Comment: Poor planning and lack of clarity damages rail projects

It’s easy to think that Britain alone is bad at delivering major projects such as High Speed 2. But that’s not true.

Look no further than Berlin’s building of Brandenburg Airport, France’s Flamanville nuclear power station, or New York’s efforts to build a mass transit link between Grand Central Terminal and the Long Island Rail Road.

Nevertheless, the National Infrastructure Commission suggests that there are plenty of UK projects that could be done better. It puts forward four reasons why projects go over budget or bust their schedules. The first is a lack of clear, strategic direction.

HS2 is a case in point. Conceived to directly boost transport capacity between London and northern England, with improvements flowing on to Scotland and North Wales, today it is just a line between West London and Birmingham.

It’s been slowly hacked back, amid fears of escalating costs, by politicians who have also increased those costs by adding expensive structures such as tunnels to appease opponents.

Setting strategic direction helps projects develop their own objectives, knowing how they fit into the wider picture. This gives them a better chance of prompt and efficient delivery than projects where the objectives change.

While HS2 has seen cuts to its scope, the project to upgrade the railway between Manchester, Huddersfield and Leeds has gone the other way. This provides the NIC with another reason why projects go wrong - the challenge of managing sponsors and clients.

It argues that sponsors (usually government departments such as the Department for Transport) should concentrate on making sure a project delivers its strategic aim, having set that aim and the budget.

This leaves clients (in this case Network Rail) responsible for delivery. But too often sponsors want to check the detail of what their clients are doing, which shows a lack of trust.

As it stands today, the Transpennine Route Upgrade provides the prospect of a better railway, which I welcome. But it would have been better still had this been laid out from the start. Instead, we’ve seen the TRU started, halted and then reshaped.

According to the NIC, the project commenced in 2011 as one to convert diesel services to electric, at a cost of £415 million in today’s money. In 2015, the government halted work and added upgrades to the overall scheme, which increased costs to £3.7 billion (again in today’s money).

Over 2018-21, reports the NIC, there were no changes to the project’s objectives. But its scope changed, as ministers changed their priorities and budget constraints came to the fore. Then ministers added enabling works for Northern Powerhouse Rail, but even without these the project can now be expected to cost up to £6.5bn.

Had the project been thoroughly developed back in 2011, with its scope and budget bottomed out, we might now be seeing electric trains running over the Pennines on a route with greater overall capacity.

Along the way, principal train operator TransPennine Express would have swapped its noisy Class 68 diesel locomotives for electrics hauling its new Mk 5 stock. Instead, it withdrew its ‘68s’ and Mk 5s last year, and is now looking for new stock to alleviate crowding. Talk about a waste of time, money and effort.

All because we’re so poor at planning.

Yet the NIC readily acknowledges the pressures on sponsors to become involved in detail. It says: “High profile failings…damage public trust and increase the pressure on sponsors to become involved in projects, further weakening the client’s incentive and ability to perform well.”

In one case, it was the client - Crossrail Ltd - that was failing by not realising the problems that were brewing under it, as contractors struggled to build the new line and integrate it with NR’s existing railway.

Britain also takes far too long to grant permission to build infrastructure. Reopening the railway to Portishead, west of Bristol, is a case in point.

It’s 15 years since Network Rail and the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC, now rebranded to the Rail Delivery Group) included Portishead’s 3.4-miles as a possible addition to the national network.

November marks the second anniversary of the project receiving legal consent, in the form of a Development Consent Order (DCO) granted by the Transport Secretary. And it took three years to achieve that from first submitting the application. So that’s five years without any physical re-building work.

Nor is the DCO on its own enough to return passenger services to the branch line. Developers also needed permission from local councils to build stations at Pill and Portishead. As local councils have been pushing for the line for many years, this was not an obstacle, but it’s more time and money with permission only coming in the last two months.

And now all capital spending projects are once again under review, with no certainty of funding.

The NIC notes that government conducted five spending reviews in the eight years between 2013 and 2021, with all but one examining capital projects from first principles to decide whether to continue or start funding them.

That’s no way to instill confidence in any construction sector.

Consents loom large in NIC’s thinking. It notes that government introduced the DCO process to simplify planning, but it now finds that some promoters find the system so complicated that they put the bare minimum through a DCO and trust the rest to local planning authorities.

That’s a risky strategy, because local councillors can decide to insist on expensive alterations to plans knowing that they’re not on the hook for subsequent bills.

According to the NIC, even HS2, which has parliamentary approval, needs 8,000 further consents from bodies such as local planning authorities, transport authorities, the Environment Agency and Natural England,

Overall, the NIC paints a picture of Britain’s transport planning becoming strangled by itself. Ever more analysis and reports feed into extended decision cycles which, when they finally approve or reject a project, find themselves subject to legal review.

Then changes cost more money - especially once construction starts, which prompts governments to impose annual spending limits that make delivery longer and increase overall costs.

Cutting through these challenges demands determination and (from ministers), rigour and focus.