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£106bn! £250m spending PER MONTH currently! Who is going to see the biggest benefit from it - corporations and already well-off individuals or your average Joe? And despite the calls for it from northern politicians/businesses, surely it'll mainly benefit London? I could probably think of 106bn things that would be of more benefit to more people than this project! Anyone actually in favour of it?
An absolutely ridiculous waste of taxpayers' money, IMHO. I will be scrapping this and Trident when I come to power.
I was kind of in favor of it when we first moved to Leeds - great, quick journeys to the city. But now what I would far prefer is for them to spend that money on sorting out all the awful regional services (I am looking at you Northern), that impact millions of lives every day.
It's far more complicated than that.
Partly it's Government procurement - it's actually quite easy to build an embankment and cutting, it's been done for centuries. But Government have asked for all sorts of guarantees like it mustn't move more than 30mm in 25 years. So that means huge extra building costs, it also means that you have to insure (because if you come back to it in 27 years and its moved 33mm, you could sue the building company but chances are that building company won't exist any more (due to mergers, bankruptcy, acquisition etc) so the insurance costs are phenomenal too).
Land costs have been badly dealt with. There was one particular instance of HS2 promising they didn't need this land, it's all OK so the landowner built a block of flats. Suddenly its like "oops, we do need this land" so the cost went from just buying the land to buying the land, demolishing the newly built block of flats and compensating the landowner.
However, rail (especially the West Coast Main Line) is already at and sometimes over capacity. The only way to free it up and get more/better commuter services which are desperately needed is to put all the HS stuff onto a dedicated line. That frees up the existing infrastructure for more freight (vital to meet climate change obligations) and more passenger stuff (again, vital to get people out of cars).
It's not about outright speed between destinations. Well, not solely. And the proposed Northern Powerhouse Rail is predicated on using a fair chunk of HS2 infrastructure so it's not really an either/or, it's a "both". They're designed to tie in.
The idea is sound. The Government is (as always) utterly abysmal at managing large scale infrastructure.
I think house prices gone up a lot since the original 2011 quotes too, so the cost of purchasing the land has increased.
I don't see how any of this is avoided if you want to build a new railway though.
How much has the latest review added to the costs ?
(considering it was a pre-election sop to potential tory voters)
How much has the latest review added to the costs ?
Surprisingly, virtually nothing. Couple of hundred thousand at most.
However, the costs of potential redesign, revision of contracts, possible re-procurement, re-tasking, the cost of the delay (so if the forecast economic benefits were due to be accessible by 2027 and now it's going to be 2030...).
That could run into billions.
I'm not too bothered by the idea of spending money to get a good system, it's more that the scheme fails the common sense test from all sorts of angles. No two people sitting in Leeds or York wanting to get to London have ever come up with the idea that the best way to do it is to go through Birmingham. We say that we need to connect cities, but come up with the 21st century equivalent of Alfreton and Mansfield Parkway, a bus stop on the A52 instead of going near downtown Nottingham or Derby, then 30 miles further north decide it can go downtown to Sheffield on legacy lines, and of course having to cope with two diverse systems for new build and legacy lines complicates the spec immensely. We get the idea that it will be expensive, and disruptive, but that's just not OK if the final result is half-assed. I think most of the compromises stem from having a single line into London and having the trains use legacy lines beyond HS2 new build. Tell people if you want to go further, use the 20th century infrastructure, build a whole new ECML, WCML with new exclusive tech where the trains never leave and old spec trains never run on, and have a proper fresh start.
No cos that'd be twice the cost minimum. Firing everything through Birmingham but at 2.5x the speed anything can go at currently solves both problems. You only need one line and one lot of land to buy. The journey times are still quicker than anything currently.
And even if you did build a new HS ECML, it'd only be 10 mins quicker than just going through Birmingham. But at a much much lower Benefit:Cost Ratio.
I say this every time in these sort of discussions, without being able to offer any concrete numbers myself, but if government invested in the technology and policy to avoid this many people having to travel for business (e.g. subsidising video conferencing technology, building local business 'hubs' were workers can choose to work remotely if it can be proven they don't *need* to be in office etc.) would we actually need the new rail infrastructure? How much of it is required just to support the idiotic system of all of us rushing to city centres for approximately exactly the same time of day, every day?
This article about *why* we need it and what'#s it for is really good, imo.
If we want people to use cars less we have to increase mas transit capacity locally and moving high speed onto a separate line helps achieve that.
£106bn! £250m spending PER MONTH currently
"s****s, walks off.
£106bn
The headline is it could cost £106b, you could die walking out the door, Donald Trump could be found guilty and Brexit could turn out to be a good thing for the country. Some of these things are outlying best/worst cases, some are ......... actually they all seem quite unlikely don't they.
It'll be someone with some risk management software chucking variables in and working out there's a 90% chance of it being under £Xbillion. There's probably an other end to that bell curve where there's a 10% chance it won't cost more than £Ybillion (where Y<56 is it currently), but that doesn't sell you a newspaper.
Also bear in mind that that £106billion of YOUR money being given to............... you? Work in engineering, it's your sallary, are you CFH?, then it's your paperclips and post it notes making up those reports, work in an LBS, you're selling toys to those engineers and paperclip salesmen. That money ends up in the economy somewhere.
subsidising video conferencing technology, building local business ‘hubs’ were workers can choose to work remotely if it can be proven they don’t *need* to be in office etc
Skype is basically free and no one needs to be in the wrong office, if they can work remotely they can work from home.
Birmingham is already planning to do this, they're introducing a £500 annual tax on car parking spaces which will encourage public transport use and working from home. There's also massive incentives to companies to slim down their offices in the form of rents and business rates. So in that sense working from home is already 'subsidized..
3 grand per UK taxpayer. Thats quite a large amount of money considering driverless cars could make trains pretty much obsolete in 20 years time
In todays news, they are going to "review" the stuff north of Birmingham - exactly as predicted it i going to be dropped.
Its a huge vanity project and a white elephant and that money could have done far for good for far more people being spent in better ways - but that does not give the politicians the vanity projects they crave and does not line the pockets of their friends as much.
Thats quite a large amount of money considering driverless cars could make trains pretty much obsolete in 20 years time
They won't.
EVs and autonomous cars is a distraction technique to avoid talking about the desperate need to get people out of cars and cars out of cities.
Same with drones, hovertaxis, etc. Literally pie in the sky stuff.
Skype is basically free and no one needs to be in the wrong office, if they can work remotely they can work from home.
Yeah... but Skype is currently crap for meetings with numerous attendees needing to share technical knowledge, unless one of them has invested in big 'smart screens' etc. Also, employers are stuck in their ways, in my experience of an otherwise understanding and relatively forward looking employer, you basically have to make a very very good case for working from home/remotely, when I believe it should be the opposite way round, e.g. why are they insisting on making you come in?
I suggest remote working hubs as I still believe people need to get out of their houses and go somewhere from a social/mental health/excessive masturbation point of view...
Birmingham is already planning to do this, they’re introducing a £500 annual tax on car parking spaces which will encourage public transport use and working from home. There’s also massive incentives to companies to slim down their offices in the form of rents and business rates. So in that sense working from home is already ‘subsidized..
People will pay the £500, moan a bit, then life will carry on as normal. I predict very, very few people will ditch the car, which in turn means the roads remain congested and that taking the bus stays just as off-putting and inconvenient as it currently is (I could drive to work in 35min, ride in 45min, or take the bus in 1hr10...).
Doesn't mean it's not a waste though does it! I'd rather the £106bn be paid to police, nurses, etc salary. Still going to end up "in the economy", would actually provide useful benefit on the way through too!Also bear in mind that that £106billion of YOUR money being given to…………… you? Work in engineering, it’s your sallary, are you CFH?, then it’s your paperclips and post it notes making up those reports, work in an LBS, you’re selling toys to those engineers and paperclip salesmen. That money ends up in the economy somewhere.
I would also argue that business commuting (already feeling a bit 20th C) is only going to become less important in the years ahead. It's already massively less important than it was say 20 years ago.
seen this argument a fair bit, surely though if passengers move away from the existing rail services, those services will just be reduced until they're at 100%+ capacity again? The rail companies, being privately rather than state owned, aren't going to be running with spare capacity if they don't have to are they?However, rail (especially the West Coast Main Line) is already at and sometimes over capacity. The only way to free it up and get more/better commuter services which are desperately needed is to put all the HS stuff onto a dedicated line.
have asked for all sorts of guarantees like it mustn’t move more than 30mm in 25 years.
Doesn't sound entirely unreasonable if not moving by more than 30mm is necessary to avoid high speed train crashes.
Why don't all of the things mentioned affect train lines in France, Germany or America?
Skype etc. do work if you force people to use them by e.g. banning all travel without board level approval in a major bank
Why don’t all of the things mentioned affect train lines in France, Germany or America?
Because they have far far more space to work with and lower population so it's easy to just bang a straight line through everything. UK geology is more variable too.
American trains are dreadful, there's no HS. Most people just fly.
Why don’t all of the things mentioned affect train lines in France, Germany or America?
They do, look up the "Stuttgart 21" for an equally badly run rail project. But al least Germany spreads around the investment even when they **** up. HS2 is just about bringing in more people to London, which completely misses the country's investment needs by a million miles.
I thought it got Londoners to Birmingham as well?
HS2 should always have been a major rail overhaul for the whole country, Southampton to Glasgow on the west coast, London To Edinburgh on the east
And then various crossings of the country Chunnel to Cardiff, Liverpool to Hull, and a diagonal London to Birmingham, with possibly slightly lower speed but still massively improved tracks going from Nottingham to Birmingham, Carlisle to Newcastle and Glasgow to Edinburgh.
Doesn’t mean it’s not a waste though does it! I’d rather the £106bn be paid to police, nurses, etc salary. Still going to end up “in the economy”, would actually provide useful benefit on the way through too!
Partially true, but there's a reason infrastructure investment is separated from the day to day costs in the budget. You spend £56-£106billion on a railway, because you intend to make a return on that investment. Even the bypass round our village has a business case that says it'll pay back the council in .... years. So there's not just a useful benefit to those using the railway (which will be paying a fare to use it, it's not free) someones sat down and worked out that the resulting economic growth is more than the cost. It's a bit crap that it's biased towards the SE as that's where you make money on this sort of project, but it's untrue that it will provide no useful benefit as you put it.
Employing £56billion worth of nurses and policemen sounds nice, but you don't necessarily make a return on that investment. Well it does, healthy people work longer, crime often has a direct financial cost, but that would probably be a different matter and undesirable (a big cut form where we are now).
And it goes round in circles, all those engineers and train drivers pay taxes, which then pay for nurses and police etc etc.
People will pay the £500, moan a bit, then life will carry on as normal. I predict very, very few people will ditch the car, which in turn means the roads remain congested and that taking the bus stays just as off-putting and inconvenient as it currently is (I could drive to work in 35min, ride in 45min, or take the bus in 1hr10…).
They're also proposing to ban private cars from the city center, and block circumferential roads to private cars between the various areas like they do in some European cities, forcing cars out to the ring road, or in reality encouraging you to cycle those <2 mile journeys between them.
There's a good article on the Guardian comparing it to what happened in Ghent when they did the same thing a few years ago.
I hadn't realised the govt had asked for bank stability guarantees. I can understand why and think it is a good idea. On my area of the SE we currently have the Redhill-Tonbridge Line Crowhurst JN slip site that will be out for months, minor slips near East Grinstead and Haywards Heath as well as piling work at Wivelsfield to alleviate a slip in progress before it closed the main line.
We also have had historic slips on the Quarry lines near Redhill and Hooley, the main line at Earlswood and also on the Eastbourne line near Ripe. Most of these caused by excessive rainfall and poor quality "made up" ground failing embankments or excessive rainfall on very old cuttings.
So getting it right in the first place may save many pounds and train delays later.
For my two pence worth I'd rather have seen the money spent improving the Northern, East-West links between major cities before extending down towards London.
A friend who is ex Network Rail has explained to me that these new HS lines are the best way of improving capacity without paralysing the existing system with 25 years of weekend closures to upgrade them.
I kind of see that, but these spiralling costs are only going to go up. And all it will do is make it easier to get from the north into London. I'm close to the proposed HS2 hub at Toton, and I can just see Nottingham and Derby becoming commuter towns for London, rather than being regenerated. There must be a better, greener way to improve transport across the whole country with that budget, surely.
And I'm inclined to think - based on what I've seen in central and local government, that any scheme of any size is seen as a cash cow to the service providers
its not going to be "the north" to london. Its going to be Birmingham to London. The rest will be dropped.
It's going to pass about a mile from our house, cut off my main road cycling route, destroy various local woodlands etc 😕 but also cut off the main road leaving just a pedestrian and cycling underpass 👍 so £106 billion well spent, but joking aside we do need new railway facilities in this country and we think nothing of using the channel tunnel, which would cost how much in todays money?
My issue is that money could be much better spent. Revising cross pennine routes, better rolling stock in the north, revamping stations etc etc. You could provide much more benefit doing this that in creating a commuter line birmingham to london
can just see Nottingham and Derby becoming commuter towns for London
I really can't see that happening. There might be the odd person on the board at Rolls Royce who gets poached to the board of some London company and opts to commute. But for everyone else it would still be a massive commute, and TBH, there isn't room, London office rents are already 8-10x most UK cities, no ones going to relocate offices from Birmingham to London in a particular hurry.
The general justification with this sort of thing is in fact the opposite. Companies will (it's hoped) base themselves in Derby, Nottingham, Birmingham etc because they make huge savings in rents, rates and wages. But their clients are only about an hour further away than if they were based the wrong end of the Bakerloo line.
London might benefit more than Birmingham from HS2, But I'd bet that Birmingham still gets a net positive from it.
£106 billion well spent
Again, worst case (although with all government projects the more people mess about with reviews the more it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy).
It starts off with "we can build a 200mph link between London and Brum", then you spend a few billion designing it, and someone demands a review because it's cost a few billion before anything's even been built. So it becomes a 190mph railway to save a few billion, repeat every year until you've paid the original 200mph price for a line that end's at High Wycombe and runs with refurbished BR Mk1 carriages because someones been elected to not spend a penny more on this white elephant. The government then sues the engineering contractors for wasting public money on extravagant things like peoples salaries and steel (both of which had to be procured at the last minute at higher prices and pay penalty clauses to the previous suppliers as someone demanded the spec was changed to something cheaper to save money) as well as all these "consultants" to carry out the reviews, and loses even more money paying lawyers.
Indeed the "sort out local services" thing is a big part of what HS2 is for. Running slow local and fast intercity services on the same line means keeping big gaps between services and far less flexibility if stuff goes wrong. A slightly delayed local train gets held for longer to let a fast train through instead of being allowed to catch up. You could buy dozens of new trains for no benefit if there's not enough capacity to use them.
Building new railways is the best way to fix that, and if you're building new it makes more sense for them to be fast ones.
Current cost is around £90,000 per metre, although it gets to be £180,000 if we go full £106bn.
Because they have far far more space to work with and lower population
Why would that affect insurance and the need to build to a quality standard, which is what was suggested as the reason for the costs in the UK?
UK geology is more variable too.
Digging a ditch in the Chilterns is harder than building a tunnel through the Alps?
look up the “Stuttgart 21”
Yes, was expecting that response, but even that project is cheaper than HS2 and HS2 has many years of cost overruns to come.
Simon G.
Its obvious all the stuff north of birmingham is going to be ditched and even if it were no then its going to do nothing for the local lines running in the noreth of england. The will just remain the same.
Track improvements on existing lines would deliver far more return for the money.
American trains are dreadful, there’s no HS. Most people just fly.
True. I travelled from SAn Francisco to Chicago by train. Average journey speed 39mph. On the other hand there was acres of legroon and the seatas reclined well back without banging into the passenger behind. OK for a holiday but nobody is going to choose a 2 1/2 day journey over a few hours in a plane.
£9bn I think so comparatively very little - and irrelevant anyway as IFAIK most (all?) was privately funded.but joking aside we do need new railway facilities in this country and we think nothing of using the channel tunnel, which would cost how much in todays money?
Never mind the £ cost, the environmental cost is huge
What's the environmental cost of NOT doing it? More driving, more flying (so more roads, bigger airports)... I'm fairly close to some aspects of HS2 but that's getting beyond my area of knowledge. Ultimately, whatever is built is going to have an environmenatal cost to it somewhere so it's finding the combination of efficiency, cost and impact that works best.
Why would that affect insurance and the need to build to a quality standard, which is why was suggested as the reason for the costs in the UK?
The quality standard remains the same but in France, China etc where they have thousands of acres of basically empty land (or at least, land used for non-residential reasons), you can just draw a straight line on a map and not really affect too many people by chucking a railway line down it. The UK is far smaller, has a far greater population density and so you end up having to build bridges, tunnels, embankments and buy up loads of housing in order to fit your straight line in. HS rail doesn't like corners. Then there's the worries from homeowners along the route about things like subsidence, noise etc so that has to be mitigated, insured against or whatever other measures you take.
Digging a ditch in the Chilterns is harder than building a tunnel through the Alps?
They pose their own challenges. At least in an Alp, you don't really have to move homeowners or pay compensation. Rock boring, while labour intensive is also relatively straightforward.
Digging a ditch in the Chilterns is invariably going to bring up the arguments I mentioned about subsidence, noise, pollution, habitat loss - you're almost certainly going to find a family of newts or bats that need moving, maybe some sort of mediaeval burial site that needs excavating and all that adds to the cost. Also, you're probably digging through layers of chalk, clay, flint and a water table rather than some nice consistent rock. And there's too many people around to just build it above ground as they might do elsewhere.
@thisisnotaspoon sums it up well - a lot of the cost is due to political posturing and the inability of Government to manage anything bigger than a office. Every time it gets reviewed and amended, the contracts change and the contractors (who have been promised £x billion to build y) are suddenly told they'll be getting half that and please could they actually build z. So they then want compensation, the supply chain needs to change, the delivery is put back so everyone involved has incurred costs and they need paying - regardless of what is actually delivered.
The scheme itself is a good idea and is badly needed to begin to close the North/South divide, unlock a bit more economic growth up North, potentially even prevent things like Heathrow expansion (because if you can land at Birmingham and be in London in 40 minutes, that's like landing at Heathrow and getting the tube, it's the same timeframe).
However the management of it by successive Governments over the last decade leaves a lot to be desired.
the only thing that demonstrates is how little the scheme is going to benefit 99% of the population!!because if you can land at Birmingham and be in London in 40 minutes, that’s like landing at Heathrow and getting the tube, it’s the same timeframe.
I thought it got Londoners to Birmingham as well?
Erm, who wants to go to Birmingham?
I wonder what the BBC and C4 think about the cancellation of the extensions to Leeds and Madchester...
Same old vanity project the conservative government comes up with. Headlines read “wizz-bang-whalllop, it’ll be brilliant, like beans they’re brilliant”
In reality its all wasted money on a scheme nobody wants nor needs.
Spend the £106bn on replacing the aged rolling stock and replace the crumbling infrastructure, the electrify the East Coast Mainline (which the conservative government cancelled... but you knew that didn’t you)
Soemone voted them in, someone’s to blame.
Spend the £106bn on replacing the aged rolling stock and replace the crumbling infrastructure, the electrify the East Coast Mainline (which the conservative government cancelled… but you knew that didn’t you)
Thanks to the franchising system, that's not really in the Government's hands to fix. They can sort parts of it (like electrification which is the responsibility of Network Rail, a non-departmental public body). However the disruption to do all that would be huge:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-network-rail-boris-johnson-train-updgrade-network-travel-disruption-a9292776.html
Problem is that because Government has failed to invest in infrastructure sufficiently over the last 15-20 years, the Train Operating Companies find it difficult to invest in new stock - what's the point in investing millions in 100mph electric trains if the network is only capable of handling diesels at 60mph? And now that backlog has come back to bite them. Old trains, running on old networks. You can't upgrade the trains without new tracks. You can't upgrade the tracks without causing massive disruption. Doing a rolling programme over 15 years would have been OK (mostly), but trying to do it all in a few years requires upheaval on an industrial scale. And the public don't want that.
And you get none of the benefits of quicker journeys or more capacity.
Erm, who wants to go to Birmingham?
Who wants to go to london, serious question, business rents are about 8x higher, as are rates, wages are higher, etc. Hence the idea is you get a few companies to move out by giving somewhere to go thats within a sensible journey time of their existing clients. Basicly you want Birmingham to be a bigger version of Reading.
Who wants to go to london
I think this is part of the problem, very few people want to go to Euston, Curzon St or Clay Cross; they want from where they live to where they work or where their Mum lives. Taking 30 minutes off the travel time to Birmingham doesn't help me if it takes 90 minutes to get to Euston and then I have to walk from New Street to Digbeth, and since I normally wouldn't be going from Euston anyway I don't ease congestion on the WCML. "Me" in this instance is pretty much the entire country west of Hyde Park or north of Hemel Hempstead.
If it stopped places en route then it'd be slower but actually useful for reducing congestion on the network and getting people out of cars. And it wouldn't need to go through nature reserves, ancient woodlands and SSSIs. And would be massively cheaper if those are the reasons why it's so expensive.
And you wouldn't have the scenario when the London to somewhere-near-Sheffield-but-not-Sheffield service breaks down at Birmingham Airport leaving everyone with a very, very expensive taxi ride.
On most big projects, part of the 'spiralling costs' are a result of the original estimates being fudged to make them politically acceptable. As discussed above, other increases occur because those in control keep changing their minds, sometimes because they think they can get back to the original estimate by cutting corners - which very rarely works.
GWEP has cost over £3.1bn so far. Not including cancelling the new trains and replacing them with bi-mode.
Every lesson learnt is that upgrade existing, originally 19th century, infrastructure is massively expensive and hugely time consuming.
they'll can it once all the tory party donors associated companies have made enough 😉
In sone ways I’m torn, I work for a company working on HS2 and infrastructure is seen to be the area o backfill the reduction in retail and commercial work, however....
The village that I live in will be greatly affected by the line north of Birmingham, even more so now that they’ve added a maintenance depot that wasn’t in the original plans. They could move it a mile or so away and not impact upon people’s homes but they’ve decided that the edge of our village is the best bit. They were bloody vague when asked about mitigation for light and noise pollution in the consultation.
The whole thing seems like one giant bit of a mess which will never deliver the promised service.
Nobody has said what the fares will be like to fund this new trainset, virgin and now avanti have high fares and no guarantee of a seat, onmost trains , seat reservations not working or no staff to enforce them.
Also how many typical working people will it help, ok fora ajunt down to london or Birmingham , but not for daily commuting due to the cost and time, invest money locally in a new company to tun Northern fail, and avanti, put longer trains on the tracks at better timings, rebuild Piccadilly in Manchester and Crewe etc, reopen manchester to sheffield through Woodhead.
Project - and upgrade the lines so trains can run faster ( those trans pennine lines and similar)
Yes HS2 would be good - but it is not the best use of limited money. But then as we know London transport MUST be subsidised by the rest of the country. Its only London public transport that matters to Westminster politicians
And while we are at it - dual the west highland line and reinstate one of the links between it and the east coast line!
but if government invested in the technology and policy to avoid this many people having to travel for business (e.g. subsidising video conferencing technology, building local business ‘hubs’ were workers can choose to work remotely if it can be proven they don’t *need* to be in office etc.) would we actually need the new rail infrastructure? How much of it is required just to support the idiotic system of all of us rushing to city centres for approximately exactly the same time of day, every day?
I keep seeing this stuff about workers not needing to be in offices, working remotely, blah blah blah...
Exactly how many people out of the UK’s working population actually do the sort of jobs which involves sitting in a cubicle staring at a screen with no interaction with other workers?
I don’t know a single person who does a job like that, I’ve never done a job like that, and it’s probably a pretty safe bet that those sort of jobs are a small minority of the UK workforce.
Most jobs require people to have physical interaction with other people, in retail, engineering, manufacturing, etc, if only to be able to bounce some ideas around, thrash out a troublesome issue, or whatever; things that cannot be done via a screen and internet connection.
Go to any city centre, what are the things you see around you? Shops, with offices around and between. Those shops need customers, the customers are often the office workers taking breaks or before and after work - it’s a symbiotic relationship, and I’m pretty certain that for most people, the thought of working from home would be unappealing, because of the lack of human interaction during the day.
Having said that, I’m sure most people who commute would much rather it be a very short commute, not one of a couple of hours.
Which is what mine would be via public transport, rather than the 35-45 minutes it takes by car...
Also how many typical working people will it help, ok fora ajunt down to london or Birmingham
A huge number?
Midweek the trains are over capacity pretty much from the first one till the last.
tjagain
But then as we know London transport MUST be subsidised by the rest of the country.
Ermmmmmmm, TJ, youre talking absolute bolloks there and you know it.
London gets more investment (which isnt necessarily a good thing) but thats not a subsidy, thats just a result of following the logic to its conclusion that infrastructure is put in place where it makes the biggest returns rather than benefiting the most people. By any measure London subsidised the rest of the UK, including Scotland.
Exactly how many people out of the UK’s working population actually do the sort of jobs which involves sitting in a cubicle staring at a screen with no interaction with other workers?
I know lots of people who work from home. I work from home two or three days a week as QS. It suits me; saves me my commute, means I can take / collect the little chap from school etc. If I have an issue I need to discuss, I have this amazing thing called a phone. It enables me to talk to colleagues etc really easily.
following the logic
Only if your logic is a continued over investment and growth in the SE of England for the next few decades and that somehow London's wealth is more important than wealth elsewhere.
Imo it's much more sensible to have focused and invested the money that HS2 is using across the North of England, to develop a future transport system that supports employment growth, regeneration and tempts more business away from SE.
I was feeling quite happy till I read all this and drove past our “new” hospital still closed after 4 years or so and £50 million over budget. Pigs, snouts,troff etc.
Loving the characteristic polarised arguments. The reality is probably that HS2 would do some of what it claims, but equally fail to deliver all the benefits it's supposed to, most notably to local commuter services in the north.
Arguably we should be asking questions about what metrics we use to assess the impact of schemes like HS2 on people's lives and well-being in particular and whether that investment could have greater impact elsewhere -- invested directly into local rail services, sustainable transport options like cycling etc.
Chances are that HS2 is being evaluated most using the blunt instrument of increasing GDP with minimal consideration of how that 'wealth' would actually 'trickle down' and impact on people's lives. The reality is that even if it does what it says it will, the profits will go to large corporations and super rich individuals and have minimal impact for everyone else. We're asking the wrong questions.
Bloke on tv this am stating warrington bank Quay about 6o waiting to get a avanti train to london, while down the road at Warringon central, 200 plus waiting for a train to take them to manchester or liverpool and in between, a train made up of two coaches all full every day.
Local services get used every day by same customers, while long distance are used in frequently by those who can afford the over priced fares systom.
We have a climate emergency on our hands partly due to personal transportation getting out of hand, the least that we can do is build some decent mass transport infra structure that will last well into the 22nd century, so we can travel north when it gets too warm down here for us southern softies
Only if your logic is a continued over investment and growth in the SE of England for the next few decades and that somehow London’s wealth is more important than wealth elsewhere.
Wasn't my logic, it's the civil services. And an unfortunate fact that investing a given amount of money on infrastructure gets a better return in London than elsewhere. I don't live in London, but you don't need to be to see why it happens.
There isn't an easy answer. On the one hand you have a philosophy that says spend the money fairly so everyone get's an equal outcome. On the other hand spending the money to get the biggest return on investment get's you the biggest tax receipts and thus lower tax rates. Which is better, the ability to earn more money, but pay more tax, or the ability of someone else to earn more money, so you pay less tax (which is where we're heading once everyone job is done by a robot anyway).
I agree that there needs to be better rail infrastructure in Northern England. But it's a fallacy to say it's more needed than HS2 because both are needed, HS2 just wins because it will payback quicker.
while long distance are used in frequently by those who can afford the over priced fares systom.
Ever tried to get a seat on a Birmingham to London train on a weekday? It's packed even in the middle of the day. And the whole point is you can run a lot more stopping services on the exiting lines when you don't have to timetable them between the intercity trains.
The current setup means you have to set the fast service off just before the next slow one at the origin, and it can't catch up with the slow train in front of it, otherwise* you end up sat on a lovely superquick electrified hitachi train somewhere between Reading and Paddington stopped because the local service between Maidenhead and Slough is a few minutes late.
*actually you don't because they just invested a few billion de-bottlenecking that line.
so there has to be a big gap. Get rid of the fast non-stop service and the number of stopping services all doing the same speeds is only limited by the signaling infrastructure.
Wasn’t my logic, it’s the civil services. And an unfortunate fact that investing a given amount of money on infrastructure gets a better return in London than elsewhere
Ah, ok.
I do wonder if at some point the ever crowding of resources and jobs in the SE will become less palatable.
Until that point I'll enjoy living oop north.
😉
Listening to R4 this afternoon there was a chap saying that the 'benefit' of HS2 is now at 60p per £1 invested...
(Pigs, snout, troughs etc).
Equally there was a conservative mp who suggested that a cycle route network was an alternative to HS2!
Yeah how is Johnson the 'king o the north' going to spin canceling the northern extension to hs2 ?
Yeah how is Johnson the ‘king o the north’ going to spin canceling the northern extension to hs2 ?
He'll promise to fund Transpennine Route Upgrade and/or Northern Powerhouse Rail and a few more vague soundbites about "unlocking the potential of the North". Rather ignoring the fact that NPR kind of depends quite heavily on some aspects of HS2 infrastructure.
for £106bn you could probably have a free/cheap (e)bike hire scheme in every large town in the UK, and massively improve cycling infrastructure with what's left.Equally there was a conservative mp who suggested that a cycle route network was an alternative to HS2!
It's the lack of joined up thinking (a transport plan) and the low ambition of the plan that bothers me not the cost.
Look at it this way. We have 100 billion to spend on rail improvements. What schemes would provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people? is it HS2 or is it improvements to existing lines across the north of England?
I've seen what the high-speed "AVE" train has done here in Spain, and it's great - the daily flights to and from Barcelona are close to being cancelled, it's connected Seville and Valencia to the capital, etc. And it took time to build, with cost overuns and problems with the land subsiding and etc. etc. etc.
So I'm pretty optimistic about HS2 - it'll take a while to see the benefits, and it'll soon need extending to Scotland, but it's a start.
Any poor soul who has used the trans pennie "service" for work understands the misery of it.
York to Manchester takes 1.5 hours to do 80 miles assuming it works it takes 1.40 to get to London from york.
I avoid business in Manchester/Warrington Liverpool as i can not work on the trains and it takes a ridiculous amount of time i preferto go to london.
HS2 simply perpetuates that problem. Take the cash build a new trans pennine and put a high speed link betwen Manchester and Birmingham.
Ever tried to get a seat on a Birmingham to London train on a weekday? It’s packed even in the middle of the day. And the whole point is you can run a lot more stopping services on the exiting lines when you don’t have to timetable them between the intercity trains.
I’ve never had an issue if I’m honest and I use that line a fair bit for work.
The 1746 from Euston to brum is standing room only every single evening
I know it intimately a long with many of my fellow passengers
£100B is chump change. It will have a 100-150 year service life and be paid for over 15 years - during which inflation will erode the “real” contract costs.
It works out around £2m a year per mile (354 miles) over a 150 year service life - and that’s without discounting for time value of money.
Projects of HS2’s scale always cost loads but are comparable to the investment in the late 1800s for the original railways. Most of the north / south rail capacity has now been absorbed so we have to do something to create future capacity, not least because the population is growing rapidly.
What’s disappointing is that the ambition in the Hs2 vision isn’t matched in an equally ambitious vision for modal shift in towns in cities - getting most single passenger car journeys to switch to small personal electric vehicles / speed pedelecs.
One more point of comparison - the latest estimate of the compensation costs to cover NHS clinical negligence is £83B (as reported in the news earlier in the week). For some reason that has received little to no attention.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51180944
From where I'm sitting it's a huge waste of money with absolutely no benefit at all to the people in the North East of England ..
Some of this money would be far better spent on dualing the A1 road network all the way from Newcastle to Edinburgh ..the fact that it is still single carriageway through large chunks of Northumberland is bloody criminal in my book...
On the plus side if it keeps southerners from over-populating Nothumberland due to shorter commuting times..then that's a good thing !
No tinas - its a massive subsidy to london public transpot. TFL absorbs almost as much public money in in a year as Edinburghs trams cost in total - and that is ignoring capital expenditure - thats just the subsidy. Add in the capital expenditure and it dwarfs what is sent on the rest of the country.. ~Some ridiculous figure of total public spend on public transport is in London. Far more per had of population London fares are the cheapest in the UK because of subsidy.
Why 'cos politicians are based in London.
Over the last 10 years, Londoners enjoyed an annual average of £708 of transport spending per person, while just £289 was spent for each person in the north of England, the analysis foun
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/01/transport-spending-gap-london-north-of-england-ippr
HS2 is just more of the same. Its never going to go beyond Birmingham - that is clear. Its a ridiculous waste of public money that could be better spent elsewhere
No TJ - because London is a mega city and drives a significant contribution to GDP.
Much of the talent / business that is located there simply wouldn’t work elsewhere in the U.K. even if the infrastructure was there - they would up sticks and work in other global mega cities.
For that reason investment in London transport is marginally higher in real terms - although Scotland and Northern Ireland continue to receive much higher public spending per capita overall.
Fares on public transport in London are pretty high in my experience - £2-5 per journey.
Edinburgh is £1.70 with a daily cap around £5 or so
From the same article
A plan submitted to the government earlier this year estimated it would cost £69bn to bring transport in the north of England up to scratch. The proposal by Transport for the North (TfN) – a statutory advisory body – includes building “Northern Powerhouse Rail”, a brand new trans-Pennine railway from Liverpool to Leeds.
The National Infrastructure Commission recently recognised the new line as a potential flagship project and estimated that £24bn of investment was needed.
If given the green light by the government, the line would bring an estimated £92bn of benefits to the UK economy by 2050, according to TfN.
Are you really trying to claim that London needs to suck more money out of the coutry. Are you really trying to claim that bringing all of the northern cities public transport into the 20th let alone the 21st century including a complete new transpennie route would not gain greater benefits?
Pure londoncentric nonsense. Look at the numbers in that article.
YGH = Edinburgh is very well served by good public transport and is cheap. I am not arguing for more for Edinburgh indeed you could argue that Edinburgh gets more than its share. Its the northern English cities and the highlands that really miss out and where the money that is being wasted on HS2 would bring much bigger benefits than HS2 will ever bring
the new transpennie route would bring in 3-4 times its cost in 30 years. Will HS2? Will crossrail?