Andrew Gilligan: Building big isn’t always building right, and the latter takes bravery we don’t often see

It’s become an article of faith that building big projects is how you deliver economic growth. That’s what underlies a lot of government policy, from Heathrow third runways to new proposals recently floated to speed up major infrastructure delivery.

But is it true?

Rather little noticed this week, the Financial Times found an official economic evaluation of HS1, Britain’s original high-speed line to Kent and the Channel Tunnel, which had been quietly slipped out on the Government website after being buried for more than two years. This scheme – two-thirds cheaper per mile in real terms than HS2 – is widely considered a success. It’s certainly a far better project than the train crash currently unfolding in the rough direction of Birmingham (destination subject to change).

It turns out, however, that contrary to the hype, HS1’s domestic service (to Ashford, Canterbury, Dover and so on) has delivered no overall economic benefit to Kent. Sixteen years after the service began, the government evaluation finds that “local economic indicators [in Kent], such as GVA per capita, have not increased significantly compared with peer locations which have not benefitted from HS1.” More people are commuting to London, but those benefits have gone to London.

There were only tiny improvements in train performance, and the scheme as a whole, even with the wider economic impacts, has been “poor value for money.” For every pound taxpayers spent on it, the assessment found, we are getting back (over 60 years) 70p.

Of course the cost, time and difficulty of building anything in this country is wrong, and needs to be fixed. It’s an important problem. But it’s not the most important problem.

I think the top problem is that we build the wrong things.

We’re biased towards big projects that are almost certain to disappoint – and not just in Britain. In almost every Western country, regardless of its regulatory and cost base, megaprojects let you down. Bent Flyvbjerg, the academic doyen of this field, studied hundreds of megaprojects and found that only one in two hundred are done on time, to budget and deliver the benefits promised.

To take transport, the EU’s Court of Auditors, its equivalent of the National Audit Office, found that cost overruns on high-speed rail projects in mainland Europe averaged 78 per cent and delays averaged ten years. A lot of the projects were unnecessary, too: trains were running on average at only around 45 per cent of the line’s design speed on the lines audited.

Berlin’s new airport was supposed to open in 2011. It actually opened nine years late and four times overbudget. It was built big to be a new European flight hub – but they didn’t ask the airlines, which are quite happy with Frankfurt, thanks.

You might say well, Berlin’s got a new airport, France has got new TGVs, the overruns and delays will be forgotten and they’re trivial over the decades that these projects will last. But it’s not just that. Transport is a network. Creating better transport means creating a better network – allowing people in thousands of places to travel easily, often by connecting from a train to a tram or bus. It does not mean for instance grafting a few new high-speed lines, serving a handful of places, onto an otherwise still decrepit system. That’s projects without a plan.

And the capacity problems are not mainly on links – the stretches of road or rail between places. They’re at nodes – that is, what happens to all the trains when they hit chokepoints like central Manchester, or to the traffic when it hits busy motorway junctions. Megaprojects take the money and the construction capacity away from tackling those sorts of problems.

Nine-tenths of journeys are local.

Each year, three London bus routes carry about as many people as Spain’s entire 2,500-mile high-speed rail network. One London tube line carries six times more people. But we spent almost 60 per cent more on HS2 last year than we spent on local public transport across the entire country.

You can see the results on the ground. Manchester’s Metrolink tram added 58 new stops in the five years between 2010 and 2015. In the ten years since, as the political focus and budgets have moved to high-speed rail, it has added only six new stops.

I advised Boris Johnson in No10, and Boris’s problem was cakeism, a belief you can have high-speed rail and all the other things too. At high-speed prices, you just can’t. You have to choose.

Britain has, in fact, had striking local transport successes in the last quarter-century, above all the transformation of London’s public transport network – the buses in particular.  How did it happen? The first element was a proper plan, a network plan. The second was investment (on a much lower scale than the eleven-figure sums blown on HS2). And the third was a willingness to do things which disadvantaged motorists: a congestion charge, a big crackdown on parking, and hundreds of miles of new bus lane.

Because while the vast majority of journeys outside cities will always be by car, the big cities are where the economic benefit disproportionately happens. And the answer to the transport problems of big European cities can never be the car. Even if you knock down entire neighbourhoods for urban motorways, there will never be enough roadspace for all the motor vehicles that want to use it.

Road pricing is perhaps the single biggest thing any government could do quickly to boost growth. Congested roadspace is one of the biggest barriers to the economy. A scheme where the price varied by place and time could spread out road use much more across the day, creating an immediate fall in congestion and an immediate rise in effective roadspace. Because it would replace fuel duty, most people would pay the same or less than now. But of course some would pay more, and there’s your problem.

In transport, there actually are quick fixes.

They’re simple, but they’re politically difficult.

Strong, brave political leadership is essential, but there isn’t much of that around at the moment. And that, I’ve no doubt, is one reason why we do all the wrong schemes. Stupid, wasteful megaprojects are a way of looking like you’re doing something – while avoiding difficult decisions. If you’re Andy Burnham, it’s a lot easier to demand that someone else builds you a high speed railway than take the political risk of a congestion charge.

Perhaps that’s the central problem this country has to grapple with, and not just in transport. How do we get people to vote for the things that need to be done? And how do we get politicians with the balls to do them?