Why is the taxpayer paying for HS2?

Rasczak

Yeap. Look at Loz's posts about the Erskine and the Forth bridges for example. The simple fact is many simply do not appreciate quite how significant a toll on bridges whose only detour is around 20-30 miles can be.

IronGiant

On reflection you may be correct , but you really shouldn't extrapolate "many people in England are clueless" from a single member's posts

DPinBucks

What's that got to do with it?

Roads and railways are equally essential to the national infrastructure.  Although railways are far more expensive to build and maintain than roads, the latter simply cannot offer the capacity that railways do, so the costs tend to even out.

You might be able to put your own vehicle on a road at no point-of-use cost, but so what?  Road users pay through the nose for the privilege of driving. Those who don't have cars pay for bus & taxi fares, plus their share of the road taxes which hauliers pay to deliver goods.  Similarly, rail passengers pay their fares, which are less than they would be without government input, assuming the service would be there at all.
In fact, even though railways are more expensive than roads, every taxpayer pays far more in road taxes than he does for the railways.

If you want to argue that rail services must be paid for by the passengers without tax subsidies, then you must equally argue that all roads must be tolls. The result would be whole swathes of the country without any transportation capability at all.

In fact, of course, without a national infrastructure including both roads and railways, neither could exist. No HS2 would mean that we would need another M40/M6, plus another two tracks of railway alongside the existing.  And it wouldn't cope for more than a few years anyway.

It is an obvious no-brainer that the only viable long-term solution to our appalling lack of past infrastructure planning is a huge new network of high-speed trains powered by nuclear-generated electricity. This can only be supplied at government level, regardless of which private companies actually run the trains and deliver the power.

kav

I worked for ScottishPower several years back, and my final interview when joining was with one of the organisation bigwigs, mostly for him to rubberstamp me as being suitable to join. One of his questions to me was "why are SP the only company responsible for the electricity network across most of Scotland?", and the obvious (though not to me at the time) answer was "because if you devolved responsibility to multiple companies to give customers choice, you would have an unsightly mess of competing companies' pylons and powerlines, inconsistent quality, and you'd never be able to get anywhere because of road works".

Large infrastructure programmes usually need a single provider, and usually this involves government backing. It's the least worst option in most cases.

Member 581642

Consider where the £50 billion goes , into paying people who build it. Suppliers who supply the material to build it , local businesses that supply services, etc etc.

It's not that the money disappears just gets redistributed  .

Not sure I necessarily agree with HS2 but some basic economics are worth throwing into the equation

pragmatic

Better people building roads than sitting on the dole.
Sadly such a view is (unfairly) tainted by the past.

Similarly rather than paying an every increasing amount in housing benefit, the state should build some houses, at least then after spending several billion we'll have some houses, right now we have what to show for the £23bn spent this year?

On topic, the railways are owned by the government, they were privatised and I wonder if those complaining about the government building HS2 are also those that loudly proclaim that the railways should be fully nationalised?

EarthRod

Do you expect any response from your rhetorical question?

pragmatic

Does anyone

When I say privitised I meant the Victorian infrastructure was build via private money, infact some by the suggested subscription/bond like structure.  As with many things though, too much was built too quickly and many people lost their shirts ... but hey hum we have some railways to show for it, better than buying overpriced tulips I suppose.

EarthRod

Yes, the Victorian rail network was built with private enterprise money. The returns were good on the money invested because the government provided an Act of Parliament which gave compulsory purchase orders to allow the buying up of strips of land from hundreds of different landowners and farmers without which the railways could never have been built.

The Victorians were like entrepreneurial pigs round the trough though because a few years later they vastly overextended the rail network and, yes, many investors lost their shirts.

A bit different to public money being squandered by the government on HS2, bearing in mind no private enterprise wants any part of it.

pragmatic

Could any private enterprise do it?

Our planning laws would make it impossible, to such an extent it would be madness to even think about it.

Look at Heathrow and Gatwick they both desperately want to build another runway, self funded even, but they can't.

If you can't build a flat strip of tarmac a few hundred meters long, how do you expect to build a railway half the length of the country, as a private investor?