HS2: The UK's Insane $130 BILLION Money Pit
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- čas přidán 22. 10. 2023
- Explore the shocking story of HS2, Britain's ambitious high-speed rail project gone wrong. Initially projected at £40 billion but now nearing £100 billion, this video dives into the expensive mistakes, political interference, and inflated costs that led to the project's downfall. Discover the reasons behind the UK's struggle to build cost-effective infrastructure and why HS2 became a symbol of this issue. Join us on a journey through the highs and lows of this infrastructure nightmare, and find out what lessons can be learned from this expensive ordeal. Don't miss this eye-opening analysis of Britain's infrastructure challenges!
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It infuriates me that there is absolutely no accountability or consequences for these people who waste so much public money due to their utter incompetence.
strongly agree
Jobs for the boys.
British average IQ has declined 14 points since Victorian times, that is why our leaders are increasingly incompetent and we can no longer do the things we used to be able to do.
I remember that to even get a job on the vase majority of roles were sourced from job centres, people who had been unemployed or gained qualifications from jail..
i applied for a job on hs2 through the job center and was told that i needed to be unemployed for over 6 months,
@@Brazen1234 The Job Centre sounds like the Twilight Zone. The jobs that aren't jobs!
When the French decided not to build a high speed line to the west of Paris straight after building the link south they reserved the rail corridor for potential future use, thus reducing long term costs. When the UK abandons it promises to the North the government announces it is immediately selling off the land it has already bought, mostly at a loss, so the next government couldn't reverse it, and does so without seeking the permission of parliament, who authorised the purchase in the first place.
It's criminal if they sell the land. Heads should roll!
We have the most corrupt politicians that have ever lived in both the Tory and labour parties
@@alexmckenna1171 You can be assured the land will be bought by some smart investors who will know that the line eventually will be built, and sold back at insane prices. This is by design.
@@NoNameForNone it probably gets bought up by someone with connections to the current government (maybe even members of it).
long live corruption
@@NoNameForNoneprobably party donors
It’s wild that Spain managed to build 3000km of high speed rail for less money than the UK spent to build 68 miles.
Wow that's my socialist Spain , probably said before, in my Valencian community 38,450 free University places @ area of Cornwall ,Devon bit of Somerset , no one has come up with the price of Oxford or Cambridge ,as us Spanish say moneyis for spending but Education takes prime place, yep re our H.S.T the offer at the moment , annual payment of €25 , Valencia to Paris on the H,S,T €9.
Students free as are student buses ,depending on religion if the youngsters or seniors can't go home a healthy mid day meal free ,a Spanish friend that speaks some English is a cook at one , no fast food , the Spanish know how to cook ,so much olive oil thisyear 2 friends when all processed are giving us 5 l of virgin ,in snobby 250 ml bottles in England £20 . When the Spanish have their mid meal a bottle on the table ,help yourself .4 pink grapefruit €1..Cropper saying come & help yourself to mandarins, no lack of vit C.
Taiwan managed the same too.
Corruption on show
Spain has a desert in the middle of the country, the rail connected cities on the coast. The rail mostly went through barren flat desert land. The UK has no deserts so the rail went through highly populated areas. It makes sense when you understand that it costs money to demolish buildings vs building on empty flat dry land one would be way cheaper to do
Having worked on the HS-2 project breifly, I can say the beauacracy there is staggering. It's no wonder it's being cancelled. I worked there as a fire alarm engineeer for a few visits. It took 18 months to organise a visit for me to link 2 of the welfare units together to the main security hut fire alarm panel at Euston becuase 18 different depatments had to approve that on visit. Apparently none of the departments would talk to each other. Then when I did make it there there had to be 5 people there to do the job instead of 2 people - ther person that organised the job had to stand and watch us, myself and the HS-2 fire alarm engineer and, (and this is the best bit!) 2 electricians. one to turn the key and remove the key to isolate the 230v supply the the other electrctrician had to look after the key whilst we did the work which was pointless as the panel supply didn't need isolating. It was like something fromk a comedy. The entire site was like that. So effectively, a 160ft hole was dug there and that's as far as they got along with a complex traffic light system that none of the lorry drivers took any notice of. Well done MACE Dragados! I was on another MACE job recently and it was exactly the same, behind and chaotic and over budget.
Embarrassing shambles, HS2 and tories have let the north down again
reminds me of that one scene in harry potter
Total useless country... No plan no managing no clue
There's a joke I heard once about the state of English jobs involving a guy digging a pit while 30 managers surround him with clipboards.
Eventually one of the managers stops the guy digging the hole and says 'sorry, but due to budget cuts we're going to have to let you go'.
of course, the hole digging project was cancelled.
Your evidence illustrates the fact that there's no incentive to minimise costs when the bottomless pit of the taxpayers' pocket is financing HS2pid. Rather, an incentive to keep the gravy train running.
It's insane how our train fares in Britain are so astronomically expensive to the point where most of us prefer to drive.
Worse still, the system is not well joined up. It would take me far longer by train than by car to get from home, 40 miles SW of London, to Durham.
Indeed, but it's important to understand that high rail fares are a consequence of low network capacity. No government will spend money subsidising rail fares when there are sufficient relatively rich people to fill the existing seats anyway. By increasing the network capacity new "high speed" lines are likely to reduce fares overall especially for the local services running on legacy lines that will continue to be used for most journeys.
It would cost me and my partner over £100 to get to Birmingham and back on the train and almost 3hours one way. Driving takes about a 1/4 tank of petrol and around 2 hours or less, with a guaranteed seat.
I used to love trains but in the last 5 years or so they have lost both affordability and reliability. Losing one of these would still let me travel by train but having lost both it isn't a feasible form of transport.
I know, driving sucks so much, but we're being priced out of all the better options 😑
Their not expensive. They have the fair price.
In other countries tickets are cheaper when you buy them because everybody was forced to subsidize them via taxes, whether they use the trains, or not.
I prefer to pay less taxes.
I briefly (over a summer) worked for a company who mapped the railway station boundaries for wheelchair access. A team of 8 people to take some basic digital measurements. All of which could have been done by 2 people. We also all got paid for 8 hours (min contract time) and were there around 20 mins. There are a lot of private firms with deep pockets because of the railways.
and as a wheelchair user, I can safely guess that nobody with an actual disability would be consulted in the process leading to a half arsed solution
bingo!@@olicool11
I've been a contractor of this sort as well. I'd just like to point out though that even this kind of wastefulness can make financial sense, since it's still cheaper to hire 8 contractors for a few weeks to accomplish something that two of them could do in a day than it is to recruit, retain, and train permanent staff in order to do one day's work. If the rail company (or whoever) only needs a small and self-contained piece of work done, then paying a contractor 10x the rate of a permie is still often the right financial call.
Good of you to take the money and not speak up about it until after you got paid for it. What a great person you are
Firstly, how do you know that? Secondly, why attempt to judge someone? Why not just ask and be civil?@@jastat
I actually think you've missed the big picture here; the HS2 Project was actually created as a way of siphoning huge amounts of Treasury Money into private hands - in that sense, it has been a complete success. It has been an "early retirement" project for many.
Was going to type the same comment. This is not the only "money pit". Every government scheme is a side job for their mates to make money and feed back greasy palms. It's politics 101 in Britain. You scratch my back.... and as the years go on, it gets worse as they get more greedy.
Indeed like any project done by UK govt, its a mates rates party, to do over the taxpayer, from NHS computerisation, the Olympics, Covid, Eco loon etc. They are all the same.
This is the same formula in Australia 🇦🇺 often wacky projects nobody needs and astronomical cost.
to true many hands were greased by johnson and co for HS2 contracts
Just like Net Zero, Lockdowns, and the Ukraine war then.
All my friends that worked on HS2, had silly pay, loads of benefits (company cars etc), and hardly worked - they weren’t even high up. I remember saying it would never get finished. I mean why should it? These companies get free money from the government with 0 accountability on how it’s being spent.
Well said. That's the truth of it. You just have to look at the Conservative politicians' faces to know that's the truth of it. Grifters like Cameron, who came a little unstuck with Greensill but has been given another chance at graft by multiple millionaire grifter Sunak.
I regularly use Euston station and I always count the number of workers who are just standing around not doing anything and it's always 10 to 20 and that's just the ones you can see on a 5 minute walk past the site. They're probably all on 40/50k with crazy benefits as well.
As someone who works in facilities in the UK, I can vouch that the higher uppers seem to prefer spending endless time (and money) just talking about things rather than actually achieving anything tangible
Indeed. We live in the Poitou-Charente, about 10 km from the Bordeaux/Paris LGV which was under constriction when we moved here in 2013. Our trip to the supermarket in Ruffec took us past a section of the groundwork. It was amazing to see how they made a deep cutting, built a bridge, laid the permanent way and put in the overhead power in under two years. The new line (300 miles) opened in 2017. We have used it from Poitiers which is now only 1hr 35 mins from Paris (183 miles). I have also used the TGV network to get all the way into Stuttgart in Germany...hammering along at 320 kph through 'le grande est' sitting in the upper deck of the new trains is really something. And all the staff on the train spoke French, German and English...different world.
Facilities Manager?
@@the_9ent It broadly speaking takes care of building systems so they work as they are intended. Building services engineer here if I may join the general rant. I also noticed that in the UK people care more about how things LOOK rather than how they WORK. That was also mentioned in the video. This approach is every engineers' nightmare, leading to embedding inefficiency in almost every project. Also maintenance is very often neglected as is being perceived as a "cost", what is a false economy as when the system inevitably breaks down, the cost you now NEED to urgently absorb is few times more what you would spend on proper maintenance...
Look, I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just saying we should really put together a dedicated team to meet and discuss this issue, and propose solutions.
@@jarimir89 I think you are right, but this evil of the product which shines instead of being effective is a Western problem. We find it in France and others
The Japanese are the extreme opposite. Everything is logical and functional. The HSLs are on viaducts, most of the time crossing cities close to buildings, but it is more functional.
An HSL in open countryside will need successive access roads so that maintenance can reach all along the line for inspections and repairs.
“Just to slightly reduce travel time between London and Birmingham” - The description of such projects as “high speed rail” has been a communication disaster. Their real purpose is to increase network capacity. By removing long distance higher speed services from the legacy network the density of trains on the legacy network can be substantially increased and hence more people and freight can be transported. This is not about getting there faster on a train, it’s about a train existing at all that serves your local station, and hence not wasting your life sitting in a traffic jam.
It’s still very pathetic, no excuse can justify, China is more then 20 times bigger than the UK and can build hsr in regions quicker than Britain takes to build 200 miles of railway😂😂
@@valmal2659Because China has no obstructions of any kind. Their government can just take whatever land they want, without compensation, and you can just sit and spin. Being an authoritarian system always has the benefit of pesky citizens getting in the way of things.
@@exnihiloadnihilum5094 Then how about the rest of Europe? No authoritarian systems there. And while they take longer than China and are more expensive, compared to the UK they are still far better at this. If you just want capacity, you don't need high-speed rail. You can just improve existing lines and surrounding infrastructure. You build high-speed rails for capacity and reduction in travel time.
@@XS69 less administrative gobbledygook would be my guess. Brits seem to love permitting, paperwork, and having the right form filled for every nut, bolt, and quarter turn of a wrench. If they can create a bureaucracy out of it, the British will.
The notion that it was just about saving 20 minutes between London to Birmingham (the figure is 30 minutes, unless you want New Street station and will walk from Curzon Street) got around the country before HS2 could even get its message's boots on. I'm not saying that HS2 were in any way good at communicating what the line was about, but I will say that deliberate misinformation campaigns were very successful and even competent HS2 communications wouldn't be able to convince the haters from the comfortable lies that had spread like wildfire.
German here: Infrastructure costs growing multi-fold during the building phase of a project are normal elsewhere, too, including right here in the middle of the continent (all countries). Even though we do mostly finish large infrastructure projects: Our latest all-new high speed track routing of about 50 km (Stuttgart-Ulm) was only opened one year ago. Italy is also getting ahead with its stuff.
Only very few countries are true masters of railway infrastructure. I believe Switzerland is by far the most capable country there, bar none. I admire what they have achieved and continue to do.
Also, the dreadful "nimby" attitude is widespread, making it that much harder to see large infrastructure projects through.
But selling the land intended for a future infrastructure build (if it indeed happened in England) is a sin and those folks doing it should be *personally* held liable - not just lose their political office at some point. If some sort of corruption or unjust selling out of state property has taken place, even prison terms should not be out of the question. Without the pressure of personal liability no responsible behaviour by those lowly, mentally corrupted politicians.
Switzerland; tiny, small European country and they are no different than other EU countries. I do not think they are capable of making big mega projects. If you are looking for a true master, currently nobody can win over Chinese on the megaprojects. 65,000 km high speed railyway. Massive, long bridges, tunnels, motorways, etc. I do not think any EU countries and USA can make that kind of projects in that short timeline. Chinese are un-stoppable. I see all of them in CZcams broadcasted by German channel DW.
Switzerland? You are missing the elephant in the room. Try China ;)
This NIMBY thing is just so absurd to the point of selfishness. It is the entitled the nature of these overprivileged pricks who live there who say NIMBY to everything including wind farms. They'd prefer to live in paradise while city dwellers are forced to live in turd towns near gas fired power stations. The political class have denyed HS2 of it's viability and thus denying the under class upward mobility.
How big is Switzerland and how complex is the landscape of it?
@@zekiserifguzel Trouble is a lot of Chinese infrastructure is sort of falling down because it's so poorly built... fast, but super low quality... Not everything! But a lot...
I've done contracting work on HS2 sites, I can understand exactly why it's costing so much and achieving so little. the amount of red-tape is insane just to go onto a site with no activity to do an hours worth of work, nothing seems to get done. I went over to a site over by the A45 east of birmingham once a month for 12 months. In that time they built a haulage road, dug a big hole and built a 50ft square concrete pad, that's it. but there always seemed to be dozens of "workers" just wandering about doing nothing and several higher ups sitting around in their nice air-conditioned site office complex looking at PCs.
That's basically a description of most of the UK economy.... Immense cost coupled with dire productivity and laughable output.
You see it everywhere. Roadworks on the M25. Miles and miles coned off lanes and about 15 worker in a space of about 4 meters with one digging driving sitting in the digger smoking wile everyone else is standing around on their phones. This can last for weeks.
Sounds about right. Jobs for 'the boys'.
@@benghiskahn3673 And why should they bother producing higher productivity when it costs £40 to simply breath here. The country is broken, put it plain and simple.
@@jason-hh6lu This is entirely due to unions. Unions run the country and that's why workers don't do anything and why there are so many of them.
My friend worked for a local authority in the regeneration department, trying to find ways to build new affordable housing. The team were a lot of very bright talented people, architects and planners. After a few years they had all burned out, quit, the boss got clinical depression. They faced total inertia. Huge email chains and nothing getting signed off. Angry town hall meetings involving months of preparation. Corrupt practices by rich companies. You should do a video about why so few architects in the UK now get work in the public sector - almost all of them survive by doing private gigs.
And the levels of corruption between government officers and construction and consulting firms is widespread and common practice. I've done refurbishments, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom replacements and, even extensions for council officers off the books in order to secure contracts. Dodgy tenders don't get flagged if everyone is in on it. And btw I was just a labourer on minimum wage and was naive at the time, if I had realised I would have blown the whistle as loud as possible.
@@chrishughes3405I’d say there’s always time because if it was happening a while back, chances are it still is.
We desperately need more people to shine a light into the dark sticky corners of corruption in local authority.
In America "affordable housing" is treated as a holy term for municipal planners.
In the end it usually translates to apartments that cost (at least) twice as much to build for people that make less than half the income of the neighborhood average.
It's as if the contractors know that a private company building something would double check every invoice submitted. But if there are government subsidies and grants involved, no one questions something like a $5,000 refrigerator.
If something is declared a Green Project, and government funding is involved, prices will instantly quadruple.
@@christopherconard2831 no kidding. The figure currently being thrown around is the cost of an 'affordable housing' apartment in a multi-level apartment building is equal to the market price of an average single family residence.
In other words, there would be affordable housing available immediately if govm't would simply buy an existing house and offer it to low-income earners.
@@chrishughes3405 It's not just there. A county auditor I know was preparing a report on the "very close" relationships between roading contractors and the roading dsepartment management (we're talking family tieups that make Arkansas hillbilly ancestry lines look diverse). He was removed from his post and hit with gagging actions (judging by the fact that the council claims no such reports/investigation existed (I'd seen the preliminary drafts) and his official respose (even after changing employers) is that it's something he can't discuss
“Something needs to change in the UK”… Almost everything needs to change.
The thing is we don’t need a bloody high-speed railway network we just need our railway network rebuilt to the scale of 1960.
I work for the firm that at one point was the largest technical consultant on hs2. We hired 100s of new people for the project due to its scale and our projected earnings. When the project was canned so too were so many of the new employees. It’s things like this people don’t even consider when thinking about how far reaching the ramifications of its cancellation have been
And it goes even deeper. All those people have now spent all this time pouring labor into something relatively unproductive. They could have instead been doing other jobs in the economy that were more productive and thus added to the economic vitality of Britain. When a project goes sideways like this, the opportunity costs are enormous.
It’s even more embarrassing when you consider the UK is the progenitor of modern rail, yet failed so spectacularly.
"modern rail"
🤣😂🤣😂
regards to Maggie!!!
Honestly most of our rail network of the past was built by Irish migrant workers (nicknamed 'Navvies' or Navigation Engineers - but honestly, said in a way that turned it into a slur). They weren't treated well, were barely paid anything and weren't welcome to stay once they'd done all the hard work. Shameful, really - and explains why we can't do it now. It was literally built via exploitation - and exploitation is more expensive these days.
Hardly modern rail when 99% of it was built by the victorians.
@@andromidius
Irish Navvies also helped build the French network.
Thanks to privatising the rail system the trains are stupidly expensive, never on time or just cancelled, underdeveloped and on strike half of the year.
As a german who works in rail construction I see day in day out how inefficient we are and had to learn not to care because it's not my problem because I will get paid anyways. I refuse to imagine how a nation can be that much worse.
We regularly do work for Network Rail, the UK rail network is old and nobody has ever had the confidence to trim the bureaucracy that has become culturally engrained within the industry. All the legislation made sense when it was introduced, it was created to prevent accidents based upon experience, but much of it is redundant.
As an example, it took us 15 months to get the permissions to install six cameras on two platforms. Every aspect of the design and construction of the cameras had to conform to a special Network Rail process that was more stringent than we have encountered -- even in the Aerospace and Nuclear industries. We were required to have our engineering management team trained one day a week for several months in order to supply equipment that was certified for use on the rail network.
It is a working environment that promotes exactly the same inefficiencies that you note. The bright, energetic, engineers move out of the industry because they become frustrated.
Even after we went through all the restrictions, we still couldn't install the cameras because the insurance levels required were beyond any sum that our company could sustain, we had to use Network Rail to install the equipment because they were the only entity with adequate insurance.
Our cameras incorporate artificial intelligence, their performance greatly exceeds the required specification, they are fully approved by Network Rail to be installed on the network. Yet, when it came to buying a quantity for service the purchasing department of the operator, which is not Network Rail, chose standard, inferior, off-the-shelf cameras from a Chinese supplier because they were cheaper!
Welcome to the Brexshit paradise that is Little Britain.
@@petergaskin1811 Nothing to do with Brexit, it is a hangover from the nationalised industry era. We work with offshore energy companies which is considerably more dangerous than the rail network, equally challenging environmental legislation, but they have completely different working practices compared with the antiquated methodology of the rail industry.
Germany's rail construction might not be efficient, the cost per km is still in line with other countries and they've been building high speed rail continuously for decades, with a lot more projects planned. By comparison, what the UK did with this project is an absolute disaster.
@@glynnwright1699the proble the UK has with large infrastructure projects is the neo con ideology adopted by both the tories and new Labour. Since 1979 ther has been a purge on the civil service with may former in house civil service roles contracted out, to employers who make a profit by cutting staff and the Ts&Cs of their employees. This idiotic policy, also followed in the USA, has denuded the state of generations of institutional technical expertise, older people with experience were not wanted by the private sector because they were too 'expensive' far more profitable to hire and fire on short term contracts and employ inexpensive new graduates for key roles. You pay peanuts you get monkeys.
Train prices are already absurdly expensive here in UK, i can only imagine with a new track. I pay £19 (with return) for a 25 mile journey to Peterborough. While in Portugal i pay ~£3 for the same 25 mile into the capital Lisbon.
It cost ~£250,000 a few years back for my local railway station to put some netting above a single platform to try and stop pigeons perching above waiting passengers. It didn't really work as pigeons still managed to get in the rafters!
Considering we invented the train and railway it shows how far we have dropped as a country
I'm America and I can see that as a massive drop that like having the statue of liberty demolish
yes but government didnt build the original railways
Uk is a laughing stock compared to european countries
UK's immigration policies is the death nail in the coffin for the country, and its culture.
Also, you folks were an expert in building them in the countries you conquered, not your own. 🫠
Overspend by the government needs to be investigated, why costs got so out of control and where the money has gone.
Billions went into compulsory purchase, planning and legal costs as-well as survey and archaeology. I worked on the compulsory purchase and planning side and honestly it’s astounding.
This reminds me of the locate and trace app.
If you watched the video, you would know why there was cost overruns.
It was a lot NIMBYs.
A lot of politicing.
Compulsory purchase orders.
Legal challenges.
People were constantly legal challenging HS2, which added further costs. The project had to play out in the courts before construction started.
@@Locutusyet didn't mention lobbying and corruption once...there's got to be plenty of that as well
Every stinking project that comes from government collapses in financial corruption, and you can well bet some MPs have brown envelopes in purses and back pockets. The last lost was into a trillion in regard to identity cards, that one failed, and was bound to fail as unless our prime minister wore a short Tash, we were going nowhere with it, and those who were paid to implement it spun a line for years, then packed it all in
Trouble is that instead of getting fixed price the politicians are milking the situation to suit their pockets
This has happened on a smaller scale in Honolulu, Hawaii. Billions have been spent on a rail line that doesn't go anywhere and is a decade behind schedule and still unfinished.
And does Hawaii need anything more than maybe a tram line in Honolulu that goes to the airport? The ecological argument actually makes more sense in Hawaii given how much sensitive terrain would need to be torn up to build rail lines around the islands.
The level of incompetence in the UK is hurting me on a personal level... And I'm Swedish, and I haven't even visited the UK for over 10 years now! 😳
They're onpar with American politicians. We've got a corpse running the country and a brain dead idiot running Pennsylvania so🤷♂️
This is what happens when you have a government party pushing to become more "independent" whilst also neglecting every sector, essentially pushing the boat out whilst forgetting that just floating away isn't going to get you anywhere significant.
@James-ed6wq i challenge you to come up with anything the UK is good at? As a Dane who has lived here for 17 years, i am still choked by how self satisfied/diluted so many brits are.
@@JohnHohn-pr9vm I'm a kiwi who's been here 20 years. Same issue - and I learned in Kiwiland that british migrants were either the most self-deluded entitled and poorly educated chancers/assholes you could get, or the hardest working, and most honest/conscientious workers you could get - almost no middle ground.
The latter group absolutely HATE the former group because they migrated to NZ to get away from them in the first place, but the former group are the ones everyone sees as they include the political Machiavellis who build themselves to high places by trampling everyone else
@@JohnHohn-pr9vm We have a great go at being a happy people, and trying to stay positive. That time capsule is pretty special!
The HS2 debacle will stand as a monument to British incompetence on an epic scale.
I always like to quote the example provided just across La Manche where France designed, constructed and delivered, on time and on budget, two high speed rail lines, similar but not exactly the same in terms of specification to HS2 - trains began running on these two lines, on the same day, July 2017 - these two lines (LGV BPL & LGV SEA) combined constituted a track length in excess of the entire planned HS2 line from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly - the total capital cost of these two projects; 9bn€ or about one tenth of the estimated cost of its HS2 counterpart.
Yes, I know there are some key differences meaning HS2 would be more expensive overall but TEN TIMES THE COST - someone, somewhere is laughing all the way to the bank and it's certainly not the UK taxpayers en-masse!!!
It helps that France already has the knowhow in designing, building and acquiring the rolling stock for long distance, high speed railway lines. I also presume they don't suffer from an overabundance of short term thinking
The difference is that the French have 40years of experience now building TGV lines and have gotten pretty good at it...this project is where the TGV was when they built their first real tracks and systems...
That cost them an inflation adjusted $31M/mile
2008 enters the room.....
I think the #1 issue is the legal system which allows people to go after companies and government and holds back progress in the name of liability. The cost is astronomical to deal with claims and demands and legal battles. Change the system, allow companies and Govnemrent to do as they wish and BOOM prices will fall. Total night and day. Same issue in the US and UK. Legal system allows too much power in the hands of the public.
245mill on planning is a fucking worry, money going from one government department to another.
Like what the fuck.
I think the problem is that as soon as a company gets a government contract, it thinks it's a bottomless pit to milk money out of. There doesn't seem to be any one in government tracking spend (probably because it's tax payers money and they don't care) and no accountability to those companies that seem to 'need' two or three times the amount they actually bid/budgeted for! I suspect if you chased the spends, you'll find for every penny spent, some MP get's a back hand in shares or bungs! If this was financed by independent backers, the amount spent would be analysed every few weeks and any overspend would mean efficiencies and re-evaluation at an early stage of the project as to what was viable and what needed to be re-assesed!
As a UK-dwelling astronomer, I absolutely loved the comparison between the Elizabeth Line and the James Webb Telescope. You have a new subscriber!
I think it’s worth pointing out to those not based in the UK that the idea of HS2 wasn’t originally to make journey times to Birmingham quicker - journey times by train to Manchester and Leeds would have been cut by 1/3 and free up capacity on the east and west coast mainline - the two busiest routes in the UK and connecting London to Scotland. This would have meant more freight trains and more frequent commuter trains to the towns and cities that currently get a small service.
The busiest rail routes in the UK are the Elizabeth line, the Brighton mainline and the Thameslink core.
@@mildlydispleased3221 I think 'Intercity' was missing from the OP's post.
@@mildlydispleased3221 How are you basing that? If frequency and intensity of trains in a relatively short distance, then yes. If passenger numbers, yes. But let’s move ourselves away from this London-centric point of view that has held the UK back from investing in transport outside of London.
@@mildlydispleased3221 the two lines in the UK (and I think Europe) with the lowest spare capacity are the WCML just south of Birmingham and the WCML just north of Birmingham.
They have less trains per hour because they need to accommodate 20mph freight trains and 120mph intercity expresses. Because of the speed required to slow down the expresses require vast distances in front and behind is a void growing where nothing can keep up. The freight trains take an age to get out of the way.
@sIightIybored The lines listed have a higher number of passangers pet day.
This goes further than this excellent video. I worked in the Oil & Gas Industry in Scotland in the UK. In the 70's and 80's when the oil fields opened up the Oil Operators like Shell and BP and the Oil Services companies like your Halliburtons and Schlumburger's took on swathes of people with transferrable skills like fishermen, marine engineers, car mechanics, industrial sparkies and so on. These people gained experience, their wages grew as their experience and knowledge gained momentum until they became global experts themselves. Moving into the 90's the oil industry stopped training and became more investor dividend driven, and poached staff off of other local industries instead, the older guys with big wages who started in the 70's and 80's likely made it difficult for newbies to come in as they liked their fat salaries and less competition. They also started to retire and took their knowledge and experience with them. Moving onto now, they do have a lack of trained skilled staff, the last down turn reduced wages which meant it was less lucrative to work in the O&G and the lack of decent training for decades meant a huge gap in skills was starkly obvious. So the UK Oil industry had no real solid planning for the future in a known globaly volatile industry, pathetic future proofing and training for future engineers, technicians, project managers and all sorts of other bad future proofing. In the UK everything was just left to the markets. Big business would rather reward shareholders with big dividends than train local staff if it can get away with it. When staff can be taken from any part of Europe or the world already trained and cheaper it becomes a no brainer for them. And here in lies the biggest problem in the UK, it no longer invests in its own people, and has not done so in a very long time. When business can get already trained staff cheaper in a globalised market they will do it if they get away with it. Countries like Norway take around 51% of all revenue from extracted resources for their sovereign oil fund, the UK allows its resources to be taken by foreign companies with tax breaks?? Norway and other Oil producing countries insist that local staff are trained and developed so that skills and know how stay local, the UK does not give a toss. The people who run the UK have no interest in the people, and this is the problem. For decades our industry has been allowed to rot and decay and all the know how and skills have gone with it, if the political will does not exist to support and nurture industry it cannot possibly survive competition from countries who do support it. If the UK has no real sound industrial, engineering, manufacturing or project managing base it likely cannot run a piss up in a brewery. The O&G industry has made efforts to train and progress staff in the last decade, but usually only University graduates not the coal face workers so to speak, and these people are just as important.
One hundred percent correct. I work in the civil side of construction in Scotland and what I have found with the industry is that youngsters have no interest doing this kind of work, the ones that do try it, can’t handle the weather, conditions and are more interested playing on a phone which results in them either leaving or being let go. You have more chance in finding an alien than you would someone that’s any good and the gap in age between the older workers and the new starts is getting bigger each year. As for the HS2 project and may I say any other projects in the UK, governments love to spend money that isn’t theirs, it would be a different story if it came out of their own pocket.
Yeah, it seems it’s like that everywhere. Short term profits and benefiting shareholders and the tip of the pyramid rather than long term sustainability and the good of society.
@@--enyo--obviously you have been paying attention to what is going on around you. Years ago I wondered why things are the way they are. You do not need to dig deep to know that our economy and financial system have been hijacked by greedy fraudsters working for the super rich to cement themselves into positions of power, not just here but globally. The cracks are already forming for our so called democracy and the way of life we used to call normal, the banditry has taken its toll on our services and society as a whole, with stripping back of workers rights and powers to bargain for fair wages. You do not need to be a conspiracy theorist to think like this, how can we have a falling quality of life compared to our parents or grandparents with the exponential growth in technology and the efficiencies that come with it, simply because all the gains have been socially engineered to go to the top. Which is why inequality is so stark now. Public infrastructure is of no interest to the unelected financial over lords we now have, if they are lending the money to our gutless weak governments for projects that are meant to represent us then they are happy for these projects to go over budget and indebt us even more. The world is not what we think it is anymore, democracy is a charade, governments have not really been in power for 40 years and we now have financial and technocratic over lords. Government has been bought and filled with career politicians that have geared everything to serve big business not the people. Anyone who challenges them is attacked in the media as a dumb clueless crackpot so that they are degraded in the eyes of the public. Global asset companies like Black Rock and Vanguard use their think tanks like the WEF and IMF to guide World government policy in their favour, these are actually your over lords. They are unelected, have all the power and no responsibility. A perfect storm. Sorry for the monologue.
I'm a Civil Engineer and can vouch this is pretty spot on. The notion of transferable skills may as well be a foreign language, if you don't have the exact skillset and experience of working on the exact same thing you'll never get a start. Which leaves a handful of graduates and apprentices to fill the void of experienced staff who either retire or leave to do to something easier as they don't need the hassle anymore.
@@34ballylol. Did you actually read the comment? You're not in agreement. They talked about the global markets and short termist thinking in management...you're complaining about smart phones which is not the issue. The issue is you can get pretty similar wages doing some BS in tech or high end recruitment, or marketing these days. All our wages and skills have atrophied. It's neoliberal capitalism for you.
This is not a UK-only problem. In Australia, the government is building a 2200MW pumped storage power station ("Snowy 2.0'") Original 2017 budget was $2 billion. By August 2023 the builder was estimating $12 billion. Current estimates (by independent analysts) are $20 billion. Timeframe keeps going out, and out ..........
An interesting titbit about the HS2: Part of the original route was planned to go through an old farm in Southam. They must have figured they could buy out the farm as it wasn't really being used any more. What they didn't realise was that the farmhouse was actually Codemasters - the biggest independent game developer in the UK. They ended up having to redirect the planned route instead.
codemasters was bought out by EA a couple years back
The stupid part is that london to B'ham was always going to be the most expensive part of HS2 (most estimates had a factor of 10 over the rest of the line) and many were predicting £100B from the outset
The line should have started in the north and been built south. By the time they got near the Chilterns the final route into london would have been sorted out. Instead it waited until that route was negotiated and then started at London
Agreed, that way it would have forced delivery and the teams would be streamlined to be more efficient
@@RyLife More to the point it would have enabled high speed travel between northern cities to be operating for at least a decade prior to the London connection - and therefore offseting the building costs. Going round London to HS1 would have also been possible at lower cost (which opens the possiblity of using HS1 for the final leg into the city, but "politics" and "traditional mindsets"
Britain is a country where the graft isn't as obvious as other places but it's always beein prevalent to some extent (sometimes more obviously than others). In the last 15-20 years it's become some commonplace that those engaging in it feel so safe they don't bother trying to conceal it anymore
It makes little sense to start the project between cities like Manchester and Birmingham, which are 75 miles apart and do not even need high speed rail between them if that high speed rail does not go to London, which has more population than the two combined.
@@rafaelcosta3238 Unless you also link to Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh. It makes even less sense to only run a high speed rail line between London and Birmingham - with the ECML/WCML BOTH being the most heavily congested _north_ of birmingham
Stop focussing on the "high speed " part and realise that the line was intended to salvage the existing mainlines from grinding to a complete halt
@@miscbits6399 the most important part to focus on is precisely the high speed part, because that is what makes the cost so high even if it did not go 1£ above budget.
If the idea was to relieve congestion on other lines the plan could be another conventional line. But it wasn't. It was high speed.
And high speed rail in the UK only makes sense if it starts in London, because that is where more than 10% of the population live, and where most business travellers (the only people that will use this thing frequently) want to go.
The biggest single problem, in my opinion, is the lack of Engineers in senior positions in the UK.
The skills needed to become a Senior Manager in the UK are not the skills needed to be a good Manager.
Well the UK de-emphasized STEM education because corporations decided it was cheaper to pay an engineer in Mumbai than one in London. So you get lots of UK students pursuing useless business degrees or equally useless fluff degrees. So, great they spent four years getting a business degree to become a shift manager at a Tesco. Said engineer in Mumbai also probably got their degree from a UK university.
Possibly also because of the requirements for degrees in the first place. Back when British industry was a big player in the world most of the management worked their way up from the bottom. Thus they knew the business from the bottom up. These days a lot of managers seem to just be cookie cutter MBA ideas, but rarely understand how their company or products work. They don't understand the details of production or logistics or most things really. They think that as they are a manager they can manage everything, whether it be an airline or a factory or a supermarket. However these all have subtle differences that require different approaches.
Point: The local lines at Old Oak Common include the Elizabeth Line which provides a fast link across Greater London - though that too went well over budget and delivery schedules even though the builders were telling us it was all OK until the very last minute.
When you make a national commitment to a project of this magnitude, you get it done. I'm not the biggest supporter of HS2, but canceling it was shameful. Lots of jobs, land, contracts now in a difficult situation. Good governance is predictable governance.
Good governance requires accountability, which is nowhere to be found in this country.
I installed drainage pumps for the piling at Euston. After 2 days I got it running just perfect. Never got started. 2 weeks later I went back to pack it all up. They decided to prioritise the welfare block development over the station itself 😂 its a shitshow but every hour I work on the project I can consider a tax rebate.
That sounds like modern politicians, those votes from the poor won't buy themselves.
@@SD-tj5dh repay the pounds to the brits who paid for your waste
you could have easily pointed that out and stood on resignation BUT YOU DIDNT so shut up
@@goldenhate6649 I don't think "welfare block" means what you think it means in the context of a railway station.
@@rog2224lol, the irony of the people who voted in these clowns complaining incorrectly about benefits would be hilarious it wasn't so tragic.
"Even the French!"...you say. The French have been way ahead in high speed rail for decades. The first TGV line opened in 1982 between Paris and Lyon and since then they have kept up a steady plod of building LGV's (Ligne Grande Vitesse) linking the country and refining the trains which run on them. When we came to live in France in 2013 the LGV linking Paris to Bordeaux had been under construction for a year. It was completed in 2017 for a cost of €7.8 bn. The distance between those cities is 500 km (300 miles). North of Poitiers some of the infrastructure was already in place and only need the special track to be laid but the 250 km from Bordeaux to Poitiers was entirely new, cuttings, bridges, overhead power, a completely new permanent way. Here they just crack on and get it done over much longer distances..Sometimes it's really embarrassing being a Brit.
The distance from Paris to Bordeaux is about the same as the distance from London to Edinburgh. It takes 2h30mn to go from Paris to Bordeaux by train and about twice that time to go from London to Edinburgh. Yet the thing is that the generally longer distances between French major cities compared to British ones probably explains why there was a bigger urge to build high speed rail there in the first place.
@@Clery75019Paris to Bordeaux is 2 hours and 3 minutes.
Yes. I too, live in France and was annoyed by that uncalled for and ignorant slur on the French. I agree, too, about the embarrassment!
In addition high speed trains the public transport in the city where I live : cycle routes + municipal bicycles, trams, tram-trains, rapid buses on dedicated bus routes, buses, ferries, all cheap and free on the weekends is more than excellent and heavily used which keeps cars out the city centre which is being planted with green spaces etc etc making it a more and more pleasant place to work, live, visit and shop.
Because they don't have NIMBYs who moan that their 4x4 track is being cut off.
Yes I always say I’m Australian instead of a Brit,abit like Americans say they are Canadian’s.
Very informative and well put together video. I would make the following points:
1. No mention was made of the constant turnover of ministers and Secretaries of State in the dysfunctional DfT - seven SoS in the past 13 years (so averaging less than 2 years each and some as brief as 7 weeks and 10 months with even more rapid turnovers of the minister with specific responsibility for rail - few of whom have any background experience or knowledge of the sector
2. A route following the M25 to include Heathrow Airport would surely have made sense (and wouldn’t this have been a better place to connect with ‘Crossrail’ than Old Oak Common?)
3. HS2 as originally conceived would have served eight of the UK’s 10 largest cities through a Y-shaped network and released large amounts of capacity on the West Coast, Midland, and East Coast main lines, offering significant improvements to local services and more paths for freight trains. In particular, without Hs2, the WCML between Lichfield and Crewe will be a significantly dysfunctional bottleneck, impacting on services (passenger as well as freight) to Manchester, Liverpool, North Wales and Scotland
4. The journey time between Birmingham and Manchester by train is around 90 minutes for 82 miles (av. speed 55mph) with 4-5 interim stops and Birmingham to Liverpool is 88 miles and 100 minutes or so (av. speed 52 mph) with up to 10 interim stops. Birmingham to Leeds is 110 minutes for 92 miles (av. sped 50 mph), again with many intermediate stops. The trains themselves are not up to modern standards for long distance rail travel. Motorways linking these cities are overcrowded and congested. HS2 was designed to very significantly improve the connectivity on these corridors as well as the quality of the trains themselves
5. The limited capacity of UK rail infrastructure (compared with other European countries) requires dedicated high-speed lines right into city centres - increasing costs significantly
6. Public support might have been increased if interim station(s) between Birmingham and London had been included - HS1 set the precedent surely so why was this option never seriously considered? Two possible locations include the A43/Bicester/Banbury/Buckingham and-or A46 Warwick/Leamington/Coventry (why not both?). I recall that in France, the row over the new line from Paris to Lille/Brussels came from Amiens who were so fed up with being by-passed by the new line!
All very valid, I will add that one of the biggest benefits was and still will be freeing up track time for freight traffic which currently is virtually at capacity
Very informative and well put together video. My only addition is regarding the point of the UK lacking the expertise. Rob Holden of London and Continental Railways, the company that owns HS1, said he managed to deliver the line earlier and within the budget by only telling a handful of people the true budget, whereas HS2, the budget was well known and thus contractors and consultants began to inflate their prices before even a single piece of track could be laid down because they all wanted the biggest slice of the pie. Holden also has experience with the Elizabeth Line project but later retired. He was told that he had lacked necessary experience for work on HS2 and thus was never consulted, so it seems that as well as the UK lacking a lot of expertise, we also seem keen on rejecting it.
Lots and lots of differing agendas were and are at play. That and a seeming lack of any financial responsibility. In the rush to move quickly, the controls on cost management get left behind. As a Programme manager I never tell my contractors how much money I have, it's simply stupid, but fresh faced graduates know better, or are listened to more than they should. Much of HS2 was being contracted on Target cost contracting agreements. These can only work where there is a level of maturity on both sides of the table, this maturity does not exist in the UK contracting world.
Not enough experts multi-classing into rubbing elbows with the right sorts 🤣
We're in a post-expert world, remember. The same people who sold us Brexit are now running the show, and breaking everything else accordingly because they're woefully inept and love a good bit of nepotism. They'll be giving their friends contracts rather than actual experts in any given field. There's some news that came out in the last day or so saying that's essentially what's been going on to some degree, and people who've questioned things have been fired to silence them.
The HS1 team have had sour grapes for about 15 years when they didn't get asked to work on the HS2 route. This was compounded by the 2009 route selection saying that HS1's route along motorways created wide corridors of blight that mistake should be learnt from, not repeated... I think Rob is the one still calling for an M40 route, saying it would have meant less tunnelling, ignoring that the M40 pushes against the design standards for a 130km/h motorway alignment due to terrain, let alone a 300km/h HSR alignment!
He's right that HS1 was massively helped by, unlike HS2, not having the budget made public meant that bidders weren't trying to get a piece of that pork. He's however perhaps not right that HS1 was delivered within the budget - the NAO said in 2012 that "Although it was delivered within the overall funding available, the £6.2bn overall cost was 18% higher than the contract target". But, of course, being secretive about the budget means that it's easy to keep to it as it's simply whatever was paid for the line!
Those highly paid consultants, environmental assessors, and contractors want their piece. It’s unbelievable, and should be investigated.
Not just the UK. In Germany we can't even build an airport without spending billions more than planned and be laughably late in completion -> BER Berlin airport.
Not to mention the disastrous and horribly expensive energy policies.
the energy mess is due to the 4 consecutive merkel governements crawling up into Putins ass and blocking domestic renewable expansion.
And BER was constructed on the site of an existing airport!
I live in the UK. As an European citizen, not British born, I see only one solution: moving out of this trap of a country
I've never actually been to the UK, but I've looked at a map of it. As soon as I heard you say the government was hoping to recoup its investment from the southern leg I just shook my head. Even I could immediately figure out that most of the people who were going to use this service were going to be travelling between London and Manchester, and London and Leeds. Unless the tickets cost the same as the normal train, which I somehow doubt, hardly anybody would be using it to go between Birmingham and London. Now that it doesn't even go to London, nobody will be using it. Without the northern legs (and a central London terminus) it will be a white elephant that permanently loses money. The guy that wrote that report was 100% correct; build the whole thing or cancel the whole thing. If you build it, it will cost a fortune but eventually pay itself off and provide a net benefit. If you cancel it, you are never getting any of that money back, but you won't spend any more. Building only the least important leg is the worst of both worlds (you will spend more and not only will you never get any of it back, it will keep costing you money).
Funnily, if Labour had been in government it probably would've been a lot cheaper. Why? Because they could've run roughshod over all those country NIMBYs without it becoming a destabilising internal battle. None of those electorates vote for them, so it's no skin off their nose if they're pissed. "Let them whine and we'll just get on with it. The national interest comes first". Or something like that. Yes, they could've tied the government up in the courts for awhile, but those Country Gentlemen and Local Councils would be going broke from the legal costs long before the government would, and they would be offering themselves up as the perfect scapegoats for every cost overrun and delay reported in the media.
Oh well. If it's any consolation, Sydney Australia recently blew a couple of billion dollars on a tram line that went way over budget. Not even a train, let alone a fast one.
One of the best advantages I've seen for HS2, was the fact it would free up the slower, congested railway lines to enable more local trains to operate
Exactly. I think the UK has a rail capacity problem, not a speed problem
@@jude_the_apostle with your old layout, you have plenty of problems and you dont need to pick just one!
Perhaps part of why it was cancelled. Did you see some of the conspiracy-peddling at the party conference? They have an ideological commitment to cars now, as a symbol of freedom from big government. The US culture-war politics is catching on over here more every year.
If it's just capacity, build more regular rails. It'd cost one-tenth compared to HS2, easily!
@@guyman1570The issues raising costs for HS2 would apply as much to regular-speed rail though. You'd still have to buy up land, and do expensive tunnelling. Going for low speed just means you could have the track curve a bit more.
I bet from the perspective of many, HS2 was a roaring success. From their pov it transferred a trainloads of money into their hands, and all it cost was a few grotty buildings in London that can now be replaced with something clean and modern.
Repurposed into over priced swanky flats
You are quite right. Lots of filthy lucre for some at the slight cost of concreting over what little natural space is left in England... plus depriving rather a large number of insignificant people of home and livelihood.
1. As a Chltern NIMBY, can I point out that The Chilterns are an area of outstanding natural beauty, like, say, the Lake District. Would you run a railway motorway through that?
2. Also, no-one, NO-ONE between London and Birmingham benefits from HS2. There are no stations, we can't use it.
3. Final point: all the economic benefits of HS2 wre in the northern bit.
The problem is that nothing moves fast in government, causing old plans to get more expensive over time, due to things like inflation. They just can't plan things, just like the NHS computer system. Too many chefs spoil the broth as they say! Not only that are infulenced too much by people that don't matter, the many outweigh the few!
I wonder if it was ever intended to succeed. Perhaps it was only intended as a severely clumsy way to turn taxpayer money into private profit.
It really looks that way. Too much paperwork, too much to work on for zero benefit of the country(or the project). If one person can stop the country in it's tracks, there is something wrong. I guess UK pride is overshadowed by money.
It's far more insidious than that. In Manchester, we've been witnessing dozens of posh, expensive sky scraper apartment blocks go up for about a decade.
My theory is that MCR would become the new commuter belt for wealthy Londoners, with our airport being their fourth.
Those in the know (politicians, business leaders etc) have huge sums invested in this and stand to lose money from it's cancellation.
They've even tricked the public into disliking that it's been cancelled when they should, in fact, be rejoicing, because amongst other things, our house prices won't shoot up as much as they otherwise would've done.
We have this issue in the US constantly, where politicians support massive projects to get votes, but then never follow through, since once in office it's easy to become wealthy and influential. Just look at what happened in Wisconsin with a massive promised Foxconn factory that the state spent billions on and then it was never even operational.
@@Ryan-lk4puExcept the part where we need it to release capacity on the existing network. Go ask Gareth Dennis if you don't believe me, he's a railway expert
BINGO!! Correct answer!
i work with these projects as an archaeologist - i'm part of some of the pre-construction payout but i'm a biased advocate for it being important lol
BUT as someone currently working with an infrastructure project, the amount of bureaucratic incompetence i've witnessed in the past year, including what i've heard from colleagues working HS2 specifically, has been mind boggling and very frustrating. we would be able to do our jobs faster if there wasn't such an issue getting everyone else to do their jobs properly (archaeology is poorly paid so tightly run by necessity, we're a tiny portion of the budget). The amount of time we've all spent sitting on our hands waiting for a piece of legal paper this summer was mind numbing
This would've been so much better spent on just looking after our current railways or on JUST the northern section lmao
As soon as it was announced I wondered how much normal speed rail we could get for the same price.
Sorry mate but archaeology is one the hundreds or irrelevancies that increase costs. Your lot should be given 48 hours to get what you need and the project moves on. You will never find much that we haven’t already got. It’s just rinse and repeat of the same finds.
@@grahamo22 thats fair, we can agree to disagree here! genuinely without being patronising, heritage isn't everyones top priority.
just for the record, we really are a tiny fraction of any infrastructure budget and on a flat negotiated sum, and one mandated by law. areas without archaeology are binned off pretty quickly - if its not going to tell us anything we don't need to be there! even with the bureaurocracy stopping us working when we usually would be muddling through in all weathers, we are still out more than the construction workforce. i feel safe working for my company, but even our in house safety team as well as the managers are endlessly frustrated, we don't want to be dragging it out this long either!
Interesting reading a comment from the archaeological angle. When I walked the entire route in 2018, I met several archaeologists on a hill near Southam. That was five and a half years ago; and I don't think investigations along the route have finished yet! If that's the rate of progress I extrapolate completion no earlier than 2030
Insane! The corruption taken to another level! OMG!
No one has ever explained to me why a country as small as ours *needs* high speed rail. I'd far rather just see the regular rail network upgraded from it's current clanking and overcrowded state.
In Finland, city of Tampere, a tram was built to run 15km (9.3miles), and the budged for it, depots etc. included, cause there was none of those to begin with, was mere 300 million euro. The project was built ahead of time and it ended up costing just about 266 million euros. With the prices of UK we would have had like 4.5km worth of tracks...
Name?
In the UK, the whole point of public projects is to create a carcass for private companies to feast upon. It's all about sucking as much money out of the public purse as possible whilst delivering as little as possible. Once you understand this formula, the fact that HS2 has been reduced from London-Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, to sort-of London to Birmingham for 4 times the original price completely makes sense.
Indeed it is. Like water privatisation...PPE contracts and the billions 'spent' on 'track and trace' much of which went into consultancy firms ( Tory friends) pockets. @@benghiskahn3673
300m Euros for a 9.3 mile tram line is shocking value for money.
@@benghiskahn3673 You speak nothing but facts.
The brown envelopes were fat and heavy with this one! Wonder how many friends of friends were supplying ppe and suddenly had consultanting firms doing those 3 day safety courses 🤑🤑🤑
One of the key reasons for why HS2 (and similarly, Hinkley Point C) have taken so long and cost so much is the sheer number of people involved. There are 4/5 different levels of approval needed before equipment and personnel can be mobilised to site. With HPC, it's 3 layers before you get to any subcontractors. EDF > NNB > Bylor (which is two companies in a joint venture anyway). Then subcontractors and their subcontractors/suppliers. There are so many people checking the same documents that the approval process takes 2+ weeks for one operation once they meet the varying standards that the various levels require.
The UK government is bad at just about everything.Our MPs can't even sort out the TV licence mess,so what hope for any large infrastructure project.
Wow. Who could have predicted it? Apart from everyone...
I started working for Network Rail shortly before HS2 was announced. We were saying back then that there is no way in Hell it would ever be completed, even with such a long timeline...
Network Rail is just as bad at wasting money
The irony here is that this country pretty much invented the modern railway - now we’re pretty much the worst at building them…..embarrassing.
I have no experience of how projects happen here or in Europe but I suspect that in the UK a HS rail project is seen as a project to suck billions from the state by Engineering firms, lawyers, bankers, and land developers, whereas elsewhere it is seen as primarily a project to create a modern, high speed rail line.
Another issue that you didn't touch on is the issue of chronic short termism in public infrastructure projects due to the 4 year term of MPs and party leadership. Big expenditure often doesn't see positives coming back until after their term is probably up which combined with insane mismanagement, public pressure, cronyism, and all the other issues you mentioned, as well as a lack of accountability results in exactly what we got with HS2. A poorly managed, poorly planned, mess of a project that fundamentally COULD at some point have been a benefit.
You lucky bastards. Here in the US Congressional reps are only in for two years at a go.
Party leadership is 5 years, but now it’s a lot shorter since even the parties think their own leaders are shit!
We have a PM Rickshaw Rishi that wasn’t even voted into power and yet he makes the decision to to cut HS2…now that is democracy!
*_Fiscali Fishi Rishi_*
@@razor1uk610how long did it take you to think of that?
Basically, the way to get good at building rail, is to draw up a plan of all the rail you want built this century, choosing a place to start and keeping that team going. their experience will bring effort and time down
What if that team includes mostly management and consultants, who spend more time planning environmental reclamation for a needlessly wide path than actually building the railway
@@srpacific then you notice that in the yearly performance cycle, and cut dead weight, hiring more physical laborers in their stead. You can even hire more of those for the same wage bill
They learnt their lesson when they mothballed our nuclear submarine programme in the late 90s and wiped out the trades and skills capability. They need to learn their lesson here and actually promote hands on skills and engineering then keep them in work
for that to work you need a real govt not corporate shills tasked to privatized national assets.
As an urbanist who hates car dependency things like HS2 and the trams in Edinburgh being messed up so badly whilst they seem to be able to get horrible urban motorways done!
Hey, motorways are generally pretty straight! Why don't we narrow the M6 and ust run the rails along that, far more efficient and fast than a car!
Its obvious, 30 years ago 2 people and 1 vehicle went to fill pot holes on the road, Today it takes 8 people and 3 vehicles and 7 out off the 8 people cant bend over to tie their shoes laces. Now multiple that by a 1000 people doing a project that took 150 to do years ago with less productive machinery. And thats why it cost so much, and local authorities have burnt through their yearly budget before the second quarter.
Wow, as a German I was surprised that our costs per mile are 1/3 of the british costs. Normally our infrastructure projects are the expensive and unlogical ones. Just look for the BER airport in Berlin or the "Stuttgart 21" railway project but the HS2 seems to be in a class of it´s own!
German HSR (I don't think Stuttgart 21 is counted as that) - ditto French - runs from the edge of one urban area to the edge of another. HS2 runs from centre to centre as those urban tunnels removing non-stop trains from existing railways are the most important parts of the project.
@@sihollett Not always, the LGV Atlantique passes in a tunnel between Massy and Paris (at 220kph) under the suburbs, there is the Lille Europe sector, same configuration, and there will be the Marseille sector where an railway underground station and tunnel under the city will be built .
We avoid it if possible, but we know how to do it.
I have followed Stuttgart 21 closely and admire the ambition behind it. Elbphilharmonie too, but I would like to say thank you for your deference towards the British that insofar as colossal, ill conceived, hugely expensive, badly managed, partly realised projects are concerned, we are the outstanding leaders in the field. You are too kind
@@willhemmings 😭😂we could make a contest which Gouvernement burned the most money. I think it's roughly the same. When I hear the real costs of one of this mega projects i'm surprised when it's not 3 times more then the Initial estimated costs. I have even a personal one. In our area were getting fibre-optic cables (like in whole Germany) the projekt should have been completed 02.2022, then 07.2022, .........., ............. Now we have nearly 2024 and the costs are roughly at 225%.
@@sihollett it was advertised as "Connecting Stuttgart to the HSR Network" but I wouldn't be surprised when this is fake. Stuttgart 21 isn't even a railway station, it's a way station. Railway stations in Germany are only allowed to have a certain slope and because they had to build it barrier-free they couldn't build steps. I think building HSR Tunnels Underground is way more expensive then above ground and that's what Stuttgart 21 stands for.
The problem of the NIMBY concept is a huge problem here in the US too. It's unfortunate but inevitable because people are stubborn and so many don't care about the overall greater good.
NIMBYs screwed up the California high speed rail project
There have always been self-interested people that opposed stuff. The problem is the laws that give those people any input. That's what changed. Prior to the Environmental Policy Act in the 1970s we pretty much decided this stuff democratically by allowing elected officials to build the stuff they campaigned on. We don't do that anymore. Now a small minority of people can block overwhelmingly popular projects or make them so expensive that they're no longer possible.
@@Keylevitation Californians screwed up California. From what I've seen they are the kings of NIMBY and using every law in the most insane way to stop construction of anything. Though some people from Massachusetts have learned from California and have become very adept at shutting down anything proposed that might disrupt their lives or views from their property in the slightest.
I live in Florida. Construction projects are slightly different here. It's possible to tie one up in court for years. But once it finally starts it gets done. The delays turn into a f*ck you, we're coming through mindset and stuff gets built quickly. So at least there isn't the constant start/stop/restart issue.
Thing is what these people don't realise is that once they're dead they can't take the cash with them.
and people here in germany say we (germany) are inefficient and too bureaucratic at planning large scale infrastructure... well it seems there is always a bigger fuck up around...
in comparison to that, we are highly efficient and perfectly on track (even though its a mess over here too, but not that large of a mess)
There are a ton of utilities (water, gas, electric etc.) criss-crossing the route. Every utility affected is milking HS2 with fees for re-routing or 'protecting' their assets. Huge teams set up to ensure maximum invoicing opportunities at inflated rates. They don't have enough staff though, so they sub the groundwork out to the usual massive service companies (Capita, G4S, Mitie etc), tripling the cost per hour. Sometimes even they 'sub it out' themselves adding yet more mark-up. And of course, because of those dangerous hippies lurking in the fields every contractor needs two security guards with them at all times - KA-CHING! Add to that the people at the top of the project are just toffs with no practical engineering or project management experience spending public money and you end up with HS2...
The problem wasn't the original idea for HS2 - even with a 30 billion price tag - the problem was the mismanagement in the execution and the ridiculous adding of costs. Any infrastructure project can balloon insanely when the politicians cave to unrealistic demands from the people and can't competently manage the project.
What really points to government incompetency is that when the costs were spiralling, the government didn't call for a review to investigate and slash unnecessary costs and overhaul the management. That one review they did do did not fix any problems or instigate any solutions, so it failed.
More like the other way round. When the poor sods trying to run the Project are subject to constant political interference from those who are able to stick their noses into what shouldn't concern them.
The original idea was terrible too. The main problem with the existing services isn't their speed (which is actually already very good)- it's the high ticket prices and overcrowding. If the main aim was to boost capacity, then they could just have built a normal rail line rather than a high-speed one, at much lower cost, with more intermediate stops and better integration into the existing network, much better achieving that goal.
@@chrisball3778 Higher speed does make sense for increasing capacity if you want to minimize the land requirement. To move the same average number of people per day you could have more trains or you could move them around faster. There is also the added convenience of more frequent trains.
Trains could also get longer but I have no idea how the scales cost for that. It would require a more powerful engine and more space at the stations but those land requirements is more localized rather than spread along the all tracks.
@@chrisball3778 High ticket prices and overcrowding is why you build a new line that provides lots of capacity and has lower operating costs due to doing the journey much quicker...
@@petergaskin1811 Yes - the 5 or 6 redesigns of Euston that the Government have demanded in order to save a few hundred million in construction costs has cost nearly as much as it would save in design, planning, etc costs - and lets not forget the construction inflation from years of delay while the Government works out what it wants...
I worked on HS2 supporting its ERP system (accounts, HR, procurements etc) and the stuff i have seen! how to literally burn money..
Please, do go on 😮
You might have mentioned that there are already two moderately fast routes from London to Birmingham already: not only from Euston but also from Marylebone via Banbury and Warwick.
I've worked in infrastructure in the UK and for a moment in time on HS2. this doesn't surprise me. From my experience the approach taken to most problems is to just throw money at the problem, when they should be engineering cost effective solutions, there are lots of people working in senior roles who just aren't sufficiently trained to think critically, only to execute "problems" that they've seen before. I've not been impressed with the state of civil engineering in the UK, probably worth mentioning that the Washington Accord sees things similarly. There is obviously a lot more to it I'm sure.
The story of the incrementally creeping cost overruns of HS2 reminds me of a quote from the late Senator Everett Dirkson of Illinois, "A hundred million here and a hundred million there and pretty soon we're talking about real money."
nice one!!
Thank you for this fantastic video. I'm a native Californian where we have a High Speed Rail cost problem too. I am a rail fan but no one seems to be able to figure out how to deliver high speed rail on time or budget here either. The inflated price for our project is virtually identical to HS2 and, at this point, will only be completed in Central California - NOT the San Francisco to Los Angeles line as originally envisioned. There have also been numerous lawsuits throughout the state that have added to the cost. The UK does not have a lock on politicians who like shiny new technology without consideration of it's cost vs. benefit. Also, as a tourist who loves London, it seems silly to cancel the connection to Euston and make the HS2 such a bad choice for residents and tourists alike.
I’m originally from the Central Valley and yeah, the HSR plan as it sits is ridiculous. That stupid bridge across the San Joaquin river took like 5 years to build by itself. The rest of the elevated segments are randomly strewn across the landscape doing nothing but attracting graffiti. This whole waste of time and money would make a lot more sense if you could go from SF to LA, but, that’s not going to happen in any of our lifetimes, if ever.
Thank God I moved out of there, much as I loved it. HS Rail in CA was a non-starter from the beginning, the pipe dream of MoonBeam Brown. The Central Valley project sure ate up a bunch of prime farmland.
Overpaying for a complete HS2 is far less of a waste of public money than cutting back the project to the stretch that no longer has any reason to exist. The Tories need locking up for the damage they've done to this country.
If Britain was continent-sized it'd make good sense to shave hours off long trips, but as Britain is just a relatively small-sized island, only minutes would be shaved off, so HS2 is therefore not worth the cost and infrastructure disruption along the route, or am i missing something?
Before I watch the video after the intro
I'll answer the question.
I worked on the railways in my Early 20s
20 men stood around watching one man do a basic task is why the budget is so high.
In the summer in Northampton.
12 men travelled from Doncaster, one being me
We did this all summer
Joined up with the GNER crew in front of the carlsberg factory in Northampton
We then proceeded to do foook all and get paid
Well we did do a little bit.
20 men took all day to put 3 signs out to slow trains down
I could have done all 3 alone in two hours because of the distance between each one
I went there for the money but went back to my apprenticeship welding job because I couldn't just standing around passing time
Time = money
Now you know why the rail industry costs so much
I worked with someone who worked on the rail, along with his brother [who is quite high up now], and they did a lot of piss taking and some dead risky things so they could knock off many hours early.
Seems like Thatcher never rooted out the commie spirit
I'm sure this is true, but then we need to know why it's not true in other countries in Europe. Perhaps we might expect the Germans to be instinctively hard working, but the Spaniards and Italians don't exactly have that reputation.
Having worked briefly at HS2 as an apprentice. I have seen first hand how much of a shambles the internal management of this much needed project was! Far too much bureaucracy and nobody willing make a decision!
make any decision in the UK and the pack will turn on you like jackals
Have a friend working on part of it. He organised a delivery van to bring something from one site to another in london. A colleague in the office said something basically like 'that could be terrorists'. He didn't know if it was a joke or serious. Had to cancel the delivery and get some type of security report from the delivery company.. lol
Government research establishment employee here, it's all about spending the money and putting your hand out for more.
Alstrom were supposed to be building the trains for HS2 in Derby, however the plant now faces closure following a collapse in the share price over two years from 48 Euro to 12 Euro. Trains have been built in the Derby plant since 1848 however the 1500 staff now face redundancy.
I’ve been living in Manchester 21 years and I’m very surprised at how bad this has become - I note that Irish Rail is better at its rail projects, although the Irish government made massively wasteful EU funded investments on motorways rather than building new rail lines - indeed, a proposed high speed rail tunnel from Holyhead to Dublin was shelved yet again because private investors were not willing to waste money on a poorly managed project
A Brexiter eh? Oh dear.
Corruption.
I live near a HS2 site. For the last year all they've done is move a pile of dirt from one side of the road to the other and back repeatedly.
It's a way to funnel public funds to MPs old school friends who are invested in construction companies that received the contracts.
They don't want to finish it, they want to keep collecting paycheques for doing sweet FA.
Couple of reasons.
Britain has a NIMBY attitude.
Most staff dont have the skills required to do jobs effectively.
Most management spend all their time having meetings about nothing.
We have way too mych regulationcausing months of delays for work that can be completed in hours.
We have crumbling infrastructure.
In Norway they are building a new regular subway track in Oslo - a project way smaller than this high speed rail of course. The estimated price before the project started was 4,5 billion NOK. Now the price is 30 billion NOK... (!)
Well this was depressing af.
Remind me - why do I choose to stay in this country again?!
I seem to be in a tiny minority with this view so be forewarned, but I'm forever struck anew by the lack of accountability when cost estimates that formed the basis for elected-official approval turn out to be so wrong. If you stole that money from the taxpayers you'd go to prison, so why is it perfectly okay to be responsible for that much taxpayer money to disappear, as long as a construction crew gets it instead?
That's why we call it 'The Giverment'.... these loopholes are built into the system.
In Paris, the Grand Paris Express metro lines is under construction (mostly underground : 90%) and will run 200 km (125 miles), and the current estimated budget for it is 42 billions euro, depots, stations and interconnetions with the current train and metro lines etc. included. We are at 336 millions per miles with the French Court of Audit having said the project is bleeding money compared to the planned budget. The chart in the fifteen minute seem therefore quite right (or the figure for France was just based on the figure of this project).
As a Londoner, it's been an absolute disaster on the landscape in the Euston area as they had to demolish an entire office tower. Furthermore, the Crossrail project was another disaster, yet provides a great link to both Reading and Sheffield. How come the HS2 can't do what Crossrail did but on a larger and more efficient scale? This country's horrendous politics buffles me.
Crossrail is a resounding success mate. This is parochial British thinking to say so.
I am Italian, and until this video I was worried about the state of our public transit system.
Now I am indeed laughing my ass off at how incompetently the UK is dealing with their own public transit.
PUBLIC TRANSPORT APART FROM HS2 AND INFRASTRUCTURE IS EVEYWHERE IN ALL OF UK AND HAS BEEN SINCE UK WAS THE INVENTER OF RAILWAY AND EVERY ROAD IS MADE PROPERLY EVERYWHERE BECAUSE ALL THE ROADS ETC ARE BUILT STANDARDLY WITH TARMAC ETC AND NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO THERE'S INFRACTSTRUTURE PROVIDED BUT THE PROPLEM IS STARTING THINGS LIKE THIS AND LIKE A LOT OF OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES THERE'S NO INFRACTRUCER EVERYWHERE SO BUSINESSES AND PROPERTIES ARE NOTHING LIKE UK AND MEANING WHEREVER THE LINE GOES THERE'S ROADS, HOMES, BUSINESSES AND ALREADY EXISTING RAILWAYS TO BUILD UNDER, OVER OR AROUND! THIS IS THE COSTS THAT POWERS AT BE HAVE TO WORK AROUND! EVEN THOUGH ENGLISH IS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE AND THE MOST SPOKEN LANGUAGE AS A FIST AND SECOND LANGUAGE AND FROM EUROPE TO AUSTRALIA, USA,CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, FALKLANDS ISLAND, JAMAICA, AND SURROUNDING COUNTRIES AND THEN ASIAN COUNTRIES THAT SPEAK AS SECOND LANGUAGE AS SHAPED THE WORLD TODAY BECAUSE FOR MOST PART UK IS THE ROOT FROM THE FOUNDATIONS AND IN MOST OF THE COUNTRIES I WROTE THE INFRASTRUCTERS AT SOME PIONT PLAYED A ROLE AND WHETHER FROM 1% TO AT LEAST 90% THERE WAS SOME ROLE PLAYEDS STARTING FROM ALL CLEAR LINES THAT CAN JUST BE LAYED AND NOTHING LIKE THE WORK AROUNDS IN UK WHICH MAKES THE COST RIDICULOUS! IGNORANSE IS BLISS AND HIM BEING BIAS MAKES HIS CHANNEL EQUIVALANT TI A LOCAL PRESS MEDIA TABLOID!
@@AllAboutCZcamsrs13 maybe it's our shit Tory government being corrupt AF and stealing all the funds. The UK needs some strong leadership someone who actually loves the country and will do anything for it.
My favourite story of HS2 is the £100m bat tunnel built to protect bats located on either side of the line. That’s so indicative of how the costs have blown out
Less expensive, but a similar scheme- bat bridges are built over new roads because apparently, bats follow the line of hedges. How they ever managed to survive before humans started making hedges baffles me.
@@MervynPartin they love hedge funds.
@@MervynPartinthose bridges are probably not just built for bats
and the newts.. bloody hell.. the damned greater crested newts....
@@sqwalnocSupposedly endangered yet manage to be found in every building site in the country.
As a British person I find this so frustrating. Ultimately, this is about incompetent people in charge, stupid planning rules determine by noisy environmental lobbies and an inability to focus on what is the best solution, not the flashiest.
One word corruption.
The contractors were milking it .
My cousin was a forensics account bought in to check it .
Due to threats eventually had leave .equipment and materials were found all over Europe and even in Russia
Hi Simon interesting video, I thought you might like to know I actually used to work with one of the consultants who worked on the very first feasibility study for HS2 and even with the most optimistic assumptions for the railway and very pessimistic assumption for other modes of transport they couldn't make an economic argument for it. They went through several rounds of the Government going "that's the wrong answer, go back and try again" until after about 2 years it was taken away from then and handed to someone else. Keen to avoid the "mistakes" of the first consultant the Government basically told the second one that the scheme needed to show at least £2 billion of economic benefit per year and they expected the report to reflect this. In the end the report came back with as assessment of just over £2 billion of expected benefit per year (what a surprise eh?). My work colleague managed to get hold of a copy of the report with the detailed assumptions which he said were basically complete bollocks and the whole "feasibility" process was just a rubber stamping exercise for a project that would never actually pay for itself. This has been known for years and yet consecutive Government's have continued to push for the scheme, at the expense of other more sensible things they could invest in.
Interesting. I used to work for a civil engineering company involved in the ground testing for building the M25. We knew at the time the plans were out of date and even as it was being built it wasn't fit for purpose.
That's suspicious, since AFAIK no report examined the released capcity on the existing main lines by keeping high speed traffic isolated. This was one of the largest benefits, far and away more impactful than the moderate speed improvements.
That's strange, since right from the first concept the released capacity was claimed to be the main benefit. @@daniellewis1789
2bn a year doesn’t seem that mad; for many northern cities they would have seen a some serious property value and salary increases.
If the project was built within the original budget (or even the later doubled one) then there's no doubt it would have been worth it. Name a country that regretted building high speed rail lines between its major cities 20 years later?
Literally the northern part is probably the most needed. The rest of the money could be used to recommission some lines closed in the 1950s
I remember when living in London, Embankment connection between District and Bakerloo line would be closed for Escalator maintenance: for 11 months. Holy crap did they have to invent the concept of escalators to justify 11 months
HS2 is an abomination!
It was never about the route.
It was always about the kickbacks.
As an American I'm jealous of Britain's low low infrastructure construction costs since ours are three times higher. It wasn't always that way. There is a bridge near me over the Merrimac river that was put up during the great depression in about a year. When it came time to repair it a while back it took 10 years. During that time we had to use a rickity temporary bridge. How is it we could build a bridge from scratch in a year in the 1930s and in the 2000s it took ten years to just renovate it.
Again, one word - corruption.
America is just one step ahead of the UK on that. Public projects are now seen as a cash cow for milking the taxpayers - with no intention of doing it properly, quickly, safely or sometimes at all. Just endless money pits, right into the pockets of political party donors.
Probably health and safety for one. back in the 30s like we see in the famous pictures of men standing on girders with no harness or safety rope was probably what they were doing to build the bridge. now they need risk assessments, safety gear, safety equipment and machines and so on which costs money and takes time to implement ( need a cherry picker to reach something you got to harness up, get in it and drive it to where you need it, before times it could be done off a ladder or just walk up or climb the girder).
part 2 is design. the 1930s bridge was designed for that era and maybe a decade or 2 in the future. now designers and looking to build bridges to last 50 to 100 years so they dont need to change them as often, and also make them look the part either fancy or fit in with local area. a complicated design leads to it taking longer to build. (and in my opinion, designers have there heads up there arse most of the time, they design something and the builders go how the hell am i going to build this? because most designers are out of uni and never lifted a tool or built anything where as here in the uk in the past (this coming from my dad who was a builder most of his life), older builders would move into the design and planning departments so the plans you got could actually be built.)
people that are smart enough to be in government and run the country correctly are also smart enough to not go for that job so we end up with idiots that will waste tax payers money on making something fancy when we just want something thats cheap and reliable to work. and politicians that negotiate these deals are weak, they just sign off on it at what ever cost when contractors make bids for work.
Road construction safety, steel prices (we burned all the good iron ore fighting WW1 and WW2), cost of living increases, worker safety (OSHA), actually getting paid rather than lining up to die due to a fall, proper bridge supports, bridge designed around reduced maintenance, survivorship bias. The list goes on and on and on. Survivorship Bias is a huge one here. We only see the buildings that lasted, not all the horrible disasters of bridges.
Let's not knock worker safety, folks, as a reason for high construction costs. Please. When a worker dies their partner has a double load plus working, unless their parents are in the picture too. Ultimately it's their children who suffer. A very sad outcome.
OSHA! That's it, and greed.
It's indescribable how much rage this matter has caused me over the past 6 years. The money pit that is HS2 continues to cost and cost for NOTHING, whilst essential services in health and local governments continue to have costs and services cut. Who is accountable for it? Absolutely nobody, because this is Britain and our government don't believe in repurcussions, they believe in sliding out of sight with another payout.
I so agree...and all to further line the pockets of the already wealthy.
That’s an absolutely insane figure… and genuinely not worth it. The could’ve literally funded a bridge across Scotland into Northern Ireland…
Perhaps if it was sold as a high capacity upgrade instead of a high speed upgrade, it might have got somewhere. But instead the politicians got to it and try messing around too much with it instead of leaving it to the engineering experts.