HS2 has devastated my constituency. And for what?
For years we have been asking 'when? When will HS2 finally be completed?' But this misses the point. We should have questioned not the deadline, but the justification and purpose of the costly, benighted vanity project.
We should have demanded to know why taxpayers are being forced to bankroll this failure. Why are we allowing the civil servants who have overseen this woeful tale of waste and incompetence to remain in their posts? Why have no heads rolled, as a consequence of this national embarrassment?
The most painful aspect to this sorry affair is the knowledge that, even at the outset, when it was a twinkle in Lord Adonis's eye under the previous Labour government, it lacked a business case. Not one private sector investor was willing to risk a penny piece on it. Over a decade later, it has inflicted unnecessary misery on my constituents.
And now we discover that the opening of HS2 will be delayed, with the Transport Secretary announcing that the remaining section of the line will not be completed by 2033.
This is hardly the first time the project has come off the tracks. First the eastern leg to Leeds was scrapped. Then the Manchester leg was curtailed. For a time, it looked as though it would terminate at Old Oak Common in West London, not even making it to Euston despite the money piled into the station's revamp. Commuting times would then have more than offset any savings from HS2's much lauded speed. That truncation has since been abandoned.
The Department for Transport (DfT) has faced accusations of insufficient oversight. Leadership at HS2 Ltd, a public company owned by the DfT, has been a merry-go-round. And all of this is before you get to the £100 million tunnel to protect bats in my county, or HS2's 52-page annual Equality, Diversity and Inclusion statement
For the residents of Wendover, daily life has been fundamentally changed by HS2. The impact on local amenities – on churches and cricket clubs – cannot be overstated. The brazen attempts to send HGVs down narrow residential streets have been destructive.
Landowners and community organisations have been abandoned by project managers. While they face the degrading financial uncertainty that comes with losing their land, the construction companies are raking in millions thanks to the DfT's cost-plus contract model, which guarantees a profit at the expense of the taxpayer whilst reimbursing firms' costs.
This is why the project's real price tag has exceeded £200 billion, with one of the worst benefit-cost ratios of any major project, all to, in the words said to me by a former Minister of State for Transport a few years back, prop up Britain's construction industry.
Last month it was revealed by RAIL Magazine, through a Freedom of Information request, that not only will the final cost of Phase One reach over £100 billion, with £81 billion (at 2019 prices) attributed to constructing as far as Old Oak Common, but also that it will be 2036 at the earliest until this section is finished. It's a slap in the face for those who've experienced compulsory land purchases, land which may have provided a source of income.
There is effectively no spending control mechanism. It is a project which, by its very design, benefits the contractors at the expense of hard working taxpayers who are currently seeing no benefit from HS2 and likely never will, given its reduced scope.
When asked, HS2 contractor Balfour Beatty Group's former Chief Executive Leo Quinn answered 'no' to a question on the efficacy of restructuring HS2's major works contracts in the interests of the taxpayer; his suggestion that 'no contractor in the UK could actually have a balance sheet to deliver something of that [HS2's] size' is highly alarming.
Not only does this bring into doubt the Department's ability to renegotiate its own contracts – it also casts significant doubt on whether the project could ever be delivered in full at all when, as Mr Quinn suggests, the private sector does not have the capital resources required to facilitate a project like this.
The utter failure of HS2 is a vivid example of British decline. That so much money has been spent on something which has so miserably failed to come about does not augur well for other future infrastructure projects. We need to learn from this.
HS2 ruins the lives of everyone it touches and, if it's not reigned in soon, we as a country will suffer immensely, just as my constituents have.
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