Simon Jenkins on HS2

Simon Jenkins is one of the few Guardian columnists worth reading.

Here's what he had to say about HS2:

The case against HS2 should never have been left to lovers of countryside, rather than to other transport users or taxpayers in general. This has played into the hands of the construction lobby, which has shrewdly allied itself with the naive left in depicting opposition to HS2 as confined to Tory nimbys. They can be dismissed by Cameron's macho urban court as effete and "anti-enterprise".
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The HS2 lobby has been led by contractors and consultants who manoeuvred themselves into what has become almost an arm of government. They promised ministers and officials untold glory in return for contracts. The lobby was actually set up by transport officials in 2009 to press their case, largely with the Treasury.

Since then the HS2 project has been allocated an astonishing £750m of public money – enough for how many schools or hospitals? – without a single spade being turned and before any decision was made to go ahead. As with Crossrail, the scale of spending and interests at stake banished reason and made the project unstoppable, besotting one transport secretary after another. The latest, Justine Greening, gasped over her plan today like Ahmadinejad over his latest nuclear enrichment plant.

According to Jenkins, things are even worse now than when the railways were nationalised:

This is money beyond all sense. It could have supplied trams to every big city in Britain. The truth is that railways, since their pseudo-privatisation in the mid-90s, have been consuming subsidy at five times the rate they did when nationalised. They take 20 times more bureaucrats to oversee them, while fares have risen to as much as 10 times the European average. Rail oversight has been one of the great failures of modern British government – without a word of inquiry or remorse.

Service quality is at the mercy not of professional managers, but of passing politicians with no knowledge of transport economics, besieged by company lawyers, the Office of Rail Regulation and the Health and Safety Executive. They all pore over hundred-page contracts and risk assessments, measuring costs against subsidies and fines, hiring and firing subcontractors with abandon.

The answer, of course, is not a re-nationalisation, but full privatisation.

It's incredible that most people believe we have a free-market economy.

As Westminster's most promising MP was moved to wonder, did we win the Cold War then suffer a Communist takeover?

HS2 pushed ahead - cui bono?

I last blogged about HS2 in November.

On the 5th, the FT quoted Westminster's most promising MP:

The maths doesn’t add up; this is just sinking capital into a lossmaking project. If you’re going to use the power of the state to do that, then you shouldn’t be surprised that this country is getting poorer.

On the 7th, James Delingpole blogged:

I don't think anyone would dispute that our infrastructure is woeful. But I also think you'd be hard-pushed to argue that Britain's most pressing infrastructure problem right now is the inability of rich commuters to get from Birmingham to London half an hour earlier than they would otherwise have done.

On the 10th, Jonathan Isaby had his say in The Telegraph

So, the worst-kept secret in Westminster is finally out: after days of leaks and briefing to the press, the Government has announced that it intends to spend £32 billion of our money (that’s their estimate at this stage, at any rate) on the High Speed Rail link between London and the North of England. And it won’t be completed for – wait for it – more than twenty years (again, that’s the timescale they’re estimating. For now).

By anyone’s standards, £32 billion is an eye-watering amount of cash – and all the more so at a time when families and government alike are having to look for savings. It works out at well over £1,000 for every single family up and down the United Kingdom, and large numbers of us remain unconvinced that this will be money well spent.

The project doesn't make sense. Taxpayers don't want it. For whose sake is it being built?

HS2

BBC News:

The case for HS2 depends partly on the idea that time spent on the train is unproductive, so that if you can make the journey shorter there will be big productivity gains for the economy.

The government document setting out the cost/benefit analysis puts the value of that time saving at £7.3bn by 2043 - and that's just for the section running from London to Birmingham.

But when I got on a train at Birmingham International, I found plenty of passengers - in First Class at least - who appeared to disprove that theory.

With free wi-fi on the train, they were hunched over their laptops and smartphones, busy working rather than idling away the journey.

What do the passengers think?

If the HS2 project does go ahead the journey to London will be cut to just 49 minutes by 2026.

But the passengers I met did not seem too excited by that - Roisif Wilson, who spends some of the week shuttling between offices in Birmingham, was not convinced that the money would be well spent.

"We use the internet for conference calls anyway," she said. "We're living in a much more technological age and I think it would be good to invest in better wi-fi for more people. It's not a significant enough difference for the investment."

Personally, it strikes me as a grotesque waste of money. They should concentrate instead on getting our existing trains to run on time, and adding capacity so that people don't need to stand.

UPDATE:

Here's the latest from Westminster's most promising MP:

The Transport Committee’s report into High Speed Rail was released today. You can find it here.

I voted against the report. In my view, it is too supportive of the present proposals.

In committee, a number of us brought forward and voted for amendments which would have softened the report substantially. Some of these were defeated by just one vote. Full details can be found in the formal minutes at the end of the first volume.