Well you see we have to contract out to every cabinet pricks mates consultancy firm and pay them fuckloads to ask daves mate in the rspb, who also gets a fat fee, if it would disturb the migratory patterns of the local pigeons and so on
\^\^\^*\^ This. Iv been saying it for years. The whole public sector has so many sub-contractors that by the time everyone gets their fill you end up at 110 billion.
NHS same
Police Same
Fire Same
RNLI charity same
I mention the above as Iv worked in all of them.
Even some sub -contractors further sub stuff out.
We had a threshold bar for a Lino floor in staff canteen lift up. Guy from the other side of Wales from a company that had the contract drive 3 hours there to replace it, obviously drive back too.
My Dad used to be a school caretaker, the big lightbulbs in the hall used to be changed by a company that had to travel from Wolverhampton to South Wales.
Yep. This is the rot but it's rarely addressed. The public sector takes a massive kicking for this sort of thing, but it's not actually public sector workers, it's politicians and high ups who love contracting out (mostly a union busting thing I think, as most of these private companies aren't unionised). But long term it costs more, and causes more issues as the staff cycles through and knowledge of the assets is lost.
Funny thing is you can actually thank labour for it. Perversely the tories rightfully get blamed for everything but the current problem began under labour and Tony Blair. Building schools for future is a perfect example. It kick started this into top gear.
PFI and BSF were absolutely dreadful systems— PFI was introduced by Brown as Chancellor as a means of kicking repayments for hospitals and schools onto the next governments, which is one of the reasons why BSF was cancelled by the Coalition. However, I don’t think it’s right to suggest Blair began the contracting out process: Thatcher was into that in the 1980s.
Someone wrote earlier about how HS2 had cost £1mn / metre.
“What rot!” I thought.
I then looked it up.
£103 bn. 230km.
£570 000 / metre.
It’s insane. I support HS2 and firmly believe it should connect London with Glasgow and Edinburgh. But I cannot believe it needs to cost anything like that much.
For comparison, France’s LGV-Est cost €4 bn for 406 km, or €9 852 / metre.
Completely flat? I don’t know which bit of France you’re thinking of (probably around the Nord department) but the LGV-Est does not go through completely flat country.
There was a great interview with the head of HS1, asking how he managed to get it completed under budget. He replied, “I never told anyone what my budget was, so no one put in ludicrous bids for infinite public money.”
Now a days it the opposite. They purposely do low bids to get signed contracts and then later say oh we need more money as this issue came up. Just scammers.
This is something I've never understood about the process. So they put in a bid and then say "Oh the cost of steel went up by 30% so now we're gonna need to charge 30% extra."
Ok? If the cost of steel went down 30% would you refund the government 30% of the bid? I always think it's crazy that we contract this all out and apparently they can just "choose" to charge higher than what they were originally supposed to build for. If in any job I said "I can do this for 500 quid and then said, oh actually it's gonna cost 4000 as soon as I had the job" I'd probably be in a courtroom pretty quick.
I have always said if they wanted to make HS2 effective, they should have started at the north end and built it towards London. That way, even if they run out of money before completing it, it will benefit the people they claim it's meant to benefit.
That's mental. On the other hand other countries have problems too. Japan's new maglev shinkansen was originally supposed to open next year, but is pushed back to 2035ish. That also is projected to cost around 50 billion quid.
It wasn't all planned ahead of construction - which is one of the big issues the various reviews have highlighted.
There seems to be an insistence among the general public that people get on with digging and construction as soon as possible, and that any money or time spent before spades hit dirt is wasted, so with HS2 you had construction beginning on some parts before plans were finished for other parts.
Which, of course, leads to increased costs when - for example, the Government changes the route, so land bought and cleared ends up having to be sold back.
As someone from an EU country which coincidentally has one of the best HS networks in the world, one of the things that struck me the most when I first moved here was the amount of public services that are operated by private companies here. Things like council-paid rubbish collection, council-funded care homes, almost all local buses, the DLR and Crossrail, health assessments for benefits claimants, all immigrant prisons and 1/5 of regular prisons, most temporary accommodation for refugees... the list is endless and there's seemingly no benefit to this system. Services are incredibly expensive and not more efficient than when run by government staff.
It all goes back to Thatcher. They brought in compulsory outsourcing laws. Some have been repealed but a decent amount are still in place. That means, if the work that needs doing goes over a certain cost, the public sector body is forced to contract out. It's ludicrous.
I help run a business that has a relatively small local government contract in an NHS related industry.
The amount of fraud / overcharging / subcontracting to other contractors we could be doing without any approval, investigation or awareness from the commissioners and council representatives is very scary and makes me wonder the scale on which people are getting away with it across the country.
So. If we believe the political diktat, everyone that works for the NHS is a union comrade and therefore labour. Are you seriously suggesting the righteous left might be champagne socialists?
Everyone should read The Big Con by Mazucato and Collington. You learn all about this process. It's focused more on management consultants and the civil service, but it applies to this stuff too.
The 'state' doesn't have any capacity to do this stuff anymore, it's all subcontracted with each person padding the contract all the way down. Since the projects (not HS2 specifically) are in the public interest, BUT, the government has no capacity to do it in house, plus some dodgy competitive tendering laws, they're forced to contract it all out.
Even in agencies nominally government run, there are often tonnes of consultants seconded to them. The actual capacity of full time government employees is now tiny compared to what it used to be in the heyday of the welfare state.
1) We need a new train line from London to Birmingham to move over passenger trains to free up train paths for freight. It's part of our commitments to decarbonisation plus the West Coast Main Line (WCML) is already at capacity along various stretches.
2) That said, nobody said it had to be ultra high speed - various governments took an envious look at the Chinese with their 250mph trains and decided that anything they can do we can do too; we'll make ours 225mph which is better than anything else in Europe.
3) The problem is that the faster the trains go, the more advanced the engineering has to be because you have to keep it as flat as possible and as straight as possible. This meant more land had to be compulsorily purchased at vastly over the market rate - something the Chinese government don't have to worry about.
4) The initial estimate of £33bn back in 2011 was hopelessly optimistic. It didn't have any buffer built in and it wasn't long before engineering surveys discovered the thing would be much harder to build than first thought.
5) Also not considered were noise reduction requirements for the affluent and influential residents in the Chilterns so the government had to then sign off on miles of very expensive tunnels to sustain the high speed straight track requirements without pissing off the likes of the Rothschild family.
6) The contracts to suppliers were a license to the suppliers to print money. Most were cost plus; figure out what it'll cost to do and we'll pay it plus x%. That left little incentive for construction suppliers to keep a lid on costs because the tax payer would take the hit regardless.
7) Unexpected global macro economic effects (supply chain crises during the pandemic, Ukraine war, massive inflation) have all massively driven up construction costs.
If they had designed it at 180 or even 200mph it would have been easier to design and build. That is what is happening now; the (relatively) new CEO of HS2 limited has a brief to descale the thing and claw back costs wherever possible. Reducing the speed from 225 to 200 will save a couple of billion.
Unfortunately we are at a point with the sunk costs where cancelling the entire thing will cost about as much as finishing the build, so build it we will. For example a lot of land required to send it to Crewe and Leeds (the original plan) has already been bought though it'll never be used.
Source on the Chinese government not having to compensate people. This is said all the time but I suspect it's something that is assumed and not evidenced. I don't have specific knowledge of this, but I have some dealings with China and from what I've heard people are compensated at market rate. Granted, I don't think they let people rip them off like we do here.
I live in China and as far as I know this is mostly true. Infact a lot of people in China pray for 拆迁, as plenty of people have become pretty comfortable off it. The government well basically pay you the land rate for your property AND basically give you a free apartment somewhere else in the city.
has a brief to descale the thing and claw back costs wherever possible.
Scope change always causes more costs. I can't believe I had to scroll this far to see it mentioned.
The last government reduced the scope of the project in its dying day, this might have reduced the cost overall, but a lot of the costs were already incurred so the cost per mile was driven up. And if they decide to undo that then they need to spend even more money to change course again.
Was about to come in swinging saying how lame it would be to not target 225mph. Then I looked it up, and none of Japan’s current Shinkansen lines top out beyond 200mph. What were the HS2 designers thinking??
It always makes me laugh when I hear about big IT project tendering, a small startup can produce the same thing and 1/10th the cost in 1/10th of the time. Worried about security and privacy? You've still got 90% of the budget left to fix it.
Well that's unfortunate, because that 90% of the budget won't cover the 99% of the work the startup hasn't done. Security and privacy isn't an afterthought, so you'll just end up scrapping the garbage and starting again to do it properly.
I have worked with startups, they're hilariously inefficient and badly run because speed to market is more important than both efficiency and doing a good job. They're probably the worst setup to deliver a large scale government IT project.
The government digital service was a rare example of them doing it in-house (well, they still hired some contractors, but a lot of the staff were direct employees).
It's a world-class thing they've built. Other governments use our stuff to build their websites. And the institutional knowledge is retained and the budget didn't go doolally.
For the A122 Lower Thames Crossing the documentation needed was over 2,300 documents totalling over 350,000 pages. That is a fraction of the size and complexity of HS2. We have a planning system that requires billions to be spent on consultants conducting studies and filing out paperwork. The planning system is the cause, consultants are just the effect.
Strictly speaking you don't need the consultants. Many of these people could be employed in house, but I suspect there's some financial trickery going on which says that it looks like it costs more to employ them permanently than to outsource. But I have no doubt that the outsourcing costs far more overall when you account for the ridiculous premiums consultancies charge. Not to mention the huge amount of knowledge that is lost once their people move on. It's an example of the individual instances seeming cheaper, but at an institutional level it's not worth it.
The wider construction industry (and I'm using this term very loosely) is chock full of people sitting in offices writing reports and pontificating about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the core purpose of infrastructure projects.
Building a tunnel for bats has nothing to do with moving people around the country quickly - yet HS2 still spent £100m on this nonsense and proudly announced this on their website. Absolute insanity.
Too much money is wasted on writing thousands and thousands of pages about things that do not improve people's quality of life in any tangible way.
This is why getting anything built in Britain is expensive as millions are wasted on this type of unproductive nonsense.
I’ve worked on many big projects in industry and some of it stems back to the fact that most people on these projects are self employed. There’s actually no incentive to finish it as all you are doing is making yourself unemployed. They’re earning good money and want it to go on forever but that not how construction works. You finish a project and move on to another.
I’ve seen this scenario in the oil and gas industry many times, testing things ‘to death’ just because 🤷🏼♂️, massively over engineering things in the name of health and safety ( not always a bad thing but it is when it’s for the sake of it), and sometimes just making life awkward in getting things done.
I’ve worked on a few. I was working on one project that had some surplus consultancy staff sucking a few millions out of the budget but generally it was really well approached, people knew the ins and outs and it was generally very robust. That one got canned because the public sector authority changed their mind about what they wanted and how much budget they had. What’s annoying is that it was actually a very good project with great benefits and would have had great public support.. meh.
And now I am working on a billion pounds construction project and the decision makers are clueless. They’ve rose up the ranks on non construction related work and now when it comes to construction they don’t understand the market or the risks. Half the staff aren’t trained on construction contracts and trying to explain how contractors will price in risk and other factors.. pointless trying.
The consultancies generally know how to deliver construction projects but public sector knowledge is shit. If you read on here everyone slags them (consultancies) off as leeches on the public purse.
They are. The reason consultancies have better people is because we've had decades of austerity and compulsory outsourcing which heavily favours the private sector. Stuff like compulsory competitive tender is totally criminal and cripples the ability of the public sector to learn and retain talent. If your are always forced to outsource to consultants you will never build up the knowledge yourself.
Wages are another factor. All the best people leave because public sector salaries are kept artificially low through things like austerity. Lots of people come into the public sector to learn the ropes like in the NHS for example, but once they're trained up they jump ship for private because the salaries are significantly better. That's not a natural occurrence. There are countries where civil servants are paid competitive wages and as a result they retain a lot of talent. You don't need public sector wages to be higher, just not as dogshit low as they are now. Many are far lower than they've been in decades (adjusted for inflation).
This is a political issue with multiple governments who do not believe in the public sector's ability to actually be productive or efficient. It's ultimately a self fulfilling prophecy. All the public sector failures you're thinking of are a result of this mindset, not its cause.
NIMBYs, cronyism for contracts, money gets syphoned (probably) lack of actual planning (foresight, not the pen on paper design type of planning) plus probably lots more
Nimbyism was massive here, the rural constituencies basically sabotaged it, they insisted they couldn't see a train so loads of HS2 ended up being built in tunnels which made the cost go sky high, I don't remember the exact stat or which proposed version on HS2 it was referring to (it's been cut down many times now) but at one point over half of the journey would have no view at all, totally miserable and unnecessary
Yeah over half of HS2 is gonna be underground when it finishes. Some are necessary (like the Euston or Northolt tunnel to get into London), but some are completely unnecessary.
Take the small town of Wendover in Buckinghamshire. The town is smallish. It has a hard cutoff on the west, because of a rail line (with Wendover station). There is also an A road to the west of that rail line. Both of these are covered with a bunch of trees to block the sight.
HS2 was supposed to go along the west of the A road. But the people of Wendover complained a lot, and forced HS2 to create a green tunnel (the Wendover Green Tunnel) that’ll span the length of Wendover town so they won’t see it, even tho they were barely ever gonna see it to begin with.
Just cas a group of residents in the town of Wendover wanted to make HS2 a lot more invisible to them even tho they were really never gonna see much of it to begin with, the taxpayer was forced to pay to build a whole new green tunnel.
It just angers me a ton. I think there should be some sort of NIMBY tax, where it’ll mean the NIMBYs will need directly pay HS2 to fund more of the tunnels or stuff they insist on.
Backhanders innit? That and years and years of quangos, planning meetings and anything else to delay things once started,so the contractors get paid more who are, of course, mates of those in charge
The channel tunnel took 8 years (6 for construction). It's not quite as far, sure, but a few tunnels and bridges through middle England, compared to a tunnel under the bloody sea that had never been done before, shouldn't take this long!
Entrenched NIMBYism, overbloated bureaucracy, limited political incentive for governments to invest in long term projects and push back from certain subsects of the population.
Too much is subcontracted to private companies, and there's too much corruption involved in the selection of those companies. It's even worse with digital infrastructure projects, like Universal Credit and the computerization of NHS records.
In the time the UK has been trying to build 130 miles of infrastructure, China and Japan have built and are using 000's of miles.
It's a totally different mindset.
China and Japan have governments who basically announce they are going to do something, and it then happens. Destroy a site of special scientific interest? No problem. Turf people out of their houses? Go for it.
In the UK we have a lot of environmental and planning regulations (which I think is a good thing) and also our towns and villages are much closer together, and that means finding a path that works on a Civil Engineering level, and which also won't destroy historic properties / ride roughshod over people's rights to live their lives in their own home is far more difficult.
China is a much vaster country, but an absolutely huge chunk of it is basically uninhabited and the big infrastructure projects out that way are comparatively fewer and more expensive. Most of the infrastructure projects are done in the extraordinarily highly-populated east coast, south-eastern and north-eastern regions (which contain some of the largest and densest cities and megacities on Earth). Japan is somewhat bigger than the UK but it has far less habitable space (because two-thirds of it are mountainous) and almost twice as many people.
I think the original question stands as to how China and Japan get those projects done through areas often far more densely populated than anything comparable in the UK. The answer is the Chinese government has zero accountability on a national level (local is a different matter) so any big infrastructure they say they want happens, happens. How Japan, a democracy with possibly an even greater love of bureaucracy than us, does it is a much more interesting question.
Shit leadership who don't have the backbone to see things through.
Voters behaving like children and demanding no development should ever take place if anyone (not just people - also bats, newts, badgers, bees or some kind of abstract aesthetic or heritage nonsense) could suffer in some way, or some kind of trade offs need to be made to make things happen.
Too many members of the leadership are just too spineless to face down this type of stupid demands.
Same type of dynamics happening with the inability to build adequate housing, or to keep welfare spending in check.
When you’re an authoritarian government with very lax health and safety standards and little concern for human rights or environmental concerns, you can get things done pretty quick.
Poor governance, lack of professionals, corruption and lack of ... well, frankly, impunity. Look how Tories nicked 2 BILLION from Woking by running the council. That's with a B. Zero repercussions.
Contracts have probably been sub contracted to some MP’s brother in laws sister and some peers nephews dog over and over again. It’s a massive grift that some people have been getting rich off.
Same people who are annoyed by the waste and problems with Hs2 are those who make it harder also to build timings like housing. NIMBYs and stake holders who get paid more and more by delays.
I have no clue. But seems like in the UK too many want to do the bare minimum at work and say "it's not my job, it's someone else's" or "I don't know about this, even though it's meant to be my area of expertise and our team has probably been asked about it before so should have the answer on tap". Not much self-emphasis on being the best you can be or being meticulous. Go to a council office, and hear "I've not done any work all day" at 2pm - in a department where there are gaps in knowledge, so free time ought to be used to plug those gaps, proactively try to solve problems. Why have I as a new employee, the lowest-paid, gone into a couple of public sector teams and within a couple months got managers saying to copy me, or fixed problems that were supposedly just "how it is" but were actually very fixable with a little less laziness? Ridiculous. I have no idea if China and Japan have that mindset.
China probably suffers less from short-termism, while we have free elections frequently, so it becomes about short-term gains at the expense of long-term. For existing railways Japan gives longer contracts to private companies and both control of the track and the train, whereas the UK train contracts are much shorter - so many there's something like that going on with HS2? I don't know if those countries have the managerialism of the UK, where each manager wants their team to look good, even if it ends up harming the overall picture.
I lived in a building having cladding works done. Awful. The British company messed it up too, which added an extra 6 months because part needed redoing. The ones who fixed it spoke Polish. Coincidence?
I think the tabloid press have a lot to answer for here.
When some freak incident happens they get the public riled up to such an extent that the government has no choice but to pass new regulation to ostensibly prevent it happening again; no matter how likely or unlikely a reoccurrence is.
Every regulation has a cost associated with it that no one seems to recognise but ultimately has to be paid by the taxpayer. All of a sudden you are then spending £125m on a bat tunnel and spending 20 years building a relatively short railway.
Projects like HS2 have a lot of trouble from inside government, especially with the conservatives who pretty clearly don't care about rail transit, actively creating problems like selling off the land that would have been used to extend the line.
In general, severely restrictive planning regulations (see cross rail, Hinkley C etc.) HS2 also had the added problem of massive levels of incompetence to compound the problem.
Too much red tape, too much paperwork, too many consultations needed, NIMBYism (they have too much power) and a general culture of what I've coined YISEBYs (Yes, in somebody else's back yard) who want all the benefits but with none of the drawbacks. All this wastes time and therefore money
Governments and councils only look as far ahead as the next election cycle. Nobody wants to do something unsexy that’ll take decades. It’s very annoyed.
When replying to submission/post please make genuine efforts to answer the question given. Please no jokes, judgements, etc. If a post is marked 'Serious Answers Only' you may receive a ban for violating this rule.
Don't be a dick to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
This is a strictly no-politics subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
SkarKrow@reddit
Well you see we have to contract out to every cabinet pricks mates consultancy firm and pay them fuckloads to ask daves mate in the rspb, who also gets a fat fee, if it would disturb the migratory patterns of the local pigeons and so on
FinanceBloke99@reddit
Everything is subcontracted to death. That's where all the money goes.
Pembs-surfer@reddit
\^\^\^*\^ This. Iv been saying it for years. The whole public sector has so many sub-contractors that by the time everyone gets their fill you end up at 110 billion.
NHS same
Police Same
Fire Same
RNLI charity same
I mention the above as Iv worked in all of them.
Even some sub -contractors further sub stuff out.
We had a threshold bar for a Lino floor in staff canteen lift up. Guy from the other side of Wales from a company that had the contract drive 3 hours there to replace it, obviously drive back too.
surreyade@reddit
My Dad used to be a school caretaker, the big lightbulbs in the hall used to be changed by a company that had to travel from Wolverhampton to South Wales.
XihuanNi-6784@reddit
Yep. This is the rot but it's rarely addressed. The public sector takes a massive kicking for this sort of thing, but it's not actually public sector workers, it's politicians and high ups who love contracting out (mostly a union busting thing I think, as most of these private companies aren't unionised). But long term it costs more, and causes more issues as the staff cycles through and knowledge of the assets is lost.
Slight-Blackberry813@reddit
Funny thing is you can actually thank labour for it. Perversely the tories rightfully get blamed for everything but the current problem began under labour and Tony Blair. Building schools for future is a perfect example. It kick started this into top gear.
RealLongwayround@reddit
PFI and BSF were absolutely dreadful systems— PFI was introduced by Brown as Chancellor as a means of kicking repayments for hospitals and schools onto the next governments, which is one of the reasons why BSF was cancelled by the Coalition. However, I don’t think it’s right to suggest Blair began the contracting out process: Thatcher was into that in the 1980s.
No_Albatross_5104@reddit
RNLI taking stray bullets here...
I used to work at the RNLI and I strongly dispute this.
We build and repair our own lifeboats, we trained our own crews and lifeguards, heck we built a sea survival centre all for ourselves.
We have our own teams doing marketing, Web developers, buying, data management, volunteer management, philanthropy...
The only significant part that I know we completely contracted out was the staff that ran the hotel.
I'm sure we paid builders to build our lifeboat stations, and we paid printing companies to print our large signage - but like obviously...
James2712@reddit
also it's a charity not part of the public sector lol, they explicitly don't take government money
RealLongwayround@reddit
Someone wrote earlier about how HS2 had cost £1mn / metre.
“What rot!” I thought.
I then looked it up.
£103 bn. 230km.
£570 000 / metre.
It’s insane. I support HS2 and firmly believe it should connect London with Glasgow and Edinburgh. But I cannot believe it needs to cost anything like that much.
For comparison, France’s LGV-Est cost €4 bn for 406 km, or €9 852 / metre.
No_Albatross_5104@reddit
To be fair, if anyone kf you have driven across France you'll know so much of it is completely flat and very empty farmland.
It's a very different prospect building a trainline there than it is a much denser country.
RealLongwayround@reddit
Completely flat? I don’t know which bit of France you’re thinking of (probably around the Nord department) but the LGV-Est does not go through completely flat country.
Casual_Precision@reddit
There was a great interview with the head of HS1, asking how he managed to get it completed under budget. He replied, “I never told anyone what my budget was, so no one put in ludicrous bids for infinite public money.”
Early_Enthusiasm_787@reddit
Now a days it the opposite. They purposely do low bids to get signed contracts and then later say oh we need more money as this issue came up. Just scammers.
New-Photograph-1829@reddit
This is something I've never understood about the process. So they put in a bid and then say "Oh the cost of steel went up by 30% so now we're gonna need to charge 30% extra."
Ok? If the cost of steel went down 30% would you refund the government 30% of the bid? I always think it's crazy that we contract this all out and apparently they can just "choose" to charge higher than what they were originally supposed to build for. If in any job I said "I can do this for 500 quid and then said, oh actually it's gonna cost 4000 as soon as I had the job" I'd probably be in a courtroom pretty quick.
Shaguar_Driver@reddit
Isn't the whole point in bidding you are supposed to put in low bids to win the contract?
PassiveTheme@reddit
I have always said if they wanted to make HS2 effective, they should have started at the north end and built it towards London. That way, even if they run out of money before completing it, it will benefit the people they claim it's meant to benefit.
blob8543@reddit
Our HS rails should be made out of gold with those prices.
chunkyasparagus@reddit
That's mental. On the other hand other countries have problems too. Japan's new maglev shinkansen was originally supposed to open next year, but is pushed back to 2035ish. That also is projected to cost around 50 billion quid.
But then again, it's a maglev.
fixed_grin@reddit
It's also much longer (178mi / 286km) and is 90% deep tunnels under the mountains.
chunkyasparagus@reddit
If there is one thing Japan does a lot of, it's building tunnels.
MountainMuffin1980@reddit
But...why? Was it just not all planned and cleared ahead of construction? It's mad if that's the case
DukePPUk@reddit
It wasn't all planned ahead of construction - which is one of the big issues the various reviews have highlighted.
There seems to be an insistence among the general public that people get on with digging and construction as soon as possible, and that any money or time spent before spades hit dirt is wasted, so with HS2 you had construction beginning on some parts before plans were finished for other parts.
Which, of course, leads to increased costs when - for example, the Government changes the route, so land bought and cleared ends up having to be sold back.
Confudled_Contractor@reddit
Clearing is construction.
MountainMuffin1980@reddit
Sorry, I meant getting it cleared for work to go ahead
blob8543@reddit
As someone from an EU country which coincidentally has one of the best HS networks in the world, one of the things that struck me the most when I first moved here was the amount of public services that are operated by private companies here. Things like council-paid rubbish collection, council-funded care homes, almost all local buses, the DLR and Crossrail, health assessments for benefits claimants, all immigrant prisons and 1/5 of regular prisons, most temporary accommodation for refugees... the list is endless and there's seemingly no benefit to this system. Services are incredibly expensive and not more efficient than when run by government staff.
XihuanNi-6784@reddit
It all goes back to Thatcher. They brought in compulsory outsourcing laws. Some have been repealed but a decent amount are still in place. That means, if the work that needs doing goes over a certain cost, the public sector body is forced to contract out. It's ludicrous.
Slight-Blackberry813@reddit
Bollocks. It started under Blair. Building schools for future kicked it off. Get your head out of your arse.
BamzookiEnjoyer@reddit
I help run a business that has a relatively small local government contract in an NHS related industry.
The amount of fraud / overcharging / subcontracting to other contractors we could be doing without any approval, investigation or awareness from the commissioners and council representatives is very scary and makes me wonder the scale on which people are getting away with it across the country.
Slight-Blackberry813@reddit
So. If we believe the political diktat, everyone that works for the NHS is a union comrade and therefore labour. Are you seriously suggesting the righteous left might be champagne socialists?
XihuanNi-6784@reddit
Everyone should read The Big Con by Mazucato and Collington. You learn all about this process. It's focused more on management consultants and the civil service, but it applies to this stuff too.
The 'state' doesn't have any capacity to do this stuff anymore, it's all subcontracted with each person padding the contract all the way down. Since the projects (not HS2 specifically) are in the public interest, BUT, the government has no capacity to do it in house, plus some dodgy competitive tendering laws, they're forced to contract it all out.
Even in agencies nominally government run, there are often tonnes of consultants seconded to them. The actual capacity of full time government employees is now tiny compared to what it used to be in the heyday of the welfare state.
Fwoggie2@reddit
Transport guy here.
1) We need a new train line from London to Birmingham to move over passenger trains to free up train paths for freight. It's part of our commitments to decarbonisation plus the West Coast Main Line (WCML) is already at capacity along various stretches.
2) That said, nobody said it had to be ultra high speed - various governments took an envious look at the Chinese with their 250mph trains and decided that anything they can do we can do too; we'll make ours 225mph which is better than anything else in Europe.
3) The problem is that the faster the trains go, the more advanced the engineering has to be because you have to keep it as flat as possible and as straight as possible. This meant more land had to be compulsorily purchased at vastly over the market rate - something the Chinese government don't have to worry about.
4) The initial estimate of £33bn back in 2011 was hopelessly optimistic. It didn't have any buffer built in and it wasn't long before engineering surveys discovered the thing would be much harder to build than first thought.
5) Also not considered were noise reduction requirements for the affluent and influential residents in the Chilterns so the government had to then sign off on miles of very expensive tunnels to sustain the high speed straight track requirements without pissing off the likes of the Rothschild family.
6) The contracts to suppliers were a license to the suppliers to print money. Most were cost plus; figure out what it'll cost to do and we'll pay it plus x%. That left little incentive for construction suppliers to keep a lid on costs because the tax payer would take the hit regardless.
7) Unexpected global macro economic effects (supply chain crises during the pandemic, Ukraine war, massive inflation) have all massively driven up construction costs.
If they had designed it at 180 or even 200mph it would have been easier to design and build. That is what is happening now; the (relatively) new CEO of HS2 limited has a brief to descale the thing and claw back costs wherever possible. Reducing the speed from 225 to 200 will save a couple of billion.
Unfortunately we are at a point with the sunk costs where cancelling the entire thing will cost about as much as finishing the build, so build it we will. For example a lot of land required to send it to Crewe and Leeds (the original plan) has already been bought though it'll never be used.
XihuanNi-6784@reddit
Source on the Chinese government not having to compensate people. This is said all the time but I suspect it's something that is assumed and not evidenced. I don't have specific knowledge of this, but I have some dealings with China and from what I've heard people are compensated at market rate. Granted, I don't think they let people rip them off like we do here.
New-Photograph-1829@reddit
I live in China and as far as I know this is mostly true. Infact a lot of people in China pray for 拆迁, as plenty of people have become pretty comfortable off it. The government well basically pay you the land rate for your property AND basically give you a free apartment somewhere else in the city.
gyroda@reddit
Scope change always causes more costs. I can't believe I had to scroll this far to see it mentioned.
The last government reduced the scope of the project in its dying day, this might have reduced the cost overall, but a lot of the costs were already incurred so the cost per mile was driven up. And if they decide to undo that then they need to spend even more money to change course again.
fuzzerino@reddit
Was about to come in swinging saying how lame it would be to not target 225mph. Then I looked it up, and none of Japan’s current Shinkansen lines top out beyond 200mph. What were the HS2 designers thinking??
skylark9999@reddit
Money all goes to consultants
fsuk@reddit
It always makes me laugh when I hear about big IT project tendering, a small startup can produce the same thing and 1/10th the cost in 1/10th of the time. Worried about security and privacy? You've still got 90% of the budget left to fix it.
teabiscuitsandscones@reddit
Well that's unfortunate, because that 90% of the budget won't cover the 99% of the work the startup hasn't done. Security and privacy isn't an afterthought, so you'll just end up scrapping the garbage and starting again to do it properly.
I have worked with startups, they're hilariously inefficient and badly run because speed to market is more important than both efficiency and doing a good job. They're probably the worst setup to deliver a large scale government IT project.
gyroda@reddit
The government digital service was a rare example of them doing it in-house (well, they still hired some contractors, but a lot of the staff were direct employees).
It's a world-class thing they've built. Other governments use our stuff to build their websites. And the institutional knowledge is retained and the budget didn't go doolally.
Efficient_Chance7639@reddit
For the A122 Lower Thames Crossing the documentation needed was over 2,300 documents totalling over 350,000 pages. That is a fraction of the size and complexity of HS2. We have a planning system that requires billions to be spent on consultants conducting studies and filing out paperwork. The planning system is the cause, consultants are just the effect.
XihuanNi-6784@reddit
Strictly speaking you don't need the consultants. Many of these people could be employed in house, but I suspect there's some financial trickery going on which says that it looks like it costs more to employ them permanently than to outsource. But I have no doubt that the outsourcing costs far more overall when you account for the ridiculous premiums consultancies charge. Not to mention the huge amount of knowledge that is lost once their people move on. It's an example of the individual instances seeming cheaper, but at an institutional level it's not worth it.
Heyheyheyone@reddit
The wider construction industry (and I'm using this term very loosely) is chock full of people sitting in offices writing reports and pontificating about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the core purpose of infrastructure projects.
Building a tunnel for bats has nothing to do with moving people around the country quickly - yet HS2 still spent £100m on this nonsense and proudly announced this on their website. Absolute insanity.
Too much money is wasted on writing thousands and thousands of pages about things that do not improve people's quality of life in any tangible way.
This is why getting anything built in Britain is expensive as millions are wasted on this type of unproductive nonsense.
nobodyspecialuk24@reddit
Don’t forget Ryman’s, and all those brown paper envelopes they sell.
Adventurous-Dog-3786@reddit
I’ve worked on many big projects in industry and some of it stems back to the fact that most people on these projects are self employed. There’s actually no incentive to finish it as all you are doing is making yourself unemployed. They’re earning good money and want it to go on forever but that not how construction works. You finish a project and move on to another.
I’ve seen this scenario in the oil and gas industry many times, testing things ‘to death’ just because 🤷🏼♂️, massively over engineering things in the name of health and safety ( not always a bad thing but it is when it’s for the sake of it), and sometimes just making life awkward in getting things done.
theabominablewonder@reddit
I’ve worked on a few. I was working on one project that had some surplus consultancy staff sucking a few millions out of the budget but generally it was really well approached, people knew the ins and outs and it was generally very robust. That one got canned because the public sector authority changed their mind about what they wanted and how much budget they had. What’s annoying is that it was actually a very good project with great benefits and would have had great public support.. meh.
And now I am working on a billion pounds construction project and the decision makers are clueless. They’ve rose up the ranks on non construction related work and now when it comes to construction they don’t understand the market or the risks. Half the staff aren’t trained on construction contracts and trying to explain how contractors will price in risk and other factors.. pointless trying.
The consultancies generally know how to deliver construction projects but public sector knowledge is shit. If you read on here everyone slags them (consultancies) off as leeches on the public purse.
XihuanNi-6784@reddit
They are. The reason consultancies have better people is because we've had decades of austerity and compulsory outsourcing which heavily favours the private sector. Stuff like compulsory competitive tender is totally criminal and cripples the ability of the public sector to learn and retain talent. If your are always forced to outsource to consultants you will never build up the knowledge yourself.
Wages are another factor. All the best people leave because public sector salaries are kept artificially low through things like austerity. Lots of people come into the public sector to learn the ropes like in the NHS for example, but once they're trained up they jump ship for private because the salaries are significantly better. That's not a natural occurrence. There are countries where civil servants are paid competitive wages and as a result they retain a lot of talent. You don't need public sector wages to be higher, just not as dogshit low as they are now. Many are far lower than they've been in decades (adjusted for inflation).
This is a political issue with multiple governments who do not believe in the public sector's ability to actually be productive or efficient. It's ultimately a self fulfilling prophecy. All the public sector failures you're thinking of are a result of this mindset, not its cause.
Key-Original-225@reddit
NIMBYs, cronyism for contracts, money gets syphoned (probably) lack of actual planning (foresight, not the pen on paper design type of planning) plus probably lots more
Former_Intern_8271@reddit
Nimbyism was massive here, the rural constituencies basically sabotaged it, they insisted they couldn't see a train so loads of HS2 ended up being built in tunnels which made the cost go sky high, I don't remember the exact stat or which proposed version on HS2 it was referring to (it's been cut down many times now) but at one point over half of the journey would have no view at all, totally miserable and unnecessary
LatelyPodes@reddit
Yeah over half of HS2 is gonna be underground when it finishes. Some are necessary (like the Euston or Northolt tunnel to get into London), but some are completely unnecessary.
Take the small town of Wendover in Buckinghamshire. The town is smallish. It has a hard cutoff on the west, because of a rail line (with Wendover station). There is also an A road to the west of that rail line. Both of these are covered with a bunch of trees to block the sight.
HS2 was supposed to go along the west of the A road. But the people of Wendover complained a lot, and forced HS2 to create a green tunnel (the Wendover Green Tunnel) that’ll span the length of Wendover town so they won’t see it, even tho they were barely ever gonna see it to begin with.
Just cas a group of residents in the town of Wendover wanted to make HS2 a lot more invisible to them even tho they were really never gonna see much of it to begin with, the taxpayer was forced to pay to build a whole new green tunnel.
It just angers me a ton. I think there should be some sort of NIMBY tax, where it’ll mean the NIMBYs will need directly pay HS2 to fund more of the tunnels or stuff they insist on.
HDK1989@reddit
Or you just do the sensible thing, what China does. Here's some money for your house. You have 12 months to leave before we bulldoze it.
The needs of some village shouldn't come before the needs of the country.
sockmeistergeneral@reddit
Half of the journey being in the pitch black is going to be so unpleasant as well
XihuanNi-6784@reddit
This is a great idea lol. I'd love that. Would really make them think twice about this sort of nonsense.
DCIGrannyGrumps@reddit
Backhanders innit? That and years and years of quangos, planning meetings and anything else to delay things once started,so the contractors get paid more who are, of course, mates of those in charge
DeapVally@reddit
The channel tunnel took 8 years (6 for construction). It's not quite as far, sure, but a few tunnels and bridges through middle England, compared to a tunnel under the bloody sea that had never been done before, shouldn't take this long!
gyroda@reddit
The biggest thing there is that there's no NIMBYs under the channel.
I've seen it compared to the Artemis meeting but there's fuck all between Florida and the moon and nobody to complain about it.
Ben-D-Beast@reddit
Entrenched NIMBYism, overbloated bureaucracy, limited political incentive for governments to invest in long term projects and push back from certain subsects of the population.
No_Topic5591@reddit
Too much is subcontracted to private companies, and there's too much corruption involved in the selection of those companies. It's even worse with digital infrastructure projects, like Universal Credit and the computerization of NHS records.
Atompunk78@reddit
Stupid environmental regs and contracting
Not all environmental regs or contracting are bad, but some sure as fuck are and they’re the ones that sunk HS2
C2BK@reddit
It's a totally different mindset.
China and Japan have governments who basically announce they are going to do something, and it then happens. Destroy a site of special scientific interest? No problem. Turf people out of their houses? Go for it.
In the UK we have a lot of environmental and planning regulations (which I think is a good thing) and also our towns and villages are much closer together, and that means finding a path that works on a Civil Engineering level, and which also won't destroy historic properties / ride roughshod over people's rights to live their lives in their own home is far more difficult.
ExoticMangoz@reddit
France then. They build high speed rail at astonishing speeds compared to us.
Werthead@reddit
China is a much vaster country, but an absolutely huge chunk of it is basically uninhabited and the big infrastructure projects out that way are comparatively fewer and more expensive. Most of the infrastructure projects are done in the extraordinarily highly-populated east coast, south-eastern and north-eastern regions (which contain some of the largest and densest cities and megacities on Earth). Japan is somewhat bigger than the UK but it has far less habitable space (because two-thirds of it are mountainous) and almost twice as many people.
I think the original question stands as to how China and Japan get those projects done through areas often far more densely populated than anything comparable in the UK. The answer is the Chinese government has zero accountability on a national level (local is a different matter) so any big infrastructure they say they want happens, happens. How Japan, a democracy with possibly an even greater love of bureaucracy than us, does it is a much more interesting question.
mahler_1@reddit (OP)
I don't think any sites of historical interest have been destroyed but I agree with the general premis
VividBandicoot@reddit
l
Count_de_Bleuchamp@reddit
CDM…
Heyheyheyone@reddit
Shit leadership who don't have the backbone to see things through.
Voters behaving like children and demanding no development should ever take place if anyone (not just people - also bats, newts, badgers, bees or some kind of abstract aesthetic or heritage nonsense) could suffer in some way, or some kind of trade offs need to be made to make things happen.
Too many members of the leadership are just too spineless to face down this type of stupid demands.
Same type of dynamics happening with the inability to build adequate housing, or to keep welfare spending in check.
This country deserves to keep getting poorer.
asuka_rice@reddit
Pride of keeping it in the U.K. despite the high cost and lack of skills to build it.
Ok-Middle8656@reddit
When you’re an authoritarian government with very lax health and safety standards and little concern for human rights or environmental concerns, you can get things done pretty quick.
And, yes, I was referring to the Chinese!
ozyri@reddit
Poor governance, lack of professionals, corruption and lack of ... well, frankly, impunity. Look how Tories nicked 2 BILLION from Woking by running the council. That's with a B. Zero repercussions.
Fraggle_ninja@reddit
Contracts have probably been sub contracted to some MP’s brother in laws sister and some peers nephews dog over and over again. It’s a massive grift that some people have been getting rich off.
notaballitsjustblue@reddit
Because the Tories took every opportunity to spend £9 on something that didn’t work rather than £10 on something that did.
Hopeful-Climate-3848@reddit
Corruption.
Early_Enthusiasm_787@reddit
Same people who are annoyed by the waste and problems with Hs2 are those who make it harder also to build timings like housing. NIMBYs and stake holders who get paid more and more by delays.
AdFree2000@reddit
As someone who works in engineering capital project. Red tape is a massive cost. Also contracting and generally everyone taking a cut at all stages.
gintokireddit@reddit
I have no clue. But seems like in the UK too many want to do the bare minimum at work and say "it's not my job, it's someone else's" or "I don't know about this, even though it's meant to be my area of expertise and our team has probably been asked about it before so should have the answer on tap". Not much self-emphasis on being the best you can be or being meticulous. Go to a council office, and hear "I've not done any work all day" at 2pm - in a department where there are gaps in knowledge, so free time ought to be used to plug those gaps, proactively try to solve problems. Why have I as a new employee, the lowest-paid, gone into a couple of public sector teams and within a couple months got managers saying to copy me, or fixed problems that were supposedly just "how it is" but were actually very fixable with a little less laziness? Ridiculous. I have no idea if China and Japan have that mindset.
China probably suffers less from short-termism, while we have free elections frequently, so it becomes about short-term gains at the expense of long-term. For existing railways Japan gives longer contracts to private companies and both control of the track and the train, whereas the UK train contracts are much shorter - so many there's something like that going on with HS2? I don't know if those countries have the managerialism of the UK, where each manager wants their team to look good, even if it ends up harming the overall picture.
I lived in a building having cladding works done. Awful. The British company messed it up too, which added an extra 6 months because part needed redoing. The ones who fixed it spoke Polish. Coincidence?
MrStink444@reddit
I think the tabloid press have a lot to answer for here.
When some freak incident happens they get the public riled up to such an extent that the government has no choice but to pass new regulation to ostensibly prevent it happening again; no matter how likely or unlikely a reoccurrence is.
Every regulation has a cost associated with it that no one seems to recognise but ultimately has to be paid by the taxpayer. All of a sudden you are then spending £125m on a bat tunnel and spending 20 years building a relatively short railway.
LANdShark31@reddit
Yeh defo the media and not the unions.
Efficient_Chance7639@reddit
I understand your point but government *does* have a choice. We’ve just had weak leadership for the last 30 years or so.
bahumat42@reddit
Projects like HS2 have a lot of trouble from inside government, especially with the conservatives who pretty clearly don't care about rail transit, actively creating problems like selling off the land that would have been used to extend the line.
niteninja1@reddit
Lack of will by politicians.
Pass a bill In parliament saying this is the extract route no right to appeal or challenge.
And then just do it.
Efficient_Chance7639@reddit
In general, severely restrictive planning regulations (see cross rail, Hinkley C etc.) HS2 also had the added problem of massive levels of incompetence to compound the problem.
midgetman166@reddit
Too much red tape, too much paperwork, too many consultations needed, NIMBYism (they have too much power) and a general culture of what I've coined YISEBYs (Yes, in somebody else's back yard) who want all the benefits but with none of the drawbacks. All this wastes time and therefore money
insomnimax_99@reddit
Because we’re beholden to NIMBYs, quangos, and other special interest groups and bureaucracy.
HS2 had to get over 8,000 separate permissions even after the government passed the legislation authorising it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
They’ve had to build miles and miles of expensive, unnecessary tunnels to appease countryside dwellers who don’t want to have to look at trains.
Etc etc. we’re not decisive enough, we don’t just do things anymore, we waste time and money sucking up to everyone instead of just getting shit done.
In any sane world the HS2 legislation would have been the one and only authorisation needed to build the line.
Valetudinous@reddit
The Green Signals podcast made several episodes, early on, analysing the way the Conservatives scuppered HS2, if you’re interested.
odkfn@reddit
Governments and councils only look as far ahead as the next election cycle. Nobody wants to do something unsexy that’ll take decades. It’s very annoyed.
Drewski811@reddit
When we build things, the things are great.
It's the will to build them that's the issue.
Nimbyism, political power, and the planning process are all to blame here.
Flavourifshrrp@reddit
The same thing that has happened to a lot of our major industries.
SocietyPleasant7461@reddit
Aerospace being one of them.
AutoModerator@reddit
Please help keep AskUK welcoming!
When replying to submission/post please make genuine efforts to answer the question given. Please no jokes, judgements, etc. If a post is marked 'Serious Answers Only' you may receive a ban for violating this rule.
Don't be a dick to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
This is a strictly no-politics subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.