FEATURE: CHRISTIAN WOLMAR
Words: Christian Wolmar Sub-editor: Deborah Maby
ver since the announcement of High Speed Two, the new line to link London with Birmingham and later Manchester and Leeds, there have been periods of media speculation about the project’s future. This happened in the summer with an article in The Spectator magazine, supposedly well sourced within the upper echelons of the Tory party, that suggested the project was about to be killed off. It wasn’t.
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Then, more recently, after the September reshuffle, the sacked minister Cheryl Gillan, whose constituency is bisected by the line, let rip now that she was free of her Cabinet responsibilities, arguing for the project to be scrapped. She had long been thought to be opposed to the scheme.
However, despite these periodic public debates, behind the scenes there is a lot of work going on. Indeed, there has to be to justify the £750 million or so being spent on preparing the line during the course of this Parliament. On a visit to the project’s headquarters in the Victoria office block once occupied by John Prescott’s mega Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, Andrew McNaughton, the chief engineer – “employee number one” as he jokingly refers to himself – is all too delighted to seek to show that the taxpayer is getting value for money and that the scheme is definitely on track. “Let’s debunk one mistake made by The Spectator – there was never a plan to publish the Bill this year; that’s what we are working on and it will come out in 2013,” was one of the first things he made a point of saying to me.
There are, he says, more than a thousand people working on the project, two-thirds of whom are consultants, and this includes roughly 300 working at the office in Victoria. There is a wide variety of tasks. Consultation takes up a lot of person-hours. There are no fewer than 30 community forums, which involve holding meetings with local people and carrying out very detailed assessments of the best options for the route, down to the nearest few yards. “You have to determine things like, will there be a cutting here, should we build an embankment, how do we best mitigate the noise through this section, and so on,” McNaughton says.
The little-known Aarhus Convention, which is a United Nations and European Union initiative – and signed by the UK in 2005 – requires detailed consultation on schemes such as this
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and clearly has generated fantastic amounts of work and cost. But it cannot be ignored. There is, too, consultation at a high level with council leaders and business people but the real problem is that schemes such as this are bound to create losers for whom financial compensation will never be enough and who therefore will never be satisfied with just being consulted.
Then there are teams who are working on the detailed route design. This is lengthy and expensive, and is the key part of the process building up to the publication of the Bill. Once published, it will be debated by a special parliamentary committee that will hear from objectors, a deliberation scheduled to last two years.
There are more than 1,000 people working on the project, two-thirds of whom are consultants, and a wide variety of tasks. There are no fewer than 30 community forums carrying out very detailed assessments of the best options for the route, down to the nearest few yards.
That length of time is necessary because the procedure is convoluted. While the Bill will set out a precise route, it can be amended by the committee after evidence from objectors and experts. Each time this happens, those sections of the Bill are subjected to renewed scrutiny, in essence therefore restarting the process for certain parts of it. If there are many such changes, the timetable will have to be set back. The process is expected to be completed in 2015 with the granting of Royal Assent, and that will be followed by a further two-year period of acquiring land, putting out tenders for construction and finalising the detailed design and starting work on utility diversions. That in turn will be followed by
an eight – year construction phase for the expected opening of the stretch between London and a junction near Lichfield, with a spur to Birmingham in 2026.
McNaughton is unapologetic about the time it is taking: “This is the biggest infrastructure project the country has seen. It is a new railway that is justified by its impact on the economy and that’s how we are going to present it”, he says, adding that it also involves the remodelling of much of the existing network, in particular the country’s busiest railway, the West Coast Main Line – and that is another part of the work his team is currently involved in, in partnership of course with Network Rail. The new Transport Secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, has promised to speed up the process but, given McNaughton’s explanations, it is difficult to see where the reductions in the timetable can be made.
Simultaneously, of course, preparations are being made for the extension of the line beyond Lichfield to create the Y shape to Leeds and Manchester. There is a team of roughly 200 people working on that section, with an expectation that proposals for consultation will be published by the end of this year with a route alignment in 2014.
McNaughton dismisses criticisms of the scheme from opponents. He accepts the business case does not look as strong as it did initially but stresses that it is “still the driver for the project”. And he defends, too, the controversial decision to make the line fit for 250mph, faster than existing high-speed lines in Europe. “Initially trains will run at 225mph but you have to look to the future. The alignment would not actually be that different if we slowed it down,” he says.
As McNaughton, whose enthusiasm for the project is rather like a football supporter’s passion for his or her team, finishes what he has to say, he pauses and says, firmly, as a response to the doubters: “The sub-text of all this is that we are blazing ahead.”
“Steaming” might have been a more appropriate word, but there is no doubting his confidence that HS2 will become a reality. Whether it does, however, is not up to him, but up to his political masters, who, so far, have backed it but there remains a lot of time for their support to wilt. Nevertheless, with large sums already having been spent, they will begin to look foolish if they pull the plug, thereby playing directly into their opponents’ hand.
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