The hole where Britain’s ambition used to be

By Matthew Brooker

If you’re looking for a symbol of what ails Britain, it lies in a vast tract of idle brown earth in the London borough of Camden. The moribund construction site around Euston station is part of a development area the size of 34 football pitches that’s destined to include the showpiece London terminus of the UK’s high-speed railway. Half a decade after the bulldozers moved in to start razing homes, businesses, parkland and trees, work has stopped and won’t resume for at least two years. Some sceptics doubt the line will ever reach its designated endpoint.

Transport Secretary Mark Harper paused work at Euston in March citing inflation headwinds and affordability pressures. A report the same month by the National Audit Office showed that a redesign of the station aimed at saving money had actually made the project more expensive. A reset of the reset was required, the spending watchdog said. It called on the government to use the two-year delay “to develop a design that is affordable, deliverable and value for money.”

For anyone arriving recently from Asia (like this writer), the sclerotic drama surrounding the UK’s high-speed rail plans is a little surreal. HS2, as the programme is known, is Europe’s largest infrastructure project, and a key plank of government efforts to reduce regional economic disparities. Once forecast to cost less than £40 billion ($50 billion), the price tag is now £72 billion, or £98 billion, or £106 billion, or £170 billion depending on whose numbers you use and when they were produced.

Nothing unusual there. Cost overruns and delays are almost a given with major infrastructure projects. Britain, moreover, has like most countries been grappling with an inflationary shock that has pushed up the price of construction materials such as concrete and steel. What’s remarkable is that the country is still rethinking and wrangling over a project that has spent so long in gestation already. Surely the time to come up with an affordable and deliverable design is before you start flattening neighbourhoods and upending the lives of residents, rather than years later?

HS2 Ltd, a government-funded public body, put the amount spent so far at about £11 billion in a 2021 report; 14 years after the project was first proposed, the UK doesn’t yet have a service to show for that outlay. In its original form, the plan was to link London with Birmingham in the midlands at speeds of up to 360 km per hour, with a branch going on to Manchester in the northwest and an eastern leg to Leeds and York. Trains were scheduled to start running into Euston in the mid-2020s. That has now been pushed back to the 2040s.

This isn’t the way that all countries approach such landmark undertakings. China opened its first high-speed rail line between Beijing and Tianjin in 2008, shortly before the former Labour government set up HS2 Ltd in the UK. Within a decade the Chinese network had reached close to 30,000 km in length and was by far the world’s largest. That had grown to 42,000 km by the end of last year. The length of HS2 as originally envisaged was 530 km.

A fallacious comparison? Perhaps. One is a continental-sized economy with a huge population and a gigantic industrial base at a different stage of development. The other is a small, densely populated island with a service-based economy. The political differences are just as great. China’s autocratic system gives the ruling Communist Party the ability to set national objectives and push through without worrying about the local resistance that a developed
civil society and independent legal system can enable.

Few Britons (thankfully) would choose to give up entrenched legal rights, environmental regulation and democratic accountability, even if it meant traveling on nicer railways that get built more quickly. All the same, it’s hard to avoid the impression that something is askew here. The absurdity hasn’t gone unnoticed, at least at the local level. The Pharaohs built the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Mughals the Taj Mahal in the time that it would take to deliver the Euston project, as the Camden New Journal observed last year, bemoaning how a generation of children in the borough would be left to grow up in the shadow of one of Europe’s biggest building sites.

HS2 has been contentious since the start, with opponents focused mostly on environmental and value-for-money issues. Still, the case for the project is well established. Lack of public support owes much to the failure of successive governments to delineate the argument effectively. Sceptics ask how faster trains to London will help close the economic gap with the regions when what is needed is to improve the clearly inadequate rail services in the north. This, though, is precisely the rationale underpinning HS2. Faster long-distance trains currently run on the same tracks as local services. Moving them on to dedicated
high-speed lines will free up enormous capacity on the older network for slower suburban trains.

The deeper issue is the process that has seen HS2 repeatedly pruned so that it becomes ever more modest in scope, a reflection of political short-termism and the UK Treasury’s power to demand cost cuts at times of fiscal constraint. The eastern leg to Leeds, which by some estimates would have have provided the greatest economic benefits, was scrapped in 2021. HS2’s first phase to Birmingham will now run from a new station at Old Oak Common in west London, obviating for now the need for expensive tunneling work through to Euston while cost savings are sought at the delayed future terminus.

Bloomberg Opinion