When Justine Greening opened the National College for High Speed Rail in 2017 she was filled with optimism. It was “a win-win for everyone,” said the education secretary at the time. Based in Doncaster, near where the Flying Scotsman was built in 1923 and within minutes of at least 20 rail engineering firms and a major rail freight terminal, it was an obvious site for the country’s first specialist high-speed rail college. A suitably grand glass and steel building was constructed to house the high-tech project aimed at training some of the 2,000 apprentices it was thought would be needed to build the HS2 rail network, linking north and south.
Next month, just six years since its first students arrived, the college, renamed the National College for Advanced Transport and Infrastructure, will close. A victim, and symbol, of the dither, delay and cutbacks around HS2.
U-turns and tinkering, largely by politicians, have made it impossible for the engineers and project managers building HS2 to plan how much work they might be given, and how many staff they will need. That meant they were unable to offer the apprenticeships the college hoped for, and student numbers fell.
Caiden Cooley, from Doncaster, was among the school-leavers who submitted an application for a railway development course when the college opened. “It seemed fun, learning how to roll out tonnes of steel train tracks. That’s not the kind of thing they teach you at university,” said Cooley, now 24.
However, after reports grew that HS2 was being downgraded, and would no longer run through Doncaster as had been planned, he feared that a rail qualification would not guarantee him a glittering career. Cooley quit to study computer science at Nottingham Trent University instead. “There’s a big future in computer science,” he said.
HS2 was originally conceived in 2009 and planned in two phases, the first of which would connect London with Birmingham before splitting into a Y shape to connect to northern cities. However, the project has since gone through many changes, most recently scrapping the entirety of the eastern leg.
Julie Owen, acting chief executive of Siemens, a manufacturer of trains and rail infrastructure which has done a lot of work on HS2, said: “What we need most from governments is certainty — once you’ve announced a plan, stick to it.” Another senior source in the rail engineering industry said the college’s closure was “symptomatic of the government’s failure on HS2.
“Years of dither and delay have ravaged UK industry and, without urgent action, companies will begin questioning their investments. Reversing course will take more than lukewarm words from government.”
However, while rail companies urge greater certainty over spending, HS2 is, for many, synonymous with waste and delay. While the original costs in 2009 were placed at £37 billion, the final bill is now expected to top £100 billion.
Inflation and higher wage costs are making every stage of the project more expensive. Engineering sources say HS2 is currently tendering a contract to build 36 miles of track near Crewe. The price? £500 million. But for all the billions being thrown at the project, it remains behind schedule, even in its scaled-back size. Only about half of its first leg has been completed.
As well as the cost, much of the blame lies in the complicated process of planning and buying up the property needed for the route. In February 2020, an independent review also suggested that there had been “gold-plating” of HS2 contracts, making contractors build to a far more stringent quality than needed.
Another cause for the spiralling costs and delay were changes to the route. The scheme scrapped its Scottish leg as well as its eastern route and cancelled other smaller legs, incurring significant abortive costs in the process. This year the government even suggested that Euston would no longer be the start of the line, despite millions having already been spent on construction at the station.
William Barter, a railway consultant, said abandoning projects halfway through construction because of costs could be self-defeating in the long term. “It is a bit like building a house and then not finishing it because the roof will cost more than you first thought,” he said. Last year HS2 scrapped its Golborne Link Manchester after £50 million had already been spent on construction.
Such uncertainty was always going to jeopardise the college’s prospects. Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer who taught there said: “It was obvious this college was doomed from the moment it opened its doors because it wasn’t accompanied with any long-term plan for rail infrastructure.” He said the problem went wider than the constant revisions to HS2 routes. The government, he said, had also failed on its promise in 2019 to publish yearly a rail network enhancement pipeline document, which contractors could have used to gauge the amount of work likely to be available. This failure, he said, was symptomatic of a government that had placed the sector in “tick-over mode”, unable to expand.
“We don’t know what investment there is going to be, we don’t know what the tracks will look like, we don’t know how many staff we need to recruit for — it’s a mess. That uncertainty makes it very difficult for the college to sustain itself.”
Dennis remembered teaching railway design courses at the college, when it first opened, in 2017.
“Having taught the students there, many of whom were brilliant, it’s quite depressing to find out those opportunities are being denied to other people.”
The scaling back of HS2 also had a more direct impact on applications. “Kids aren’t stupid, they don’t want to go into an industry that the government keeps scaling back,” he said.
The 170 or so students still there will be transferred to other colleges to complete their training while it is unclear what will happen to the empty building.
Dan Fell, chief executive of the Doncaster Chamber of Commerce said: “This is a real opportunity loss for the city and yet when it launched there was a lot of optimism here.”
The shutdown is the latest setback for the city, with its airport also closing last year. “We were badly in need of a win,” Fell said. The loss of the college will be felt beyond the rail companies, he added, pointing out that the closure would have an impact on the number of young locals in well-paid engineering careers. “It has a knock-on effect,” he said.
Trough-Tec Systems is one company that was delighted by the prospect of a college to provide skilled rail workers. The company builds cable housing boxes, which snake alongside railway tracks, securely carrying wi-fi, telecom and electricity wires inside. Located in an industrial park five minutes from the college, its cable boxes are stacked ten feet high like a large fortress encircling its warehouses, from which the dull hum of forklifts can be heard.
Gary Elliott, managing director, said Trough-Tec had been eager to offer placements to the students to help address skills shortages: “We were over the moon — at the moment you end up having to look on Indeed [a recruitment website] or LinkedIn and you can’t guarantee the skills that way. A technical railway college providing a steady supply of candidates would have been fantastic news.”
Elliott, 61, said the company stopped pinning its hopes on HS2 long ago. “You can’t build a business on something that may or may not happen,” he said. His reaction when he heard of the last scaling back spoke to that pessimism: “Yeah, we saw that coming,” he said.
Manufacturers fear that while Britain prevaricates other countries are ploughing ahead with their own infrastructure.
Owen, of Siemens, said: “To continue to invest, we need certainty on plans for new trains, digital signalling, and electrification, smarter ticketing just like we have in places like Australia, India and the US.”
Australia has committed to spending billions to upgrade its infrastructure, which includes halving the time it takes to travel between Sydney and Melbourne. Some British rail engineers are moving to jobs in Australia.
The “chop-change” strategy is not limited to HS2. In May 2021, Boris Johnson announced the biggest shake-up of the railways since privatisation. At the heart of the change would be a large new umbrella organisation called Great British Railways, which would, rather like the old British Rail, take over the running of large parts of the network. Doncaster had been in the running to house its headquarters but lost out to Derby, another historic rail city. However, Derby’s victory was pyrrhic. It emerged last month that ministers had watered down the plan and that the proposals were unlikely to get any parliamentary time.
A government spokesperson said it was committed to HS2 and that the project was already creating thousands of apprenticeships and a better skilled workforce. HS2 said it had created 1,200 apprenticeships and was employing nearly 30,000 people. The department said it was working with education organisations — and listed initiatives, including graduate training programmes and schemes to help get unemployed people into jobs on the project.
Barter, the consultant, said HS2 and Great British Railways’ travails show the failure of UK infrastructure planning. “They both show a lack of will to make a decision. Is the government really interested in railways? Do they have a positive view of what the railways can do to the economy?”
He said scaling back the projects could mean that fewer people use the railway, meaning they generate less economic value.
“With HS2, you could spend 80 per cent of the capital costs but only get 20 per cent of the benefits,” he said.
Even those reduced benefits are unlikely to be felt in Doncaster.
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