It is interesting enough that Boris Johnson has attacked high-speed rail in today’s Telegraph: the Mayor is undermining the priorities of the current government (while attacking Labour a little too), and reminding them that they are dithering on aviation policy. He warns that the project’s costs will balloon to well over £70 billion. But the Mayor makes one very important comment about the government machine that should not go unnoticed. He writes:
Talk to the big construction firms, and they will tell you the problem is not the cost of actually digging and tunnelling and putting in cables and tracks. Those are apparently roughly the same wherever you are in the world.
It’s the whole nightmare of consultation and litigation – and the huge army of massively expensive and taxpayer-financed secondary activities that is generated by these procedures. It is the environmental impact assessments and the equalities impact assessments and the will-sapping tedium and cost of the consultations. Did you know that in order to build HS2 we are going to spend £1 billion by 2015 — and they won’t have turned a single sod in Buckinghamshire or anywhere else?
That is a billion quid going straight down the gullets of lawyers and planners and consultants before you have even invested in a yard of track. To understand the prohibitive costs of UK infrastructure, you need to take this haemorrhage of cash to consultants, and then multiply it by the time devoted to political dithering.
It is clear from this that the Mayor sees much of the paraphernalia accompanying policy development and big new projects as baggage that slows Britain down in the ‘global race’. The government has already announced it is scrapping the equality impact assessments, but it would be interesting to hear more detail from Johnson on what else he thinks needs to go in order to stop the dithering.
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