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Bit of a problem this, no?

The trend of working from home has led to a steep fall in fare revenue, meaning bosses are under instruction from ministers to find around £2bn in savings to balance the books.

At the same time we’re to spend £120 billion on expanding capacity through HS2.

Joined up government, eh?

22 thoughts on “Bit of a problem this, no?”

  1. There was a story on Guido yesterday about how that midget twat Khan had had a raft of bus route closures overturned by the Government and was claiming the U turn as his own work.

  2. What is it with HS2? They’ve been attempts to axe it ever since it was first mooted. It’s cost has risen inexorably. It’s justification declined in parallel. But it still hangs in there defying everything. There must be some very powerful vested interests have some considerable leverage on politicians. Or is it just no particular bunch of politicians want to take the reputational hit of cancelling it, at which point the waste of money figure crystallises out & they cop the blame?

  3. Or is it just no particular bunch of politicians want to take the reputational hit of cancelling it, at which point the waste of money figure crystallises out & they cop the blame?

    That £150bn is heading towards the right pockets (ie, theirs)

  4. “There must be some very powerful vested interests ”

    Lots of big Tory donors building this and 28,000 jobs involved. It is why Johnson caved in the first place and the cost of cancelling the contracts will be extortionate. So even if the government had the balls to cancel it, the Treasury probably won’t let them.

  5. ‘Or is it just no particular bunch of politicians want to take the reputational hit of cancelling it, at which point the waste of money figure crystallises out & they cop the blame?’

    Always felt that the Yanks have much the same reasons for not dumping Iraq and Syria.

    Still, Trump had dumping Afghanistan as his election policy, so Biden could go ahead with it when he won. A very rare sensible bi-partisan foreign policy action.

  6. Wasn’t HS2 originally part of some EU master plan? Given that most of the civil servants and a lot MPs are closet remainers they have every interest I keeping it going. Be ready for when we’re back under the EU heel.

  7. A friend had a word with Rishi during this summer’s campaign. He decided to vote for Truss because Rishi refused to cancel HS2. “The contracts are all signed” was his excuse. Poor!

  8. Jimmers

    It was indeed, but I don’t think that the utter stupidity of running it from Euston rather than St Pancras was in the plan. The EU wanted a through service from Paris to Brum or Manchestet.

  9. @Ottokring – November 25, 2022 at 9:38 am

    Lots of big Tory donors building this and 28,000 jobs involved.

    Sod the tory donors, and as for the 28,000 jobs – if they made every single one of them redundant and paid £1,000,000 per head it would save a fortune! As it is, it’s probably going to end up costing north of £200billion and will never, ever, make a profit.

  10. Used to live in what’s now North Lincolnshire, but at the time was South Humberside: at the point where the Humber Bridge was built and opened.

    Spectacular engineering, at the time the world’s longest single-span suspension bridge. Unfortunately, by the time it was built, the problem it was meant to solve had largely gone away, and it was very expensive (estimated cost of £28 million, turned out to be £98 million, and delays plus high interest rates took it past £150 million… back when a million was real money) It was meant to pay for itself, instead it had to have big slabs of debt written off.

    Like so many projects, it took a very long time to go from “wouldn’t it be good if…” to HM the Queen cutting the ribbon with the Red Arrows overhead; by which point it was both five times the forecast cost, and much less important than it was meant to have been.

    But, we’re all (or all should be) aware of “sunk cost fallacy”…

  11. Policy Exchange have a good paper on HS2:
    https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/hs2-the-kindest-cut-of-all/

    Although strongly against the project, Andrew Gilligan reckons it’s too far gone to cancel the first section (to Brum). I’ve always believed this was the likely outcome – our politicos lack the testicular fortitude to cancel it, so it will be built as far as Birmingham after which it will be so obvious a financial disaster that the remaining legs will be cancelled (the leg to Leeds has already gone).

    We will be left with the world’s most expensive railway to nowhere and hardly any remaining benefits (which were thin enough on the ground to begin with). That benefits were immaterial was obvious ever since the decision was taken to start it from Euston, rather than connecting to HS1 at St Pancras.

  12. the cost of cancelling the contracts will be extortionate

    Not as extortionate as the cost of finishing it and then running it at a loss for decades.

    The current cost estimate is £100bn so the cost of cancelling can’t be more than that. If it is ever completed, the cost is bound to be more than £200bn.

  13. MC and Baron J

    I fear that Chris M is probably right.
    The penalty costs will come up in one lump, rather than the prolonged agony of the losses of completing the project.

    Accountants being accountants seeing only that year’s bottom line and penny wise pound foolishism will mean that it won’t be cancelled.

    Well we shall see. I live in hope of sense prevailing and my being proven wrong.

  14. Bloke in North Dorset

    That £150bn is heading towards the right pockets (ie, theirs)

    I heard an interesting explanation of why everyone went berserk when Martin Shkreli raised the price of Daraprim from $13:50 to $750. Apparently lots of serious people and politicians were severely pissed off because it was a private company so they couldn’t share in benefits.

    The other reason was that other drug company CEOs were also pissed off because they couldn’t do it.

    Quite a reliable source as well, the Capitalisn’t podcast.

    https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/the-woke-capitalism-game-with-vivek-ramaswamy

  15. “Unfortunately, by the time it [The Humber Bridge] was built, the problem it was meant to solve had largely gone away…”

    I thought that the problem was getting from one side of the Humber Estuary without having to drive to Goole and back. Is the Humber not there anymore then?

  16. “We will be left with the world’s most expensive railway to nowhere”. Sorry, that trophy has been retired. The world’s most expensive railway to nowhere is California’s LA-SF route, which will never be completed.

  17. I thought that the problem was getting from one side of the Humber Estuary without having to drive to Goole and back.

    The fun way pre-bridge was the British Rail paddle steamer Tattershall Castle that plied between New Holland pier and Hull. Nominally a passenger ferry, it also had limited space for cars and now does service as a pub on the Thames.

  18. “But the rise in popularity of trainspotting is causing a headache for Government beancounters trying to balance the books on the railways – while saving the least popular stations from closure.

    A Nottinghamshire railway station was yesterday named Britain’s least popular, with just 40 travellers using it in the last year.”

    You hardly need to be a member of the Church of Dr Beeching (pbuh) to think this is fucking stupid. Running a station for less than one passenger per week. Stagecoach would swiftly remove a bus stop from a route it had less than 1 passenger per day.

    This is, of course, because railways were never properly privatised. The operations were handed to companies, but what they did was micromanaged by government. So they have to stop at this stupid station because the contract says they have to, along with things like ticket prices, who they have to employ and arrangements for the royal train. So you lose any of the innovation you get from just letting a business work out how to make money.

  19. Wkpd has a summary of why the bridge was not as useful as hoped

    The journey was along straight single-carriageway roads across foggy moors interrupted by bottlenecks for most of the journey to Blyth, Nottinghamshire, where it met the A1, and the accident rate was high. Debates in Parliament were held on the low standard of the route across the wind-swept plains around Goole. It was not unexpected that under these conditions, a Humber Bridge, with connecting dual-carriageway approach roads and grade-separated junctions, would seem worthwhile. By the time the bridge opened, much of this inferior route had been transformed by dualling of the A63 and its bypasses, extending the M62 and the connecting of the M18 from Thorne to Wadworth. The obvious need for a Humber Bridge had been reduced by the late 1970s with the improvements of the motorway infrastructure in the region. Although welcome, these improvements detracted from the need for vehicles to cross a bridge from Hessle to Barton. The Humber Bridge was a victim of the success of the M62 before it opened. A hovercraft service, Minerva and Mercury, linked Hull Pier and Grimsby Docks from February to October 1969 but suffered relatively frequent breakdowns”

  20. Fix:
    “At the same time we’re to spend £120 billion on expanding capacity through EU mandated HS2

    @TW and others, Why do you never mention that HS2 is an EU requirement? You potray as Brexiters, but never acknowledge we’re still following EU laws

    Tell the truth

    Lord Frost
    Remainers are softening us up to rejoin the EU

    Their whole campaign to return the UK to the orbit of Brussels is based on a fallacy. Brexit isn´t failing
    https://archive.ph/zwnjm
    telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/24/remainers-softening-us-rejoin-eu/

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