The story of HS2 is a cautionary tale that should be studied by all

I doubt many of you are interested in the disaster that is HS2, but as a former transport minister who drove through the Jubilee Line extension and took the first Crossrail (now Liz Line) Bill through the Commons in 1995 only to see the line open 27 years later, I promise it is a classic case of systematically bad planning at practically every level.

The Commons Transport Select Committee chairman described the project as a textbook example of how not to run a project. He said HS2 was “now a cautionary tale that should be studied by future governments” and he blamed the Department of Transport.

The trouble is the problem is endemic. The project was approved using the Hybrid Bill process, which is used when both public and private interests are involved. This is a Victorian construct used when members of parliament were likely to be massive landowners and was designed to ensure that the only MPs who would decide the project were those who had “no interest” in the matter in hand.

In those days, that meant that if a planned railway was to run through their half of the county, they were not to be part of the bill committee. Fast forward to today and I can promise you that membership of a Hybrid Bill Committee is a punishment detail. If you’ve been naughty by not voting as required by your whips, you are consigned to sitting on the committee on Tuesdays and Thursdays for hours at a time, for months and perhaps years, having literally no interest whatsoever in what is being discussed.

The project’s promoters are interrogated by civil servants who are bright and well-meaning but have no detailed knowledge of the issues at hand. So, in the case of HS2, it was designed to travel at 360km per hour. European high-speed trains run at between 300km and 330km per hour. Given how small and frankly hilly England is, why on earth would we want to run faster than Europe?

We should surely have gone for the lower end of the high-speed scale, so the trains could be bought off the shelf for less money than those required for HS2, which were special builds. More importantly, at slower speeds trains can more easily avoid sensitive sites. The higher the speed the less the train can turn. Given our topography that would have resulted in enormous savings in land compensation and substantially less opposition.

As it is, if anyone were daft enough to travel from Old Oak Common to Birmingham, they would only see daylight for 23 minutes. Add in a wholly owned but independent company that saw nothing odd about £100m for a bat tunnel that wouldn’t incidentally have saved any bats, and that was unreasonably aggressive in its approach to land acquisition, and there you have it. I should, of course, add that there is zero prospect of Euston being redeveloped by the private sector. Once bitten, multiple time shy on that one.

What this tells me is that when this government talks about reforming the planning system, we need to go right back to why we need a system at all. So, for example when a government with a reasonable majority wants to build essential infrastructure, it should be able to do so without agencies created by that same government telling it that it can’t.

When the priority is building more homes, then opposition should be entertained only where there are sound reasons beyond mere NIMBY self-interest for doing so. This is not a free for all, it is what virtually every country in Europe does automatically. This is the first government that appears to understand just how badly the current system is broken. Whether they can fix it will go a long way in determining whether or not they are a one term administration.