Why do so many of our public sector projects end up massively expensive, heavily over budget, late to be delivered, and faulty?
HS2 will not be a particularly attractive journey, as most of the line will be in tunnels or cuttings
How much does a door cost? Well if it’s replacement one for the entrance to the House of Lords, the answer is £9.6m, which is about a thousand times more than most people might think reasonable. The original estimate was £6.1m.
Oh, and having been fitted, it doesn’t work properly. A member of staff has had to be deployed to sit by it and press a button to open the door. Baroness Smith, the leader of the Lords, conceded the door might never be fully operational.
It is not difficult to find other crazy examples in our mother of parliaments. A short stretch of glass cover over an open walkway came in, some years ago, at around £370,000. And someone decided that it was a good idea for the trees that until recently graced the atrium in Portcullis House to be rented at £5,000 each per annum.
Why do so many public sector projects in Britain turn into embarrassing fiascos – massively expensive, heavily over budget, late to be delivered, and faulty when supposedly complete?
This shockingly bad use of public money is of course not limited to the palace of Westminster. The pitiful story about the Lords door came to my mind when the latest of many calamitous statements about HS2 was delivered, this time by the transport secretary Heidi Alexander.
What’s left of the once ambitious plans – a sad stump between London and Birmingham – has been delayed yet further beyond 2033, by at least two years, as costs continue to rise inexorably.
We are promised that the new team of chief executive Mark Wild and chair Mike Brown will finally get a grip on things.
I have nothing against these two. Indeed on paper they look like a good combination. Mark Wild has 35 years’ experience of handling critical infrastructure projects, and Mike Brown impressed insiders and outsiders alike while Transport for London commissioner.
But we have had a succession of people who on paper look appropriate and who promised to get a grip on things, but who have nevertheless disappeared into the HS2 sink hole. Wild’s predecessor, Mark Thurston, chief executive for over six years from 2017, looked eminently well qualified with a wide railway background but utterly failed to put the brakes on the runaway train.
The London-Birmingham section, first announced in 2010, was due to open next year, some sixteen years later. It now has 2035 pencilled in: 25 years to deliver 186 miles of track, or just over seven miles a year. The cost has quadrupled to over £80bn, or around £430m per mile.
The French delivered a high speed line of the same length in just five years. China has built around 6,500 miles of high speed track in seven years.
Brunel took just five years, from 1836 to 1841, to build the entire 118-mile line from London to Bristol, and without the sophisticated technology available today. Even more astonishingly, the conversion of the Great Western Railway from Brunel’s broad gauge to the standard gauge was achieved over just a single weekend, in May 1892. This involved the conversion of 177 miles of track, primarily in Devon and Cornwall.
The HS2 project has turned into a huge national humiliation with other countries wondering how the land that gave the world the railway now seems incapable of building a new line. No wonder the public lose faith in governments.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that HS2 is a one-off. The only difference here is that the sheer scale of the project has magnified the faults and shortcomings that were less noticed but still existed in other transport, and indeed non-transport projects.
The cost has quadrupled to over £80bn, or around £430m per mile
Thameslink 2000 was so late in delivery it was only completed in 2019. Crossrail was finally finished four years and five months behind schedule, and £3bn over budget. The Edinburgh tram project was over five years late and £400m over budget.
The good news – there is some – is that all these projects did finally produce a safe and competent end product. Nobody is now saying that the Edinburgh tram network should not have been built, and Crossrail, renamed the Elizabeth Line, is now used on average by 700,000 people every day. But satisfaction with the final product has perhaps only served to mute the concerns about the planning and construction shortcomings that preceded it. Lessons have not been learnt.
I fear with HS2, there will not be the same post-opening satisfaction, however.
First, for a high speed line to work optimally, it needs to cover a long distance and have few stops. The original concept which I signed up to, both as my party’s transport spokesman in opposition and then as a transport minister from 2010, envisaged a high speed network that ran from Leeds and Manchester through to London, with a spur to Heathrow and a connection to HS1. Trains would be designed so that people would be able to travel from Glasgow or Edinburgh to Paris or Brussels, using the high speed line in part, and without the need to change trains.
Cut after cut has whittled this down to a sad stump, initially from Birmingham to Old Oak Common, with a need to change trains at this place nobody had ever heard of in order to get into central London. TfL calculated that it would actually be marginally faster to go city centre to city centre using the existing line as opposed to this convoluted alternative.
Second, it will not be a particularly attractive journey, as most of the line will be in tunnels or cuttings, massively increasing the cost of course. This is the result of successful lobbying from Conservative MPs and their voters, often living up to 20 miles from the proposed route, who believed the nonsense put to them about noise and visual intrusion. The same nonsense, by the way, was propagated about HS1 before it was built, but nobody complains about that now. I am afraid the culprit here was the affable and generally effective transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin but who should never given in to this baseless nimby lobbying.
Third, HS2, far from easing congestion, will make it worse as the trains designed for the line will carry 50 fewer passengers than the current Pendolino trains due to platform lengths, thereby reducing capacity north of Birmingham on the already overcrowded West Coast Main Line to Manchester and beyond. The calculation is that HS2 will mean 6,000 fewer seats daily between London and Manchester, 4,000 fewer to Liverpool, and 2,000 fewer ro Glasgow. That implies price rises to reduce demand, and no open access on this line.
The ideal administrator is still too often seen as the gifted layman
So where do all these schemes go wrong? There is usually a toxic mix of reasons. For one, there is a serious lack of expertise within the Department for Transport, and government generally, when it comes to letting infrastructure contracts and handling legal matters. I am a supporter of the civil service but perhaps we have too many Oxbridge arts graduates and too few hard-headed economists and savvy lawyers, both groups of whom can in any case earn far more working for the private sector.
Back in 1968, the Fulton Report into the civil service warned that “the ideal administrator is still too often seen as the gifted layman.” What has changed since then? Nothing, it seems. Kate Bingham’s recent vaccine taskforce report concluded there is a “notable lack of scientific, industrial, commercial and manufacturing skills” amongst civil servants and politicians.
In 2010, the new transport secretary Philip Hammond decided the department needed a “haircut” and the subsequent generous voluntary redundancy scheme saw the best officials go, and the less good stay. The department got into a right mess over contracts relating to the West Coast Main Line and ended up £100m the poorer as a result.
Stories of PFI contracts being let which then charge the public entity £100 to change a light bulb may be an exaggeration but not by much.
In Edinburgh, the local council was taken to the cleaners by the utility companies who managed to get their pipes and cables upgraded at public expense on the back of the tram works.
Then there is the constant chopping and changing of specifications by politicians, for rolling stock, for stations, for track layout and now apparently for speed, as plans are afoot to downgrade the top speed on HS2 to 200 mph, worsening further the comparison with the existing line.
The political mismanagement gets worse. The ministerial taskforce set up under the last government to keep a tight rein on progress was frequently skipped by the transport secretary and chief secretary to the Treasury, the two key ministers. Another taskforce, set up to handle Euston station, never met at all.
There has frequently been a failure to ensure sub-contractors do not overcharge or worse. It now appears parts of the supply chain have been defrauding taxpayers. Investigations are underway not simply at HS2 but now also in the TransPennine route upgrade project.
Can Britain learn the lessons of past and present mistakes? The next challenge perhaps is the new high speed line proposed by north-west mayors to link Liverpool and Manchester. On first glance, it does not bode well. A high speed line which will never be high speed because the stations are too close, and a route that means trains on the new alignment will take longer to cover the distance between the two cities than existing services.
It seems Britain’s long-terms systemic problems persist, and sadly I do not see much light at the end of the tunnel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Norman Baker served as transport minister from May 2010 until October 2013. He was Lib Dem MP for Lewes between 1997 and 2015.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
Why so many embarrassing fiascos?
by Passenger Transport on Jun 26, 2025 • 1:35 pm No CommentsWhy do so many of our public sector projects end up massively expensive, heavily over budget, late to be delivered, and faulty?
How much does a door cost? Well if it’s replacement one for the entrance to the House of Lords, the answer is £9.6m, which is about a thousand times more than most people might think reasonable. The original estimate was £6.1m.
Oh, and having been fitted, it doesn’t work properly. A member of staff has had to be deployed to sit by it and press a button to open the door. Baroness Smith, the leader of the Lords, conceded the door might never be fully operational.
It is not difficult to find other crazy examples in our mother of parliaments. A short stretch of glass cover over an open walkway came in, some years ago, at around £370,000. And someone decided that it was a good idea for the trees that until recently graced the atrium in Portcullis House to be rented at £5,000 each per annum.
Why do so many public sector projects in Britain turn into embarrassing fiascos – massively expensive, heavily over budget, late to be delivered, and faulty when supposedly complete?
This shockingly bad use of public money is of course not limited to the palace of Westminster. The pitiful story about the Lords door came to my mind when the latest of many calamitous statements about HS2 was delivered, this time by the transport secretary Heidi Alexander.
What’s left of the once ambitious plans – a sad stump between London and Birmingham – has been delayed yet further beyond 2033, by at least two years, as costs continue to rise inexorably.
We are promised that the new team of chief executive Mark Wild and chair Mike Brown will finally get a grip on things.
I have nothing against these two. Indeed on paper they look like a good combination. Mark Wild has 35 years’ experience of handling critical infrastructure projects, and Mike Brown impressed insiders and outsiders alike while Transport for London commissioner.
But we have had a succession of people who on paper look appropriate and who promised to get a grip on things, but who have nevertheless disappeared into the HS2 sink hole. Wild’s predecessor, Mark Thurston, chief executive for over six years from 2017, looked eminently well qualified with a wide railway background but utterly failed to put the brakes on the runaway train.
The London-Birmingham section, first announced in 2010, was due to open next year, some sixteen years later. It now has 2035 pencilled in: 25 years to deliver 186 miles of track, or just over seven miles a year. The cost has quadrupled to over £80bn, or around £430m per mile.
The French delivered a high speed line of the same length in just five years. China has built around 6,500 miles of high speed track in seven years.
Brunel took just five years, from 1836 to 1841, to build the entire 118-mile line from London to Bristol, and without the sophisticated technology available today. Even more astonishingly, the conversion of the Great Western Railway from Brunel’s broad gauge to the standard gauge was achieved over just a single weekend, in May 1892. This involved the conversion of 177 miles of track, primarily in Devon and Cornwall.
The HS2 project has turned into a huge national humiliation with other countries wondering how the land that gave the world the railway now seems incapable of building a new line. No wonder the public lose faith in governments.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that HS2 is a one-off. The only difference here is that the sheer scale of the project has magnified the faults and shortcomings that were less noticed but still existed in other transport, and indeed non-transport projects.
Thameslink 2000 was so late in delivery it was only completed in 2019. Crossrail was finally finished four years and five months behind schedule, and £3bn over budget. The Edinburgh tram project was over five years late and £400m over budget.
The good news – there is some – is that all these projects did finally produce a safe and competent end product. Nobody is now saying that the Edinburgh tram network should not have been built, and Crossrail, renamed the Elizabeth Line, is now used on average by 700,000 people every day. But satisfaction with the final product has perhaps only served to mute the concerns about the planning and construction shortcomings that preceded it. Lessons have not been learnt.
I fear with HS2, there will not be the same post-opening satisfaction, however.
First, for a high speed line to work optimally, it needs to cover a long distance and have few stops. The original concept which I signed up to, both as my party’s transport spokesman in opposition and then as a transport minister from 2010, envisaged a high speed network that ran from Leeds and Manchester through to London, with a spur to Heathrow and a connection to HS1. Trains would be designed so that people would be able to travel from Glasgow or Edinburgh to Paris or Brussels, using the high speed line in part, and without the need to change trains.
Cut after cut has whittled this down to a sad stump, initially from Birmingham to Old Oak Common, with a need to change trains at this place nobody had ever heard of in order to get into central London. TfL calculated that it would actually be marginally faster to go city centre to city centre using the existing line as opposed to this convoluted alternative.
Second, it will not be a particularly attractive journey, as most of the line will be in tunnels or cuttings, massively increasing the cost of course. This is the result of successful lobbying from Conservative MPs and their voters, often living up to 20 miles from the proposed route, who believed the nonsense put to them about noise and visual intrusion. The same nonsense, by the way, was propagated about HS1 before it was built, but nobody complains about that now. I am afraid the culprit here was the affable and generally effective transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin but who should never given in to this baseless nimby lobbying.
Third, HS2, far from easing congestion, will make it worse as the trains designed for the line will carry 50 fewer passengers than the current Pendolino trains due to platform lengths, thereby reducing capacity north of Birmingham on the already overcrowded West Coast Main Line to Manchester and beyond. The calculation is that HS2 will mean 6,000 fewer seats daily between London and Manchester, 4,000 fewer to Liverpool, and 2,000 fewer ro Glasgow. That implies price rises to reduce demand, and no open access on this line.
So where do all these schemes go wrong? There is usually a toxic mix of reasons. For one, there is a serious lack of expertise within the Department for Transport, and government generally, when it comes to letting infrastructure contracts and handling legal matters. I am a supporter of the civil service but perhaps we have too many Oxbridge arts graduates and too few hard-headed economists and savvy lawyers, both groups of whom can in any case earn far more working for the private sector.
Back in 1968, the Fulton Report into the civil service warned that “the ideal administrator is still too often seen as the gifted layman.” What has changed since then? Nothing, it seems. Kate Bingham’s recent vaccine taskforce report concluded there is a “notable lack of scientific, industrial, commercial and manufacturing skills” amongst civil servants and politicians.
In 2010, the new transport secretary Philip Hammond decided the department needed a “haircut” and the subsequent generous voluntary redundancy scheme saw the best officials go, and the less good stay. The department got into a right mess over contracts relating to the West Coast Main Line and ended up £100m the poorer as a result.
Stories of PFI contracts being let which then charge the public entity £100 to change a light bulb may be an exaggeration but not by much.
In Edinburgh, the local council was taken to the cleaners by the utility companies who managed to get their pipes and cables upgraded at public expense on the back of the tram works.
Then there is the constant chopping and changing of specifications by politicians, for rolling stock, for stations, for track layout and now apparently for speed, as plans are afoot to downgrade the top speed on HS2 to 200 mph, worsening further the comparison with the existing line.
The political mismanagement gets worse. The ministerial taskforce set up under the last government to keep a tight rein on progress was frequently skipped by the transport secretary and chief secretary to the Treasury, the two key ministers. Another taskforce, set up to handle Euston station, never met at all.
There has frequently been a failure to ensure sub-contractors do not overcharge or worse. It now appears parts of the supply chain have been defrauding taxpayers. Investigations are underway not simply at HS2 but now also in the TransPennine route upgrade project.
Can Britain learn the lessons of past and present mistakes? The next challenge perhaps is the new high speed line proposed by north-west mayors to link Liverpool and Manchester. On first glance, it does not bode well. A high speed line which will never be high speed because the stations are too close, and a route that means trains on the new alignment will take longer to cover the distance between the two cities than existing services.
It seems Britain’s long-terms systemic problems persist, and sadly I do not see much light at the end of the tunnel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Norman Baker served as transport minister from May 2010 until October 2013. He was Lib Dem MP for Lewes between 1997 and 2015.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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