Opinion

What would the Victorians think of HS2?

Should we worry when project promoters call on the dead for support?

I don’t know much about HS2, but when senior people from the Prime Minister down invoke the spirits of Brunel and the Victorians to convince people to back the project, there has to be something awry with their business case.  And when the eminent economist Dieter Helm suggested in the pages of the Financial Times that the Victorians were a model for visionary investment in infrastructure, I knew we were losing the plot.

The Victorians had many outstanding qualities but a visionary appreciation of the nation’s infrastructure needs was not one of them.  The Victorians were entrepreneurs with the courage to invest in new infrastructure based on emerging technologies in the expectation of rich rewards.  They were pragmatists who fixed the problems that arose with their technologies with the same consummate ease that they bought off or faced down people that objected to their proposals and threatened the progress of their enabling legislation through Parliament.  And they were businessmen always on the lookout for opportunities to reduce their costs or increase their revenues.

The Victorians’ finest achievement is our national railway infrastructure.  Much of the network we use today was built in the 1840s in a period of speculative investment known as Railway Mania.  Dozens of small companies obtained consents from Parliament to build local railways and then financed the projects by selling shares to private investors.  Some companies were successful but most struggled to cover their costs.  And when in 1846 the bubble burst, thousands of investors lost everything leaving behind them a patchwork of different railways each with their own fares and often with separate stations in the same town.

The demise of many small companies was an opportunity for the Big Four private railway operators to buy their assets at a fraction of what it had cost to build them.  They rationalised the network, reduced operating costs and introduced simple fare structures.  But even these four companies struggled to develop their networks into viable operations and in 1948 the Government nationalised them to form British Rail.  Dr Richard Beeching made the final adjustments to the network in the 1960s.  It is a familiar pattern of infrastructure development in the UK that was followed by London Underground towards the end of the 19th century and more recently in the development of our fibre-optic data networks.

So what would the Victorians make of our proposals for HS2?  They would be horrified by the cost of the project and in particular by the money presently being spent on consultants and advisors.  Victorian engineers took responsibility for their own decisions.  They would also be more focused on revenues, looking for ways of completing sections of the railway and bringing them into operation early to generate revenues that could be used to finance the later stages of construction.  And with the hybrid bill about to begin its journey through Parliament they would be out there offering deals to the objectors and attractive developments to the communities along the route.

Maybe we can learn something from the Victorians.

Simon Murray is a member of Acumen7 and former chairman of contractor Osborne