No one regrets a railway once it’s built

[John Ashworth]

No one regrets a railway once it’s built

The Spectator
MATTHEW PARRIS 14 JANUARY 2012

Infrastructure. Still reading this? Well done, because the word alone will have lost half my readers at first sight.

Infrastructure is a big idea dogged by a dreadful modern name. If Thomas Telford, John Rennie, Joseph Paxton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Joseph Bazalgette had been informed as little boys that they were to dedicate their lives’ work to something called infrastructure, they’d probably have become tinkers or tailors instead. No, in their minds it was the great glories of 18th- and 19th-century Britain that they were to build and have the honour of being forever associated with their names: roads, canals, bridges, fountains, gardens, towns, tunnels and railways. Ferdinand de Lesseps thought of himself as the genius behind the Suez canal, not a key contributor to North African infrastructure.

Infrastructure is our family silver as a nation. It is our inheritance and our legacy. It helps define our greatness and our greatest days. It is the very furniture of a dynamic political economy. So I’m delighted it’s back in the news, back in fashion and back on the agenda of forward-looking politicians. We are talking here of what we will leave the next generation to make their lives and livelihoods richer, their tasks easier, their journeys faster, their trade and industry stronger. At relatively modest cost and nuisance to ourselves we can bequeath the young better cities and a better country to live and work and make their way in. Infrastructure is investment, in the best, most old-fashioned sense of the word.

More people need to say this: to raise their heads from the costings and balance sheets, the revenue projections and contractors’ timetables, the endless public inquiries, and remind citizens of the bigger picture. Very little that modern man invests to build for future use and future ease is ever, in the end, regretted. Even the once-madcap project to bridge the Humber is worth having now.

Someone should do a serious cost-benefit analysis of cost-benefit analysis, as applied to major infrastructure projects over the last two centuries. As an MP I sat on the Commons Transport Select Committee’s Inquiry into proposals for a fixed Channel link with continental Europe. We examined a range of ideas: tunnels, bridges, bridge-tunnel combinations: rail only, road only and rail-road combinations. Each project, including essentially the scheme that became today’s Channel Tunnel, came with detailed projections as to cost, duration, likely usage and return on capital. We spent hours — days — weeks — poring over these, challenging figures, querying predictions, asking for more.

Of what interest are those attempts at financial prophecy now? Why even bother to dust off the papers and study our solemn attempts at fortune-telling? Many of the key assumptions about traffic, revenue, market fare-pricing and borrowing costs will have turned out to be wildly wrong. We interviewed ferry operators, railwaymen, the freight haulage industry, accountants and engineers; and all proposed conflicting numbers. But what I was always convinced about was that whatever scheme was adopted, and whatever the difficulties and costs of its construction, and even if the original backers went bankrupt in the process, nobody looking back would ever regret the building of a fixed link over the English Channel, or wish it were not there.

I have no shadow of doubt that the same will prove true of any high-speed rail links we build between England’s major cities. HS2 will be finally indispensable. It will alter the dynamics of business and leisure travel and alter the local economies of every place it serves in ways so multivectored and so erratic in their impacts on each other that it’s impossible to extrapolate the whole bundle. All we can be sure of is that when you can get from London to Birmingham in half the time it takes today, an imponderably large number of people will start doing so. We’ll wonder why we took so long to agree the plan; smile at the rage of local activists who strained every sinew to block what they now take cheerful advantage of; and agree that the environmental nightmare of their imaginings was — as with so many innovations — no more than that: a bad dream.

And in the end we will have a new airport for London too. It will probably replace Heathrow and probably be sited in or on the Thames estuary. We can argue about it, study it, dispute the need for it and postpone it (the M25 was first proposed in 1905) as we’ve been doing since the 1970s. But with existing airports near capacity (Heathrow at 98 per cent), the looming loss of business to the Continent, the prospect of expanding to a 24-hour flight schedule and the sheer residential misery caused by Heathrow, how long can we overlook the obvious? The proximity to any estuary airport of an existing high-speed rail link and a projected deep-sea container terminal makes the logic compelling.

Something like Lord Foster’s or Boris Johnson’s scheme is an idea whose time is coming — and when better than during a long period of economic downturn when costs are lower, job creation a priority and reasons to be cheerful in short supply? Politically alone, the case is formidable, for much of the cost is loaded forward into the middle-distance.

Why don’t we stop foot-dragging and just do these things? Is there no longer a breed of politician prepared baldly to announce a conclusion — that a project looks desirable — and then beat out the path from here to there? If Parliament says the consultation will be foreshortened, then Parliament can legislate for that. Parliament can legislate to limit judicial review. Parliament can do anything.

Be bold. Ask yourself: if we had already moved to a new airport east of London with bespoke, fast transport links, would we now be regretting it? No! If we already had high-speed rail links to our major English cities, would we now be regretting it? No! Then it’s only about getting from here to there, starting now. Go to it, David Cameron, George Osborne.