Christian Wolmar
CHRISTIAN WOLMAR argues that with little fanfare surrounding Royal Assent, the project has failed to capture the public’s imagination
HS2 Royal Assent.
THE firework display in London to mark Royal Assent for HS2 was the biggest since D-Day. An estimated half a million people thronged the banks of the Thames to view the pyrotechnics. In Trafalgar Square, tens of thousands of people heard speeches from the mayors of the northern big cities and stood attentively for three hours in the rain, in an event that would have done Kim Jong-Un proud.
Except, of course, none of this happened. The passing into law of the HS2 Bill was something of a damp squib (to continue the firework analogy), with only the occasional short press release and a few small stories in the national press. There were no ministerial appearances on national TV and radio, and no one to talk the project up.
Admittedly, it was a busy time for Brexit and Trump news (the two issues that dominate the airwaves at the moment), but nevertheless the scant coverage for the biggest infrastructure project this country has ever seen shows how the scheme has completely failed to capture the public’s imagination. Indeed, the public’s knowledge of the new railway is equally scant, and there is surprisingly little enthusiasm for it.
Even the industry hardly seemed interested, with the Rail Delivery Group only managing an extremely banal three-paragraph release. And as well as lacking a champion to speak for it, now that Lord Adonis has disappeared from public view, the project also desperately needed a well-organised and funded opposition. Sure, there was the Stop HS2 campaign, but that has always seemed like a ‘NIMBY’ exercise rather than one rooted in a wider analysis of what was wrong with the scheme in terms of a national transport strategy. The best effort came from the HSUK people who devised what was a much more coherent alternative, but they rather missed the boat by not getting in early enough.
The result is that not only have the basic tenets of the scheme never been properly challenged, the details have also not received sufficient scrutiny.
Philip Haigh, in RAIL 822, rightly pointed out that the Bill is extremely detailed, setting out (just to give one obscure example) that the Scottish Government can undertake work on Phase 1 if necessary (although why it should want to do so is unclear).
However, the basic principles of the Bill did not receive sufficient challenge. Take, for example, the capacity of the line. There has been much confusion over this, not least from HS2 Ltd itself.
In evidence to Parliamentary committees, HS2 Ltd Chairman Sir David Higgins said that because the trains would go faster, the capacity was greater. This is not the case. While intuitively it would seem that if the trains go faster more would be able to get through, especially as there will be moving block signalling (in other words no external signals, but instead a system that will allow trains to travel at safe distances from one another), that assumption is wrong. That’s because the relationship between stopping distance and speed is not linear. The braking distance increases by the square of the speed. So at low speeds, the time taken to cover a fixed distance
“Rather than starting from the notion that we needed a high-speed line because everyone else is getting them, there should have been an appraisal of the entire concept within a transport strategy.”
is longer, but because the braking distance is less the blocks (whether moving or fixed) can be shorter.
Remarkably, Simon Kirby, who moved from Network Rail to HS2 as chief executive (although he has now departed for the more lucrative climes of Rolls-Royce), made the same mistake, telling the Commons Public Accounts Committee that “because the speeds are lower, the capacity is less”.
This is what has worried me about the project right from the beginning. There has been no proper analysis of basic factors which may well have led politicians to a different conclusion. The problem was that very early on it was adopted by all the main political parties, which meant that it was never given proper scrutiny. As a result, the Parliamentary procedure became focused on detail, not principle.
The issue of speed has never been considered properly. Most high-speed railways around the world operate at 300kph (187mph), but HS2 has been designed to 400kph. This makes it far more expensive - perhaps as much as 20% - and makes the route design less flexible. The initial trains will run at 360kph, but HS2’s chief engineer Andrew McNaughton has argued that there is a need for future proofing. Why? We are a small country - 400kph running, which will not be possible on some sections anyway, will shave possibly a mere four or five minutes off the journey to Manchester or Leeds. Given that even at 360kph the trains will be far faster than any possible alternative, this decision has been allowed through without proper consideration.
One reason is that time savings are the key determinant of the business case. The ‘benefits’ of the line used in the business case are mostly obtained by the small time savings millions of people will make, which have then been given a monetary value.
This nonsensical, archaic and just plain dumb method is the basis of WebTag, the Department for Transport’s methodology for big projects. To get a strong positive value the time savings had to be large, which then (in turn) determined the need for the higher speed. This highlights that one of the lessons learned from this project should be the creation of a new methodology for determining whether schemes should be given the go-ahead. I have given this a lot of thought, and will set out my ideas in a future issue.
The biggest missed opportunity of this whole process of committing the nation to this mega scheme has been the failure to assess Britain’s fundamental transport needs. Rather than starting from the notion that we needed a highspeed line because everyone else is getting them, there should have been an appraisal of the entire concept within a transport strategy.
It should (Labour or the Lib Dems should have done this, but they embraced the idea far too readily) have been couched in very basic terms: is this good for the environment? Is it beneficial for the economy of the whole country? Will it really relieve congestion? Instead we had the largely ignored Eddington report nearly a decade ago which actually said we did not need a high-speed railway.
My main objection has always been environmental. This line, especially if it is run at 360kph or even 400kph, will not reduce our carbon emissions. Quite the opposite. Given that climate change is the biggest threat facing humankind, spending upwards of £55 billion on a scheme that offers no such benefits is, frankly, bordering on the criminal. It is real ‘fiddling while watching Rome burn’ stuff.
I have little doubt that the scheme will now be built - or at least the first phase, which incidentally offers fewer benefits than the second. However, I doubt whether our grandchildren will thank us for doing so.