In his final days as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown pledged to invest £20 billion in building a high-speed rail line that would will carry thousands of passengers from the north to the south of England.
“This is also a significant day in the long and proud history of British railways,” Brown said during a speech in 2009.
< p>Almost 14 years later, the expected cost of building the HS2 railway has risen to more than £100 billion, 8.5 times more than similar projects elsewhere in Europe.
“If we are going to solve big problems, «We need an answer to why high-speed rail in this country costs 10 times more than in France,» Jeremy Hunt told the Tory conference. in Manchester on Tuesday. “This is absolutely and completely unacceptable.”
Britain Remade's analysis estimates that the London to Birmingham section of HS2 will cost £396 million per mile, making it one of the most expensive railways in the world. In France, similar projects cost £46 million per mile.
The project has since been branded «unattainable» by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority and the northern section of the railway is now expected to be scrapped entirely.
However, the cost problem is typical of the British infrastructure system, making the UK a global exception.
Construction of Crossrail has dragged on for years and is billions of dollars over budget. In 2007, Edinburgh's tram system was budgeted at £375 million, and by the time it opened in 2014, the cost had risen to £776 million. The TransPennine Route upgrade was expected to cost £289 million and be completed in 2019. are estimated to cost £10 billion.
Even if HS2 costs the amount budgeted in 2013, it will still be 3.7 times more expensive than the French line between Tours and Bordeaux, according to Sam Dumitriu from Great Britain. Redone.
His research with Ben Hopkinson found that tram projects in the UK are 2.5 times more expensive per mile than in France. Building underground railways costs twice as much as in Italy, three times as much as in Germany, and six times as much as in Spain.
Spain is a particularly striking example of how infrastructure can be build faster and cheaper. — says Dumitriu, where standardized station designs are used and speed is a priority.
Over eight years, Madrid built an 81-mile underground network at a cost of £68 million per mile, a ninth of the cost of extending the Jubilee Line. Spanish methods included hiring six tunnel boring machines to work around the clock to get the job done as quickly as possible.
At the heart of all this, according to the Chancellor, is the British planning bureaucracy.
“If you have to, it takes a ridiculous amount of time. get the big project done before you even dig a shovel in the ground,” Hunt said Tuesday. “There are so many national policy frameworks that you have to consult on.
“Everyone wants to protect the environment, everyone wants to be fair to local people who are affected by new infrastructure. But it may take five years to go through all these processes.”
Part of the problem is that UK planning rules are also more effective than those on the Continent, says Stephen Glaister, professor at the Imperial Center for Transport Studies at College London.
“This country has common law, which is means that people have a right to property, and the government must obtain those rights through due process to get things done,” says Glaister.
“That's what these planning rights requirements are all about. In Europe, Napoleonic law applies, which means that the state starts with rights, and individuals operate under the license of the state.
“If the French state or another European state wants to build a railway, do they have a starting position on is this right?”
This means projects are not delayed due to public consultation. When the French government launched a major pressurized water reactor program, one minister, asked how he approached public consultation, said bluntly: “We have a saying: when you drain a swamp, you don’t consult frogs.”
“Major infrastructure projects [in Britain] have to contend with much more bureaucracy than ever before,” says Dumitriu.
This is partly due to new environmental requirements. The environmental impact assessment for Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk, which is in the planning stages, was 44,000 pages long, according to Britain Remade. That's 13,000 more than Hinkley Point C, which began construction in 2018, despite Sizewell C being modeled as a «replica» of the former. This suggests that the planning load has increased rapidly in a short period of time.
The problems are the same for airport terminals, runways and renewable energy projects.
“It could take seven years to build a new offshore wind farm, and then another seven years before you can connect to the grid,” Hunt said at a side event hosted by the Center for Policy Research. «It's funny. We have a lot to do to figure out how we build infrastructure.»
But planning and ambition are not the only problems, says Dumitriu. Construction costs are higher in the UK. This is partly due to the fact that we have higher costs associated with design. This is also because our sector is particularly reliant on subcontractors.
Just over an eighth of the UK construction workforce is in permanent employment, according to the Construction Products Association. This means the sector is particularly exposed to labor cost volatility, such as record wage growth over the past year.
Cancelling HS2 would be a catch-22 for the government. This may make upfront costs disappear, but will lead to even greater cost problems down the road.
A clear timetable is key to allowing the sector to plan ahead, says Glaister. This allows them to maintain a stable workforce and maintain scalable efficiencies.
“Treasury is concerned about this. They talk about the need to create a portfolio of projects so that these things are not just one-off projects, and so that the industry can save costs by systematically moving from one task to another,” says Glaister. Canceling HS2 would destroy much of this pipeline.
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