A Walk Through HS2

It is a while since I wrote about the UK’s infinite rail transport money pit, also known as HS2. When I first started criticising it years ago, based on my view that the business case was a con (having seen many dodgy public sector business cases over the years and even having helped write a few), I got some comments on Twitter and LinkedIn saying it would all be a great success and I was being ridiculous when I predicted it would cost over £100 billion. I did think it might get completed for that much, I should say.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, two retired CPOs and I went for a 10 mile stroll in the Chilterns in a persistent drizzle. But I saw a badger close up for the first time in 40 years!  I also saw rather a lot of the HS2 works as our route crossed that swathe of land twice. The second time, we had to divert a few hundred yards and use a road bridge going over the works.

But as we approached the first crossing, our path was diverted for a few hundred yards, and then we were directed to a gatepost with high wire all around it. This was the HS2 works, all fenced off of course. At the gate, we were greeted by a chap in high-vis gear.  He nodded and said something into his walkie-talkie. We saw another chap a couple of hundred yards away, at the top of a slope, who presumably checked that no high-speed bulldozers were heading our way over the hill.

Hi-Vis 2 then gave Hi-Vis 1 permission to let us cross. We walked about 100 years across the site, mainly across rough gravel roadway, to another gate manned by Hi-Vis 3. He opened his gate and ushered us into a passage way about 2 metres wide with 3 metre high wire fencing each side. We followed this for another couple of hundred yards, before meeting Hi-Vis 4, who opened another gate which led into more wire-edged walkway.  We asked him how many people he’d seen that morning. “Just you three,” he said. It was noon by now.

So four people employed as far as we could see just to help walkers get across 100 yards of construction site.  Were those posts manned 24 hours a day, we wondered? If each guy is paid lets say £30K a year, the construction firm no doubt charges the tax payer at least twice that. So on a single shift, that’s a quarter of a million a year. If there is 24 hour cover, we’re talking a million a year.

Surely there must be better options. A simple crossing with some warning lights maybe?  Or just one person as an escort? I know it is a cliché but this felt like “health and safety gone mad”.  When we look at the relative costs of capital investment sin the UK, we wonder why it costs us so much more than other European countries, let alone China, India and so on.

Well, this sort of approach partly explains things. And I come back to one of my original fears about HS2. Who actually had a vested interest in getting the best possible value for money? Not the civil servants in Whitehall and the executives running the HS2 company,  who get promoted and bigger salaries if they “control” a bigger budget. Not the hordes of consultants and advisers to HS2, whose fees look more reasonable if the construction firms charge more. And certainly not the first-tier suppliers themselves.

In the greater HS2 scheme of things, four poor guys standing around doing absolutely nothing for hours, days, weeks on end (mind-numbingly boring work, by the way) just doesn’t matter. And that sums up some of the problems with the whole scheme.