February has marked the start of the so called ’Public Consultation’ regarding the New HS2 High Speed Rail Link.
Why are we planning to spend 100 billion pounds or more on the High Speed Rail Link? The Transport Secretary will try to persuade us that this folly will only (yes ‘only’) cost the country £30 billion or so but to imagine this being the price is to ignore the history of all past schemes of this size. Do you remember Concord? A great idea and a great dream. Our lives no doubt would have been far less enriched had we never seen such a magnificent form of high speed transport - but at what cost? The financial cost turned out to be huge as it continually escalated. A plane that cost the UK government billions of pounds to develop (when a billion pounds was real money, not these days when the government fires free billions at UK banks with a money cannon) and was eventually given away to British Airlines at a huge loss. How can anyone forget the Channel Tunnel? At least Maggie Thatcher had the sense to make sure this was done with private money rather than paid for by the state - but the price just rocketed to three times the original massive estimate. Eurotunnel has never made a profit much greater than your average corner shop in the few years it has made money - it has been a financial disaster as far as return on investment goes. No private enterprise would embark on this High Speed Rail Link - it’s a financial disaster waiting to happen.
So why would a high speed rail link be anymore financially successful? At an estimate of £30b just to go from London to Leeds, it beggars belief that over 14 years the cost will not rocket. Unforeseen infrastructure problems will raise their head and add to the cost. Newts, rare butterflies and ‘Swampy II’ will be chaining themselves to trees in protest, delaying the construction, increasing the cost and tying up valuable police resources. Construction companies are remarkably able to find costly problems that go well over the meagre contingency that the government will have built into the construction budget.
Then there’s inflation. For £1billion spent in 1980 you now need £3.8b to allow for inflation. Between 1980 and today we have had historically low inflation. If inflation goes back to historic levels, or takes off with the huge demand the world will see from the growth of the far east (as it likely will in the coming decades) then £30billion for the cost of the High Speed Rail Link is laughable. If this doesn‘t treble in cost over the 14 years it‘s going to take to build then we are going to defy history on a grand scale. This month the Consumer Price Index has hit 4.1%. If £30bn in today’s money has 2% inflation added on to it over the 14 years this scheme takes to construct then the final cost will be £38bn. If that actual cost rises to £35bn and inflation over the 14 years is 4% then the final cost is £60bn. Should the scheme take three years longer the cost becomes £68bn. These are crude examples but it does just show you the optimistic view governments can have when selling us the deal but what the eventual cost can turn out to be and how much one years delay at the end of the project adds far more to the cost with inflation built in. It would be interesting to know what inflation rate the government has guessed at (and inflation is a guess over 1 year let alone 14 years, ask Mervyn King, the Bank of England ‘guvna’. )
But it’s not just the construction cost. When this rail link is completed, it will only be for the most wealthy that can afford to use it. We will have a two tier transport world where the few wealthy people that want to travel between London and Birmingham or Leeds at speed can afford to use the HS Rail Link. The average earner and the poor will still have to travel by ordinary rail or car and subsides HS2 via their taxes. Unless of course, like most rail lines in this country, the cost of travelling on the HS Rail Link is subsidised by the government via even more taxes from the public. If so, this will mean even greater ongoing costs and even higher taxes for the masses that won‘t be using this rail link. To suggest it won’t have to be government subsidised again defies the history of rail transport in this country.
Then there’s the unions. Already holding the rail travelling public to ransom at the drop of a hat, what will it be like once the HS Rail Link is running? Unions will be arguing that train drivers are travelling at the speed of an airplane and so they need pilot style wages. They’ll want more safety staff and greater pay for them and the HS Rail Link will be shut down with regular strikes as soon as people start to depend on it, increasing the costs, if they government get their way.
What about the environmental cost? “You paint paradise and you put up a parking lot“. This Rail Link will rip through the heart of the beautiful British countryside. You can’t un-destroy the damage that will be done, once this is built the Chilterns are destroyed. What point was there in declaring the Chilterns an area of ’Outstanding Natural Beauty’ if it doesn’t warrant protecting that rare and beautiful feature? Far fewer people will want to holiday or weekend in the Chilterns when they are going to have their peace destroyed by 225mph trains ripping past every 4 mins (yep, that’s the capacity this rail link is said to have). Tourists will visit the Chilterns far less. Less local trade, less income, less quality of life for all. You cannot get that back once this rail link goes ahead, it’s gone forever. What is the point of being able to get to places at twice the speed if the destination we want to get to has been destroyed by construction? I’ll declare an interest in that I live in the Chilterns. I can mitigate the bias that might be seen there in that I’m a paraplegic of 33 years and unlikely to live to see this monstrosity built as it’s going to take 14 years before it’s up and running. But I feel for those that come after me.
Each train will be able to carry 1100 passengers. The line is able to take a train every 4 minutes. Nearly 400,000 passengers a day capacity. I don’t know how many of those passengers will be living in walking distance from the terminals in London and Birmingham or Leeds. Based on my experience I see most people travel to the train station by car, mostly one business person in a car. I’d like to know where potentially 400,000 cars are going to park while people use this railway link.
The only people that will benefit from this link are a small part of the population that want to rush via London Birmingham and perhaps Leeds. While those in the Chilterns pay for it in a decimated environment and the whole of the population pay for it in higher taxes it will be a small few who benefit. The actual time saved from London to Birmingham is actually around 15mins faster than the current fastest Intercity Train. By the time you arrive at the new station in Birming, walk to New Street Station and then wait 5 to 10 mins for your connection you've save no time at all hardly - a bargain @ £17bn for this leg of the link.
The government call the current HS2 route their ’Preferred Route’. Nobody in their right mind (and I’m not for one minute suggesting Philip Hammond is in his right mind) would ‘prefer’ to put this train through the Chilterns, but then I‘ve not seen much from any UK government to suggest they are in their right mind when it comes to grand schemes on which to blow tax payers money and this government seems no different. What they actually mean by ’preferred route’ is it’s the route they think they can get away with at a cost they think they can afford. This cost will be subsidised by those living in the Chilterns via a reduction in their quality of life and reduced visitors. If they really are committed to HS2 then they should pay the true price of a high speed rail link and put this thing in a tunnel through the Chilterns. Better still, why not run it alongside the M1? The M1 route is already creating noise, there’s not the beauty to be destroyed as there is in the Chilterns. If the train ran alongside the M1 it would be it’s own best advertisement. Surely those crawling up and down the M1 in traffic would see these trains speeding past all the time and be coaxed onto the rail link. No, that’s far to smart and simple an idea.
Why don’t we spend this money improving rail across the whole of the country? Everyone will be paying for it so why not do something where everyone benefits? We are living now in a country where the roads are in a total mess. Failure to maintain road surfaces mean that pot holes are everywhere. How can you concentrate on the traffic ahead and the potential dangers of driving when you need to spend so much time watching for these huge holes in the road, virtually invisible in rain at night? The UK roads are now reminiscent of a third world country. These roads are the arteries of commerce yet the government and councils are running around trying to stem the bleeding with sticking plasters in the form of 50 quids worth of tarmac and two navvies with a shovel. Wouldn’t spending the HS2 money on the existing transport infrastructure be a better idea? Would any sane person really go out and buy a second house if they couldn’t afford to maintain the one they have? What about a proper high speed system like China, Japan and Germany are developing - Maglev? :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-54gBLwK3s
By the time we have HS2 built, 250 MPH rail travel is likely to be out of date as others use Maglev - how very British!
You might have thought this Rail Link doesn’t affect you but you and your kids will be paying for it in taxes to construct it and subsidise the travel on it for decades to come. These revenues could go to improving the roads or perhaps increasing the state pension. It’s pretty amazing how they can find so many important things we can’t afford in this time of austerity but can still find the money from the average man’s tax bill to pay for something most of us don’t need and won’t use. Soldiers being sacked, hospitals tightening belts, libraries closing, nursing care cut, education cuts, public sectors closures, policing reductions……..tickets please. We’re told HS2 is investing in our future - well what is the nation’s education system, the heath service and the existing transport infrastructure that are being so lamentably neglected?
If HS2 is such a worthy and financially viable idea why doesn’t the government put it out to private enterprise to construct and run? We’ve just spent fortunes selling off the national rail companies to Virgin and the like, now we are going to create another publicly owned financial disaster. Let’s see if any private enterprise believe they can make money building it an running it and if so let them do it, not the tax payer. Would the Dragon's in the Den buy this? It's fanciful and the costs are too high and for that reason - I'm out.
14 years to build this white elephant. Will we all be travelling that much by train in 14 years time? I suspect with peak oil and the rapidly rising cost of fuel we’ll all be working far more from home - wouldn’t the money be better spent on a High Speed Fibre Optic Network across the country?
I’m sure no matter what party anyone voted for in the election, nobody expected a high speed rail link to take priority over some of the cuts we are seeing today - there’s no sound economic or environmental case for this rail link. The true cost is £100bn in construction, billions of pounds in ongoing subsidies, millions of pounds lost in trade in the Chilterns and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty destroyed forever - just so a few people can rattle between London and Birmingham 20 mins faster than they can get there by existing infrastructure.
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This government has already shown it can make spectacularly bad decisions with attempting to sell off the woodlands - most normal people knew this was wrong and thank goodness the public made their opinion felt and they have changed their mind. When this whole HS2 proves to be the costliest folly ever in the UK where will Phillip Hammond be? He won’t be in the government anymore by then. If history is anything to go by he’ll have a nice cushy, well paid directorship on the board of one of the contractors that have built the thing by then.
I urge everyone to make their opposition clear - we have one countryside, we have one heritage but we have a million better things to spend this money on at this present time.
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