HS2's timetable troubles

Has HS2 suddenly hit the buffers?

Some of its opponents might be suggesting that today after a report from the National Audit Office basically said Government hasn't made a very strong case for it.

But if you read the report (as I have) you'll realise that its heavily nuanced language does not say that the case cannot be made. Rather, it says it needs to be made clearer.

So the NAO is really saying that the case for HS2 is not clear...yet.

Nevertheless, its analysis of the Government's work on HS2 so far has plenty of ammo for opponents.

The cost-benefit analysis is poor because it contained errors, the business case is built partly on data which is in some cases more than 10 years out of date.

Then there's the small matter of an apparent £3bn funding gap in the first phase, and a challenging timetable for that first phase to actually get going.

Civil service insiders will tell you it's a must-do-better warning shot rather than a damning verdict. The money almost certainly can be found and ministers were already revising their case for HS2 when the NAO was drawing up its report.

Neverthless, the NAO's report reads like an analysis of a hard-pressed government department trying to push through an enormously complicated project to a tight timetable when it's short of expertise. The big risk there is that expensive mistakes are made (remember the West Coast franchise fiasco?).

What about Nottingham, which is hoping to benefit from an HS2 station at Toton in stage 2 of this £30bn project? The positive is that the NAO believes the economic benefits of the second stage should be much stronger than the first stage.

But if its warnings about the first stage timetable are proved accurate our long wait for that second stage may be longer still.

Westminster fiddles while the economy burns?

I suspect that George Cowcher, the chief executive of Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber, is probably being his normal diplomatic self when he says that Conservative party politicking about an EU referendum is “extremely unhelpful”.
While it’s true to say that businesses are unlikely to shed any tears if there was a bonfire of EU red tape tomorrow, Britain’s relationship with the Union is currently number 99 on the list of the top 10 challenges they face.
Businesses really do get riled by the time and money it takes to satisfy rules simply to get the job done (especially when the EU is meant to be a barriers-down single market), but what they crave more than anything else is stability: if we know what the rules are and they’re the same for everyone then they’ll usually grin and bear them.
The spectacle of politicians down in London spending OUR time and money jawing about an EU referendum might well strike businesses as not just indulgent but also irrelevant to where the economy is at right now.
What about business rates revaluation, what about energy and raw material costs, what about infrastructure, what about the availability of funding and the cost of new facilities, what about sorting UK government red tape?
Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber is the third biggest in the country, so the views of the businesses who comprise its membership ought to count for something.
Those views, expressed through its respected Quarterly Economic Survey, are that two-thirds of businesses want the UK to stay in the EU. What they want to change is the UK taking more control over some of the one-size-fits-all rules governing issues like employment.
The EU is not good at persuading ordinary people of its value, and has recently had a nasty habit of asking the same question a different way when people give it an answer it doesn’t like. As an institution, it has seemed both wrong-footed and lead-footed amidst the Eurozone crisis – a crisis that has had a painful impact on ordinary people in Greece and Spain.
Not being part of the eurozone has unquestionably helped the UK’s sluggish economy, allowing us to manipulate both interest rates and currency value in a way individual Eurozone countries cannot.
But businesses largely believe being a part of the wider EU at worst doesn’t make any difference, at best has its merits. If the Chamber’s survey is anything to go by, it’s the rules they quibble over, not club membership.