HS2 Bosses To Be Scandalously Paid More Than The PM

I think that overall this government has done a very good job when it comes to infrastructure. More money is being invested into the roads and railways than under the last Government and this is all done despite a cut to the Department of Transport's budget. Network Rail has certainly done a good job of Nottingham train station.

The one big blemish to this good record has been HS2. Spending £42.6 billion plus contingency* on a railway with no business case is very stupid, and we're the ones paying for it. I've made my views on HS2 beforehand consistently clear, I don't think it should happen.

But now that the legislation has been passed and it is 99% likely to take place, what tax payers want is for HS2 to have the lowest costs possible. This has been somewhat shattered today with the plan to pay 30 bosses on the HS2 project more than the Prime Minister.

No one should get paid more than Dave when working for the Government.

Who thought that was a good idea? The PM has the toughest job in the nation and so rightly the Government has a policy of dissuading departments and QANGOs from paying any more than Dave earns, which is £140,000 per year. In a time of austerity I thought this would also be crucial let alone the necessity for high scrutiny of HS2's costings.

Patrick McCloughin after a hard days work at the Department of Transport.

What baffles me most is that the Transport Secretary has come out and said the salaries, which will cost several millions of pounds, "fell within the budget we've set." Yes this is true, but paying people vast amounts is a making it a virtual certainty that HS2 will run over budget. Who will then get the blame for that Mr McCoughlin? Thank the Lord the Treasury has to give approval to these monster salaries. Hopefully George Osborne, Nicky Morgan and co. have the sense to say no to this major pay out.

The sensible squad.

*Bare in mind independent organisations and the Treasury think it will cost around £80 billion.

Weekly Poll Lowdown

We apologise for the delayed service of the HS2 express poll leaving London to who knows where. There will be no refunds of the £80 billion price tag. Your results are pretty conclusive; you think HS2 is a stupid idea and should be scrapped by the government.

Sorry for the delays.

Should the Government scrap HS2?

Yes	76%
No	24%
Unsure	0%

Total votes: 17

For the first time in a long while we are in agreement. You're completely right. HS2 is the biggest waste of money under this government and since my last post on it, which you can read here, there have been developments which further damn this Victorian folly.

The CBI, although believing in a push for infrastructure spending from the government, issued a warning over its cost saying of HS2 "it must be demonstrably clear that the benefits outweigh the costs" (obviously this is not true at the moment). 73% of business wants money spent on the 'deterioration' of the road networks rather than the railways; do remember that the vast majority of transportation of goods is done by lorries and no new railway will change this. Only 35% of businesses back the government's policy of HS2 at the moment which must be a blow for coal miner Patrick McLoughlin, who also happens to be the Transport Secretary. 

Patrick McLoughlin after a hard days work.

Indeed the Transport Secretary over the past few weeks has re-written the entire government argument on HS2. He has admitted inaccurate plans from his predecessor, which I'm sure Justine Greening took very well, and is now basing the HS2 plan on capacity. The Government is now saying that soon we will run out capacity on the railways lines and will have to build more tracks so that's why we need HS2. However it is worth noting that actually HS2 doesn't go near any lines that need extra capacity (if you're that interesting in commuting they run down the East Coast Mainline). Also if we need extra capacity and it is no longer about the 20 mins saved by high speed rail why not just use ordinary and cheaper trains? I don't think this new argument has been thought through very well.

HS2 may even be defeated in the Commons. If Ed Miliband, who usually can't make his mind up on what flavoured tea to have at breakfast, finally decides that the cost is too much there is a definite defeat for the government ahead. Even if Red Ed does back HS2 the rebellion in Labour and the Tories may be so big that the vote is lost anyway. I think the government, if the pressure is kept on them, will quietly kick the high speed rail idea out. 

So sorry train spotters of Britain, HS2 may never happen. 

Vote in the new poll on the sidebar.

Murder on the HS2 Express

HS2 has yet again been in the news this week, and it's not very good for our good old friend Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary. Essentially it has been discovered HS2 is one of the most expensive things that the tax payer is going to have to bear this decade and this is all for an infrastructure project with no business case. What a waste.

  Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, used to be a miner at a time where nationalised industries were the biggest white Elephants.

It all started just before the summer recess when the Government announced they were increasing the budget of HS2 from the £32 billion. This figure they said was definitely going to be the maximum cost of the project despite having gone up from £17 billion. However the Government have now said HS2 will cost £42.6 billion with an added contingency budget. It seems the Government realised it needed to put out more realistic figures because he Treasury, the Transport Select Committee and lots of other independent organisations saying that HS2 will cost massively over the proposed budget. 

But is HS2 going to cost just shy of £50 billion? Erm ... no. This week the Institute of Economic Affairs joined in on the scene and said that HS2 is now going to cost £80 billion, more than double the original costings. To back this figure even more it was reported in the FT that the Treasury actually believes High Speed Rail will cost £72 billion.

 Even Alistair Darling can't believe his eyebrows when he sees the full cost of HS2.

I believe it is bordering on madness to stick with an infrastructure project that would be so costly to the public purse. To put the figures of the project into perspective, our national deficit in 2010 was £167 billion. This means if we did not build HS2 we would cut our deficit nearly in half. No wonder even Labour figures are turning against High Speed Rail. These are the people who supported the project in government because they are prepared to use Keynesian infrastructure spending to provide unsustainable jobs which give the false pretence of an economic recovery. Alistair Darling, who was Transport Secretary at the time of HS1, has said HS2 "could easily run out of control" with highly contentious economic benefits and plenty of Labour and Conservative MPs are backing his words on this.

The Government's reasoning behind HS2 is that it will see a growth in trade using the railways and save time for businesses in the North. There is a debate using evidence from French and Japanese versions of HS2 as to whether quicker railways actually centralises growth in capital cities. There may be no growth in the North at all. What is for certain is that some growth will occur but is it really worth £42.6 billion let alone £80 billion?

The Government's plans have so many flaws that similes of HS2 have gone past the sieve stage and have now entered the more realistic metaphor of a hoop. For example the Transport Department accounts the time travelling on the train as lost business hours. Yet it is true from anybodies experience that people work on trains. This was much pointed out by the Public Accounts Committee but the Government have yet to listen. Back in the time when HS2 was supposed to cost £17 billion, the Tax Payers Alliance worked out that each of the 40,000 jobs the government said would be created by the scheme would cost £400,000 each. Yet if we took the national average of the amount of money it cost to create a job HS2 should be producing 170,000 jobs, the same as the working population of Coventry. 

This whole High Speed Rail nonsense should be stopped now. It is probably, considering the magnitude of its spending, the worst decision made by the Government. It is a clear murder of the representative of the value for money and common business sense. We're all victims and the government should be called to account so it doesn't get away with such criminal waste. 

'At Risk Of Failure'

Yesterday the government released at 5 to 5pm a document that proclaimed that virtually everything they are doing infrastructure and project wise is likely or going to fail. This is quite a worrying development considering what could happen.

The first problem with the all these projects failing is the cost. The governments flagship infrastructure project of HS2 is going way over budget (see http://thingselliottsays.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/tony-robinson-stops-hs2.html and http://thingselliottsays.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/weekly-poll-lowdown_16.html to view what I think about HS2). The government initially said that it would cost £17 billion, however this has not been accepted by the Public Accounts Committee and the Tax Payers Alliance has predicted HS2 to cost £45.5 billion. Matthew Sinclair, who is the Tax Payers Alliance CEO, says that "alarm bells will yet again be ringing for taxpayers". It has certainly got me concerned even more so when it is calculated that HS2 will be loss making for the economy. All that money wasted.

My thoughts exactly.

More worrying for me however is our national defence which is seemingly in jeopardy once again. The aircraft carriers that the government have promised to be built have been listed as red or 'unachievable' by this report. The decision to make sure we had no carrier defence was stupid in my opinion. We are too big a world power not to have one, we have to borrow the Charles De Gaulle if in need. But now it looks like we will never have one. Great. Worrying for me too is the fact that this project is going to cost about £7 billion; yet HS2 is costing over 5 times that amount. So effectively we have decided to trade national defence for the biggest waste of money ever. Very wise.  

HMS Argus was the world first aircraft carrier built in 1918. Less than 100 years later when still very much needed the carrier looks like its going to be extinct in the UK.

Everything is going under from the new passport control system to the universal credit benefit system. We are creaking as a nation at very best when it comes to government projects. So whose fault is this? Well partially it is the Governments, they have made some of the stupid decisions that could have probably been foreseen. But mostly it is ever inefficient and massively over paid Whitehall system. It is a lace where no one does any work, everyone receives a massive pension, no one does what minsters say and is secretly receiving a more than 3% increase in wages from George Osborne to keep them quiet. These great people are slowly destroying our country and yet we can do very little to stop it.

Whitehall is like entering into a world where money is plentiful and inefficiency is the order of the day.

So what is the case for the defence. Well Francis Maude has said that they have made £1.7 billion in efficiency savings so that the projects are not so costly. However, he must have forgotten all together governmental infrastructure cost £350 billion. That's just over a 0.4% saving which is truly pathetic. So it seems like all these projects Britain is 'at risk of failure' because of the incompetent people who we cannot get rid of at the helm. This time it's the civil service and not Lib Dem ministers. 

It's not all the fault of the Government. Even Dave isn't happy that Francis Maude isn't delivering on the civil service.

Tony Robinson Stops HS2

I like Archaeology, it's a hobby of mine. So I was interested to see that in London a Black Death pit was found. What's even better is this was found when constructing the HS2 rail link.

Archaeology is mostly tax payer funded, although it is getting more common for sponsorship from companies. Quarrying and oil companies use environmental data as it helps them decide whether to set up shop there. Also it is compulsory to have an archaeological survey for something the size of HS2 when being built, especially when it is in London. London itself is one massive museum and underground are some many fantastic and important discoveries to be made.

My suggestion is this. Why not explore London's history to the maximum. It is a great city, as Boris always says, and you can never know too much about its past. So let's find out more. We should force for an extremely detailed survey to be done of the HS2 route. Let's get to know the area really well along the HS2 route and force a very long survey that would hold it up for ages. Or better still make HS2 take a route of historical areas so we get to know even more, and waste the time of the builders. Maybe government will stop it then, or by the time it finishes a more sensible government will scrap it. Archaeological investigations across the HS2 route will also save money because, whatever the bill for the digs will be, it is certainly cheaper than building an irrelevant railway.

Let's get Tony Robinson and Time Team on the scene to stop HS2. 

Weekly Poll Lowdown

It was a close run thing but, after a heated debate with the Speaker having to shout ‘Order’ a lot, I think the ayes have it, ayes have it.

Yes	13 (52%)
No	10 (40%)
Unsure	2 (8%)

HS2 is very misguided. Like most government policies HS2 is going to seriously go over budget hitting £45.5 billion not £17 billion which will cost every family £1,000. And what is it for? so people can travel faster by 30 min across the country? Why? In the age of super fast broadband we need higher speed information streaming into our lives, that is where the money is nowadays. The Government should spend more on this surely (especially considering they said they would).

Railways are a shrinking business because of the high prices, you can see how bad it is when you sit in an empty carriage that is not running at peak times. It’s gotten so bad the Government has nationalised the industry virtually. The trains may be run by ‘private companies’ but they are at the whim of Westminster, who owns the line too. Apparently this will be worse in the future as well. The HS2 plans admit there needs to be a 27% increase in train fares in order for the Government's business plan to work.

The Government should invest in broadband not in HS2. But if they are committed to Victorian follies then I suggest they launch a Thomas the Tank Engine line. It will certainly make more money from the tourist trade.

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