15-07-2025
The HS2 farrago shows we're a country that can't get its act together
It's not often one wishes for Communism or to live in a full-blown dictatorship, but Derailed: The Story of HS2 (Radio 4, all week) just about had me there. Kate Lamble's terrific 10-part series – available in 15-minute daily bursts if you're squeamish or to be guzzled in one go on BBC Sounds if you're a masochist – portrays a Britain that is neither Orwellian nor Kafkaesque, but a bureaucratic basket-case plucked from the pages of Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It may not fully get to the bottom of why HS2 has been such a monstrous debacle, but it shows how in the most gruesome detail.
In Monday's opening episode, Lamble began with perhaps the most damning thing of all. In 2009, the year HS2 first rumbled into life, the West Coast Main Line upgrade had finally finished – years late, billions over budget, with more money spent on compensation than on the actual infrastructure. In other words, the perfect manual for how not to run a railway project. HS2, as we all know too well by now, has made that project look like Swiss clockwork.
Lamble spoke to an impressive roster of those involved in HS2, from engineers to MPs, and found a project riven with division from the off, and one so in love with the idea of itself, it was incapable of seeing a yard in front of its face. Some of the details amounted to a national embarrassment: the budget updates tied doggedly to 2012 prices, key figures sacked for providing realistic costings (HS2 Ltd deny this), the wrong trains purchased, trees chopped down on land they didn't own, thousands of properties bought that they still don't know what to do with.
One key figure stated that the original budget (around £15bn – current estimates have it going northwards of £80bn) was drawn up when they knew 'three to four per cent of the facts' about the project. The use of guesstimates is stunning. According to the podcast, one necessary piece of land attached to a golf course was valued by HS2 at £3,800. They agreed to buy it for £7m. It's not so much a case of trying to work out who knew what – no one seemed to know anything. In 2014, when the first of the bills passed in parliament, the transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin believed that was tantamount to the planning application being approved. Since then, HS2 has required more than 8,000 further permissions from local councils and other agencies.
Yet for all we've completely ballsed it up, Lamble hits upon a key truth. The obsession with the cost and with the speed meant that HS2 had failed to tell the right story. As a result, said Lamble, 'the public got the impression we were about to spend billions just to knock 30 minutes off a trip to Birmingham'. In a country obsessed with the railways, we'd got the narrative wrong, failing to convince the nation that HS2 could be something discussed in 150 years the way we discuss the golden age of Victorian railways now. In 150 years, HS2 will certainly be discussed – as a prime example of the little country that couldn't.
