ANDREW GILLIGAN
Doomed from the start: the four reasons HS2 failed
Last week we exposed the chaos that still haunts the project. Now a former No 10 adviser sets out how it became Britain’s ‘worst infrastructure scheme in modern history’
As ministers are about to learn the hard way, spending money on one thing means not spending it on something else. So reports of cuts in the budget to local buses and trains should be seen in the context of other reports that Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, plans to commit yet more billions to HS2, a project that even the transport secretary called “dire” and “out of control” in The Sunday Times last week.
For years, there has been consensus on Britain’s greatest infrastructure needs: more housing; a decarbonised electricity grid; raising local public transport in the regions to London standards; better sewers for cleaner rivers and new reservoirs for the new homes.
So why, instead, are we spending fortunes on something — intercity high-speed rail — which is objectively not even in the top ten? And how did the bills spiral not just out of the government’s control, but out of its very knowledge?
As The Sunday Times revealed last week, HS2 cannot tell ministers whether it is £10 billion or £20 billion over budget. For perspective, even the lower of those two sums would be enough to electrify almost every railway line in the north of England, or build three cities a new tram system, or roughly double the capital budgets for the courts, prisons and police in each of the next five years.
HS2 devotees blame the train wreck on people like me: politicians and aides who spoiled a fine project, originally designed as a Y-shaped scheme from London to the Midlands, Manchester and Leeds, by meddling and cutting it back. (Between 2019 and 2024, I advised both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak on transport in Downing Street.)
In truth, though, HS2 was certain to fail from the start: doomed by four foundational flaws which no “review” or “ministerial task force”, the latest potions prescribed by Labour, are able to cure.
1. The wrong route
Britain’s previous high-speed line, HS1, which runs from St Pancras International to the Channel tunnel, did work, costing two thirds less than HS2 per mile in real terms. This was partly because it followed a motorway corridor, which was already spoilt.
To save a few minutes, HS2 chose instead to slice through the middle of the Chilterns, stuffed with ancient woods and vocal, politically active nimbys, and certain to require vastly expensive tunnels, cuttings and other aesthetic additions. A better route would have been along the M40 corridor.
2. The wrong speed
They were wildly aspirational, opting for a line with a design speed of 250mph, one third above the European high speed standard (France’s TGV lines and HS1 have a maximum of 186 or 200mph). Accommodating this ultra-fast design meant the line had to be flatter and straighter, with more earth moved, and yet more tunnels and viaducts, costlier track and structures. The top speed of 250mph, by the way, will never be reached in planned service.
3. Bad connections
HS2 doesn’t link properly to the rest of the transport network. Many rail passengers from London to Birmingham don’t end their journey in the city centre: they connect at Birmingham New Street station for other parts of the conurbation. Under HS2’s plans, this connection becomes a 15-minute walk through the streets of Birmingham from its separate purpose-built terminus to the local trains at New Street, losing half the time you saved coming from London.
Despite the vast sums spent buying up expensive London property, HS2 still does not — after ten years — have a workable station design for Euston, the planned London end point. Euston is one of the capital’s worst-connected termini, with only two overcrowded Tube lines in the station itself. (A pedestrian link would also be made to two more lines five minutes away — at Euston Square station).
Nor does HS2 join up with Britain’s other high-speed line at St Pancras. It will be a domestic backwater, not linked to the continental network and never reaching the distances that justify its high speeds. Because unlike in France, Germany, or Spain, all England’s key cities — save Newcastle — are within about 200 miles of all the others. At those distances, the time you save simply isn’t worth the extra cost of high-speed track.
Flawed design and high cost means that HS2’s benefits, though not nil, are not even close to enough to justify the price. Indeed, in 2022 the London-Manchester HS2 line was assessed by Whitehall itself as delivering (over six decades) 90p of benefit for every £1 spent. That’s on the official, grossly understated construction cost of £45.7 billion, (£61 billion in 2024 prices).
HS2 degrades London links from smaller, poorer places on today’s main lines, such as Stockport, Stoke, Wolverhampton and Coventry. For the first 60 years, the small amounts of C02 it saves through greener transport will be outweighed by the vast amounts it took to build it. Even under the full scheme, almost half the benefits would go to London and the southeast. Pound for pound, almost any other public transport project imaginable would do more for growth, levelling up, lower car use and net zero.
4. Ratchet, ratchet, ratchet
The scheme’s greatest flaw is the culture of HS2 Ltd, whose waste and dishonesty are surely now undeniable. This is about more than just profligacy. Bent Flyvbjerg, former professor of major project management at Oxford, has coined the “iron law of megaprojects”, which describes them as “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again”. Flyvbjerg identifies optimism bias as a key problem: project managers gloss over and underplay costs to get something started, then gradually admit the full cost once huge amounts of money have been spent and it’s too late to stop.
This ratchet process has been at the heart of HS2’s spiralling costs. HS2 and Department for Transport (DfT) officials concealed the rising costs from parliament; had those been known at the time, the scheme might have been cancelled. They misled No 10 and at least one Treasury official. They ousted staff who rang alarm bells.
When The Sunday Times reported this last October, HS2 and the DfT pressed us in Downing Street to authorise denials which were untrue. The denials they asked to release were that the allegations in The Sunday Times had been looked at previously by the National Audit Office (NAO) and found to be unfounded. But in fact, they had not been specifically looked at by the NAO, and at least one had been founded.
HS2 was, perhaps deliberately, also made too expensive to cancel. By 2020, when Boris Johnson was as prime minister deciding whether to start main construction on phase 1, they had already spent an astonishing £9 billion on “preparatory works” such as design, surveys, overheads and property — most of which, had we said no at that point, would have been wasted. That became a key argument.
Last year, Rishi Sunak called their bluff, cancelling phase 2 from the Midlands to Manchester. Another adviser and I in Downing Street argued that he should make it a “teachable moment” for Whitehall, with inquiries and sackings, but he didn’t.
Thus many of the culprits are still there, and still using the same tactics. The same ratchet operation is clearly being tried on the new ministers: we’ve spent so much already, it would be silly not to finish. It’s not so much more, you know.
It is vastly more: even the official cost of phase 2, in 2024 prices, is up to £33 billion — perhaps £65-70 billion if it costs spiral as they did in phase 1. The new proposals for a supposedly cheaper, slower “phase 2 lite” are a delusion and trap. We looked at this in government — concluding (as do many HS2 supporters) that it was not cheaper than the full-fat plan. We were told this redesign would need a fresh parliamentary bill, and another five or more years. It’s another version of the old trick: start low, put up the price and end back at the original scheme.
It is claimed that we need HS2 because the existing main line is full, but no one ever provided evidence to prove this. Overcrowding, we found, was usually caused by too-short trains — most from Manchester to Birmingham have only four standard-class carriages, and many to London only five and a half standard-class carriages in a nine-carriage train. Crowding is also caused by quirks of the fare system, with heavy demand for the first off-peak departures. Capacity could greatly expand with cheaper interventions, including longer platforms and trains. The north of England’s capacity crisis is on the local and regional lines, such as across the Pennines, which HS2 relieves little, if at all.
So why are we still debating the northern extension?
Partly because it is easy and cheap for northern mayors such as Andy Burnham, who are pushing for the extension, to demand someone else build them a high-speed rail line. By contrast, many of the things they should be (but mostly aren’t) doing themselves — congestion charging, say, or taking roadspace for bus lanes — require political risk on their part.
Partly, it’s that this has now become a faith-based issue. Backing HS2 proves you’re green, or a friend of the north, or just a good person who wants people’s lives made easier.
Governments often pursue stupid, destructive policies for their symbolic value, of course. But HS2 is a very expensive symbol. In fact, in terms of value and efficacy, it is the worst infrastructure project in modern British history. Don’t just take my word for it: Christian Wolmar, one of Britain’s leading train experts, recently called it “the biggest omnishambles in history”.
Finally, while HS2 has been wrong for the country and the planet, it is very right indeed for the construction and consultancy industries, which have powerful lobbies in Westminster. Trams, bus lanes, and new conventional tracks would help far more people, in more places, more quickly. But they’re cheaper, with fewer opportunities for profiteering, than one giant project which can be milked for decades.
The only rational approach to HS2 is to stop it causing us, and the public finances, any more damage. The stretch to the West Midlands is too late to cancel — the digging has been done and the tunnels built. But the rest of the scheme should be left in the grave, and the money spent — as we planned — on better projects.
Britain needs investment. But we need the right investment. Investing in the wrong projects is worse than not investing at all.
Andrew Gilligan, a former transport adviser to the prime minister, is head of transport at Policy Exchange
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