The HS2 debacle is a parable of broken Britain

The levels of waste, incompetence and dysfunction inside parts of the modern British state are hard to fathom at times. It consumes extraordinary amounts of money, yet increasingly struggles to perform even its most essential tasks competently. Nothing better illustrates this state failure than HS2, Britain’s high-speed rail project linking London to Birmingham.

Originally proposed by Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2009, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition confirmed the project was to go ahead in 2012. As it was described at the time, it was to be a high-speed train line connecting London to Birmingham with a Y-shaped section to Manchester and Leeds. The construction of the entire HS2 network was costed at £32.7 billion and was supposed to be completed by 2026 – ie, this year. Neither the projected cost nor schedule has been even close to accurate.

In fact, the UK government declared this week that HS2 will not be finished until possibly the 2040s, and that it could set the taxpayer back up to £102.7 billion. That’s over three times the original projected cost. And according to some sources, even that is a massive underestimate.

What’s more, the scope of HS2 has been massively scaled back since 2012. The northern and eastern legs of the route, taking it to Leeds and Manchester, have been scrapped – a move that has reduced the total length of the line by more than 50 per cent. HS2 will now be slower than promised, too.

With the financial sums involved in HS2 so large, it’s easy to become numb to them. So it’s worth putting the anticipated cost of the project into more comprehensible terms. Assuming it ends up being complete on time at its current proposed length of 230 kilometres, for £102.7 billion, the railway, including associated works like new stations and bridges, is expected to cost up to £446million per kilometre. That’s close to half a million pounds for every metre of track. That’s nearly £4,500 for every centimetre. Oh, and it will have taken over 30 years to finish, from inception to delivery. It beggars belief.

China, by contrast, built the entire Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway, spanning 1,318 kilometres, in marginally over three years between April 2008 and June 2011. To reiterate, that railway is more than six times as long as HS2’s route, was built for around four times less, at £26 billion. And its trains are faster, too.

Indeed, China has laid approximately 25,000 miles of high-speed track in under 18 years, almost enough to circle the globe. That’s far quicker than we’ve managed to build HS2, which will be under 200 miles long.

Of course, China does have a far larger workforce and is governed by a totalitarian regime. It enjoys certain morally questionable ‘advantages’ over Britain when it comes to undertaking immense construction programmes at breakneck speed. But China isn’t the only nation that is able to execute such schemes more rapidly than the UK – liberal democratic nations including France, Italy and South Korea have all built, or are in the process of building, high-speed train lines and for a fraction of the price.

Britain hasn’t always been in the painfully slow lane. In the past, major public works were often delivered far more cheaply and efficiently than they are today. The 118-mile Great Western Railway, completed in the 1840s, cost £6million to £7million – equivalent to perhaps several hundred million pounds in today’s money, not tens of billions.

HS2 is just the most high-profile example of the modern British state’s incapacity. There are numerous other infrastructure projects that have encountered similar problems. They have either stalled entirely or ended up coming in massively over budget and behind schedule.

Take the Lower Thames Crossing, the long-planned road tunnel linking Essex and Kent. The planning application alone ran to well over 350,000 pages and took years to process before construction even properly began. Huge sums have been spent on environmental assessments, consultations, legal-compliance exercises, regulatory submissions and procedural hurdles… and the crossing itself remains nowhere near completion.

Or look at Hinkley Point C, the nuclear power station in Somerset. When originally given the go-ahead in 2016, it was anticipated to cost £18 billion and open in the mid-2020s. Since then, that sum has risen to over £30 billion, while the completion date continues slipping further into the future.

Or consider the endless delays surrounding airport expansion, road upgrades, housebuilding and energy infrastructure. Britain increasingly appears to be a country that can’t get things done.

HS2 receives plenty of scrutiny, much of it entirely justified. But the deeper issue is what it reveals about modern Britain itself. We feel like a nation that has lost the ability to act decisively, its construction and infrastructural ambitions mired in a swamp of legal process, institutional inertia and ‘progressive’ dogma.

Indeed, the HS2 project team seemed most comfortable producing lengthy equality, diversity and inclusion reports than building anything. Because, as we all know, it’s impossible to build a railway unless the people doing the building have familiarised themselves with ideas of white privilege and gender identity.

HS2 captures well the absurdity and failure of the modern managerial state. It is a state that is happier binding itself in red tape and bureaucratic processes than actually building anything. And we as a society are paying the price.