By stewartb
A new report by the public accounts committee of the House of Commons is noteworthy.
Before reading the summary below, I suggest a moment’s reflection! As a ‘thought experiment’, take the reaction of the BBC, the corporate mainstream media and opposition politicians to the procurement of two ferries in Scotland as your benchmark. Then, after reading about another procurement – and mindful of the ‘ferries’ benchmark – what scale and intensity of media and political reaction would be commensurate?
Source: House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts (3 July 2023) HS2 Euston. Sixty-Third Report of Session 2022–23 (https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/40783/documents/198632/default/ )
Here are some notable extracts from the Commiittee’s report (with my emphasis):
‘Despite spending over eight years on planning and designing the HS2 Euston station, the Department still does not know what it is trying to achieve with the station. ….. the latest estimate in March 2023 for the revised design showed it had become even more unaffordable, at £2.2 billion over budget. The Department attributes the high cost to the revised design incorporating all requirements, including from stakeholders such as Transport for London, the Greater London Authority and the London Borough of Camden.’
‘The £2.6 billion budget set in 2020 proved to be completely unrealistic for what the Department wanted to deliver. In April 2020, as part of the overall Phase One budget of £44.6 billion set by the Department, HS2 Ltd set a £2.6 billion budget for Euston. This budget was below HS2 Ltd’s early estimated cost for the station of £3 billion. Later, more detailed estimates showed that the costs were likely to be significantly higher, with the 11-platform design forecast to cost £4.4 billion in June 2020 and the revised 10-platform design £4.8 billion in March 2023. This is despite work by HS2 Ltd between 2020 and 2022 to identify ways to reduce the expected costs.
‘The Department does not yet know the costs and impacts of pausing construction. Neither the Department nor HS2 Ltd know the likely costs of pausing construction work for the next two years.’
‘In setting the budget for Phase One of the HS2 programme in 2020 the Department never established how the government-held contingency of £4.3 billion would be deployed. Given that some of this contingency could potentially have been used at Euston or on Phase One more widely to manage the higher spend from inflation, we are concerned that arrangements for the use of this contingency have not yet been determined.’
And more on the financial contingency: ’One potential source of additional funding to help manage higher costs from inflation and also higher costs at Euston is the government-held £4.3 billion contingency. This was set by the Department in 2020 as part of the £44.6 billion budget for the whole of Phase One. The Department told us that it had no expectation on what this contingency would have been needed for when it was established. However, it is also unclear on what it could be used for, with the Department acknowledging that it had ‘never reached any formal view or agreement on what basis the contingency would be drawn down on’.
The Committee makes a broader point: ‘The Department has not yet learned lessons from managing major rail programmes. In previous examination of other rail programmes like Thameslink and the Great Western Railway modernisation we have reported very similar problems to the ones we are now seeing again with Euston.’
Spotted the emergence of a commensurate intensity of media and political reaction to all this yet? Is it because railway stations aren’t designed to float and carry things that reaction is rather muted to say the least – so far anyway! Maybe this will change tomorrow! And maybe we’ll see a reaction again and again over the coming weeks and months!
The real difference in the reaction to ‘ferries’ of course is due to something else entirely!
Talking-up Scotland 
I have one thing to say to BBC Scotland , stick it up your HS2
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BBC Scotland news:–
“Oh look, a ferry……..or is it a pigeon……or a Blue tent…….or party accounts”?
“Islanders isolated for years, with nothing to eat (they cannae bake bread, dont have freezers and dont have hens, apparently), fishing curbs putting communities under threat (while they import fishermen from the Philippines), and non-Scottish hotel owners are ragin’ daily on the BEEB”!
“What the latest, Glenn”?
“Oor ain BEEB Hootsmon in-house expert, Magrit Curran, says they Nats hiv hud it, an Anas wull make sure aw’ the weans go tae Hutchies tae get a gid accent, an if they gae intae politics they can mumble jist like him”!
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“Islanders isolated for years, with nothing to eat (they cannae bake bread, dont have freezers and dont have hens, apparently).
Stop it. My ribs hurt!
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£2.2 billion over budget – SO FAR ! Did Jim McColl sign this contract ?
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I’m feeling so disgruntled with politics just now. The weight of criticism of the Scottish Government is just too heavy and I’m finding it very hard to be positive about anything. Nothing the SG does is ever good enough. The ferries debacle is wearing but now the opposition is again getting its teeth into the drugs situation, tory politicians holding forth and completely in denial that their party is in charge.
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You Scotch chappies really don’t understand that governing is a difficult job, do you? That’s why we cannot even consider letting you run things for yourselves. Look at this ferry fiasco. What could be easier than building a ferry? People have been doing it for thousands of years. But you chaps just haven’t managed it, have you?
So, just bugger off and leave us to mangae the big budgets and ensure our chums get big pay-offs. THAT is what government is about.
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Don’t forget about the Crossrail fiasco … 5 years late and over £3billion over budget!
12 months into the Elizabeth Line and I’m getting reports from those I know who live and depend on the Line that the ‘new’ service is getting really unreliable. My experience a few weeks ago was being held at a station outside Stratford (East London) for 20 minutes in a rammed rush hour train because of ‘signal failure in the tunnel section’ causing tunnel closure, termination of services at Liverpool Street mainline, and a pile of trains backed up on the Eastern section to Essex. Other problems include ‘software failure’, trains breaking down (they are only a couple of years old and cost a few million each) and even ‘swans on the track’ (I kid you not!). It’s hard to believe but the service from Shenfield to Liverpool Street may have been more reliable under Abellio, even though they were using 40 year old tin cans. Latest reliability figures
It’s no longer operated by a subsidiary of the Dutch government though – instead it’s the Chinese government who own the operator (MTR) and get the British taxpayer subsidised profits into their coffers!!
BBC London picked up on the swans in its news reports, no doubt due to the ‘novelty’ factor, but there’s very little said about the terrible overspend on cost and delays due to the numerous software and signal problems. The msmedia silence is because the Labour Mayor and Tory Government don’t see how they can blame each other, as they are both equally responsible. However the thread ‘Elizabeth Line Reliability’ is one of the longer ones since April this year on the RailUK forums bulletin board for train buffs.
Latest performance data from TFL only goes up to 31 March, before the recent problems emerged, but even then in the first year only 92.5% of Elizabeth Line trains were on time compared to 97.3% for Calmac ferry sailings.
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sorry blip in the paste: ignore the ‘Latest reliability figures’ phrase – it’s in the final para.
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Sorry, blip in the paste: ignore the ‘Latest reliability figures’ phrase, it’s in the final para
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As with all the neoliberal b/s,the trickle down benefit to Scottish tax payers from HS2 is a contribution to the London treasury for something which is of no value to Scotland whatsoever.
At least our ferries will eventually help to sustain island life so will be a real benefit.
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Everyone must surely know that in the case of Scotland’s ferries it is overspending as a result of a ridiculously low initial estimate of the cost of the stakeholders requirements while in the case of London’s Euston Station it is additional investment to meet revised stakeholder requirements that were not included in the initial estimate.
As different as chalk and cheese.
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