Radio 4’s Derailed will explore “emotionally devastating” impact of HS2 railway project

Political instability and ephemeral ministers are, no surprise, key factors in the series. As it stands today, when “High Speed 2” is completed – at a date yet to be set – it will be Britain’s second purpose-built, high-speed railway after the London link to the Channel Tunnel (aka HS1) and will run between Birmingham and London. The original idea, conceived in 2009 under Gordon Brown, was to extend HS2 to Manchester and Leeds but this has since been cancelled.

“Andrew Stephenson, the only dedicated HS2 minister who had been brought in by Boris Johnson at the Ministry of Transport in 2020, was in a factory looking at rolling stock when Boris called to inform him that he’d lost the leadership and said, ‘I’m out, you’re out, we’re all out’,” explains Lamble.

This change of prime minister brought a big change in approach. Johnson was determined the project would succeed and had said, “The Treasury must not prevail in terms of HS2,” but former chancellor Rishi Sunak took a view that the cost should not outweigh the benefit and curtailed the line accordingly.

“As with Grenfell Tower,” says Lamble, who won an Aria award for her in-depth coverage of that Inquiry, “it’s a long, involved story that hasn’t really translated in the news. In Grenfell, the news is ‘it’s the cladding’ and for HS2, ‘it’s the cost’. The complexities and what it tells us about how the country is run never get picked up.”

In pursuit of the former, she has spoken to (and was “surprised by the frankness” of) everyone from Boris Johnson and the man who designed the new high-speed line to industry whistleblowers and people who lost their homes to make way for it.

Jonathan Loescher took Lamble to see the garden he tended near where his house used to stand in Staffordshire before it was demolished. Work has since been halted on that section of the line.

HS2 was originally designed to resolve capacity around London, but there were problems from the beginning. “A former CEO told me the initial cost estimates were done when they knew three to four per cent of the details,” reveals Lamble.

“Former transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin told us about the parliamentary bill [to approve HS2] and that he understood it would give them planning permission. That was a mistake. What it gave them was deemed planning permission, which is slightly different, and means local councils and other agencies are given control over the detailed design of what happens.”

In other words, local considerations had to be addressed by central government. “They had to get 8,000 additional permissions as major as increasing the number of tunnels and as trivial as moving a water fountain.” Budgets and deadlines have proved impossible to manage; HS2 has become shorthand for our inability to think big and deliver infrastructure.

Lamble disagrees. “Yes, I was surprised the transport secretary didn’t know which kind of planning permission he was getting, but it also speaks to a bigger question about what kind of Britain we want to live in? We live on a small, densely populated, property-owning democratic island and there are consequences.

"We can’t cut through empty fields or override public opposition in the way that a centralised power like China chooses to, but we have done big builds like HS1 and some new nuclear sites. Those who still support HS2 suggest that when it opens it will be a success and people will forget about the overspend and delay.”

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Derailed: the Story of HS2 begins at 8pm on Saturday 19th July on BBC Radio 4.

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