Off the Rails: Sally Gimson on HS2. Oxford Literary Festival
Off the Rails by journalist and local councillor Sally Gimson is an in-depth study of the biggest waste of public money in our lifetime. She traces the whole project through every stage over the past 30 years and concludes that it has been "a huge collective failure" for which there is "no accountability". None of the politicians, civil servants, engineers, private companies and project managers who have wrecked so much of our environment and wasted £50 billion (maybe twice that amount) will ever face prosecution. They just pocket huge profits.
The scheme, first proposed by Labour under Blair and Brown, was taken up by their successors and neither they nor the Conservatives exercised due diligence.
In the austerity years 2010-2014, Cameron and Clegg cut spending on welfare, including child benefit; local government funding, reducing police forces; the NHS (cutting ambulance services); state schools - even to the point of letting the buildings crumble - and universities, loading students with fees and debt; defence; and of course the paltry amount the UK government spends on the Arts too. Then reflect that all those "savings" were squandered on a pointless scheme for a "high-speed" trainline from London to Manchester that will not now go further than Birmingham and probably won't even be high-speed.
Countless people have been forced out of their homes, compelled to sell their farms and businesses (often not paid for years either), activists have been jailed for trying to protect ancient woodland, the area of London around Euston has been wrecked and all for what? The option to get to Birmingham 20 minutes faster. Calling that "infrastructure" just dignifies lunacy with a long pompous name.
Gimson says that the project's official "price...was totally and utterly unrealistic from the very beginning". Since then it has grown from £37 billion to many times that figure. Contracts were handed out on a "Cost +" basis that guaranteed more funding if unforeseen expenses arose. And unforeseen expenses arose everywhere, because no proper surveying or geographical assessment had been carried out by anyone. Moreover, private companies stood to gain by delays and rising costs because they were guaranteed a percentage of the outlay, not a fixed sum. She concludes that the whole story is one of "mismanagement, overspending & incompetence."
When Rishi Sunak cancelled the Northern leg, he was admitting that the whole scheme had always been a pointless extravagance.
I welcome this book because, sad though this story is, we must as a nation confront such failures and the underlying attitudes that made them possible. Infatuated by ideas of futuristic high-speed and high-technology, successive governments were prepared to squander untold billions, while ignoring the environment and chronically underspending on the upkeep of our existing railways.
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