The story of HS2 reveals the glorious ineptitude of democracy

Elective government is the worst kind – if you want to get anything done

It was a rare moment when my pal Toby had a sense of humour failure. I called him one morning in the deep winter of 2009. “Sorry I can’t quite hear you,” I said. “What’s that noise in the background? Is it a high-speed train?” “Not funny, mate,” he replied. In fact he was right. It was very much not funny and I apologised.
Some of us had been involved in attempting to fight off new wind farm proposals that threatened to blight our precious and rural patch of Northamptonshire. Suddenly that battle paled with the announcement by the then Labour government of a new high-speed line, between London to Birmingham. In several years’ time those trains would whizz across the bottom of my friend’s garden.
There was concern and panic. There appeared to be several different routes mooted and a large degree of vagueness. At a first meeting in Brackley Town Hall attended by local MPs, representatives of HS2 Ltd and local residents, a friend of mine tried to get an answer as to whether the proposed line would go through the shed by his back lawn or his kitchen. The kitchen idea was preferable as it meant demolition of his house and guaranteed compensation. The shed option would mean he’d have to live with the line along with a massive depreciation of the value of his home.
These little local difficulties would become ephemera, litter in the path of the line, of the story of HS2. And the ensuing years saw a tale of decision, indecision, confirmation and cancellation. As a report just out by the Institution of Civil Engineers says: “HS2 had to navigate six prime ministers, eight chancellors and nine secretaries of state for transport. Over time, this meant decisions were no longer aligned to any central purpose and the narrative over the need for HS2 was constantly shifting [and] reduced the institutional memory of previous decisions.”
Politicians have sought to use the idea as political capital, initially with Gordon Brown, egged on by his strategist Peter Mandelson, as a weapon in the 2010 general election. HS2 showed the electorate that Labour was committed to futuristic infrastructure, a gleaming and speedy train to hurtle us north and south, connecting our booming cities. Boris Johnson would bang a similar drum years later. The line signalled his vision of progress, its northern leg was a crucial bolt of his levelling-up machinery.
And Rishi Sunak would also use it as a political football but this time by cancelling the northern leg as proof of his fiscal responsibility.
Lord Mandelson would go on to recant his early support for the venture admitting, as he wrote in the Financial Times in 2013, that the decision was “partly politically driven. We were on the eve of a general election and keen to paint an upbeat view of the future.”
And this has all been frightfully annoying for the infrastructure zealots at the Institute of Civil Engineers. They want to build stuff. In their original application for Royal Chartership in 1818, they championed the work of a civil engineer. “The working Mechanic, governed by the superintendence of the Engineer, brings his ideas into reality.” And so they build: roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, docks, ports, lighthouses and harbours. And, of course, railway lines. And when, for the greater good, for our better connectivity and safety, they hatch a plan for a dam or a tunnel or a wind farm, their best hatched ideas get dragged down by politicians and by people. In other words, by democracy.
If only HS2 had a brutal dictator leading from the front, ignoring political expediency and nimbys, you could probably today be on a train from London to Birmingham taking just 45 minutes. Job done.
But a democratic country, where the theory is that state power is vested in the people, thwarts the civil engineers and picks apart their conspiracies to build.
When HS2 was announced, we asked: do we need it and how much will it cost? And the civil engineers and their cheerleaders, some of whom were politicians, fudged and hedged, or rather they lied. Because what we actually needed was capacity, not speed, but that wouldn’t get a civil engineer leaping out of a bed on a cold Monday morning. And because they knew we couldn’t afford it, they just invented the figures. Or, alternatively, they based the figures on completely dubious assumptions (the original cost of the first phase of HS2 being £30bn and now it could be £66bn).
And this I know personally from one minutiae of detail as in 2010, I put up some geological surveyors for six weeks. Their job was to suss out the land, the ground, under the proposed rail line. After their findings were submitted, someone else could make a guess as to how much concrete they might need. So the 2009 plan was hatched without any clue of this.
We still don’t have a completion date, no one dares admit how much a ticket will cost, and I’m yet to meet anyone desperate to get to Birmingham 36 minutes faster.
One day civil engineers will pop corks and ride their white elephant between Birmingham and London (free of charge) while the rest of us are still scrambling for a seat on a crowded train, with no Wi-Fi, eating filthy carbs but at least wrestling with the idea that we, sort of, have a voice.