In a similar way, the eastern leg of HS2 would have meant more services to Peterborough, Lincoln, Bedford and Northampton - even though HS2 trains themselves didn’t stop at those stations.

This wouldn’t just be good for passengers. It would also benefit the economy by effectively bringing businesses closer to each other, and to their potential employees.

The HS2 we are getting, however, is a shadow of the original plan. Trains will eventually run between London and Birmingham but the northern legs have been cancelled in the face of soaring costs and public scepticism.

So what went wrong?

Arguably, the first mistake was naming it HS2 (HS1 is the high speed line between London and the Channel Tunnel). This gave the impression that the project was all about faster trains, leading people to ask whether it was really worth spending billions of pounds to get to London 30 minutes faster.

But the PR blunder could probably have been overcome if the project hadn’t also gone massively over budget and faced a series of delays.

Back in 2013, the cost of phase one of HS2 - the only phase that will now be built - was put at £21.4 billion, the equivalent of around £30 billion today due to inflation.

But the Government has actually spent £40.5 billion so far, and doesn’t know what the final price will be.

As Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander admitted, this doesn’t just affect HS2. “Delayed benefits and cost increases incurred on HS2 have diverted billions of pounds from other vital transport priorities,” she told MPs.

Trains were once due to begin running in 2033. But Ms Alexander said: “I see no route by which trains can be running by 2033 as previously planned.”

Several reasons for the disaster have been identified. The initial plan was for an “exceptionally high-specification and high-speed railway”, which was more expensive than it needed to be.

The Department for Transport has also admitted that initial proposals “underestimated” the challenges of designing and building a new line.

Legal challenges, and fear of future challenges, meant vast sums were spent on measures to reduce the impact on the environment, including £100 million for a 1km tunnel in Buckinghamshire to allow bats to cross the line safely.

HS2 also failed to ensure it got good value for money from the thousands of firms involved in supplying goods and services for the project.

In addition, governments kept on changing their minds about what they were trying to achieve. This usually meant cutting costs by cancelling planned sections of the network, but the result is that the remaining part is more expensive than it should have been.

Finally, HS2 Ltd, the Government-owned business created to oversee the project, had “insufficient capability” according to the Department for Transport. This is another way of saying it just hasn’t been up to the job, although Ministers hope Mark Wild, the former chief executive of London’s Crossrail network, will turn things around after he was appointed to lead the project last year.

We can only hope.

Dame Bernadette’s admission that she didn’t know how much HS2 will cost taxpayers is one illustration of the project’s failure. There was another last month in Beijing, where the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation proudly displayed its new 373mph train, which is set to slash journey times to cities such as Shanghai.

Other nations are improving their transport networks for the very good reason that it ultimately makes them richer. To our shame, however, it seems we in the UK are just not capable of building a railway.