Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Nigel Harris' explanation of HS2 budget

I think HS2 flies in the face of austerity. We can’t afford so many things and so cuts are made, yet can find this huge sum for , in my view, a tenuous project.
Transport is a key strategic sector that has huge effects on economy, social and ecological areas.
The existing rail structure is in a terrible state, particularly Southern Rail and Northern Rail. Privatised rail will be profit orientated and that will influence decisions and investment.
Recent timetable changes resulted in huge cancellations reportedly for driver shortages! Really? Large companies plan changes without checking feasibility and resources? Surely a basic requirement? Who has been sacked for incompetence?
I hope that nationalisation can proceed with proper management and not a deterioration to the bad old days of money puts and unrest.
Same for utilities such as power and water.
I haven’t read the link yet but it would need a very good factual content for actual benefits and value for money to change my views on HS2. I fear a lot of big project projections tend to become fantasy based . Man maths on a huge scale!

Just read the tweets. They seem to focus on build costs and suggest excessive specs and contingencies. Passing costs and liabilities to the private companies seems a take on public sector extravagance with other peoples’ money!
There is nothing to evaluate the benefits of HS2 . We have the time saving on journeys as one but really? That small a saving for that outlay? Who will use HS2 i stead of normal rail? A similarity with Concorde comes to mind.
Is the reduced projected cost of £85b any better than the £106b? No. There will be a lot of soundbite rhetoric around this and future economic benefits to justify it. It smacks of efforts to reduce the cost to something that can be argued as a positive. Meanwhile money for real world issues will be hard to find.
Should we have a referendum?

Does anyone think the outturn cost will be less than £100bn or that it will be completed fewer than 10 years late?

Does anyone thing it is sense to spend that much on an aspect of our transport that accounts for maybe 5% of the total? Without HS2 the government already spends 3 times as much subsidising rail as it spends on the roads that take 90% of our traffic. Does anythone not think this is unconnected with the traffic jams, potholes, congestion?

Railways are a Victorian system that only really works well for commuters into big cities. For the rest of us, we have to drive to the station find somewhere to park take the train which costs more than the car and takes us to somewhere we dont want to be, after which we agantake to the roads to get to our destination.

For the cost of HS2 we could build 7000 miles of motorway

Well let's look at the current projects, lets see how crossrail is doing, that other massive project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail

Yup I am confident. Of a delay and overspend, perhaps they were just softening us up with the >£100bn as a plan. When I first read it I must admit my thought was "well that gives Boris an excuse to cancel it, convenient."

I thought HS2 was required to persuade the BBC luvvies when they moved production to Birmingham and Manchester...?