There is something heroic about a major engineering project cutting beneath a major city and Crossrail has real potential to reduce the number of car journeys and thus improve air quality and reduce CO2 emissions. Spending money on visionary infrastructure programmes can make very good sense.
My concerns about Crossrail are not that I object to investment spending. They are that I want it evened out across the country. Put even the £600 million overspend funding into creating a proper functioning northern rail network and the impact on the economy of the north of England would be really helpful for millions of people. Put anything remotely on the scale of the £15.4 billion investment into the regional rail networks and it would totally rebalance and transform the UK economy.
At the moment the UK doesn’t have any effective regional support policy. In fact it has the exact opposite. The people who live in the regions get less per head spent on their transport network. Estimates vary but at least three times as much is spent per head on infrastructure in the London area as in the north. The government is taxing the economy of the north, of Birmingham and of Bristol and sending the money to London. Not exactly a wise way of dealing with an over concentration of economic wealth and activity in one big city.
That, however, is not the only question that the over run of Crossrail raises. If one major engineering project can over run and get delayed by safety concerns then, surely, we should start worrying about whether the country’s biggest vanity project might also over run.
Hinkley Point is due to cost £20.3 billion for one power station. That makes it a bigger and more complex project than Crossrail and therefore even more likely to over-run. It requires a subsidy on the price of the electricity it produces which is simply impossible to calculate properly because we don’t know the price of electricity 35 years from now. What we do know is that estimates from the national audit office have exceeded £30 billion and that the private company involved won’t give up the contract if energy turns out to be massively cheaper and it is being heavily subsidised whereas it could easily hand the contract back if it is losing money on it. We also know that the project is being built with Chinese money and French engineering to a design that has never been fully tested in operation anywhere else. Oh, and we know that if the electricity it is due to produce doesn’t come on line in 2025 there is a real risk of the lights going out in the UK as a regular event.
What possessed any UK government to think that such a clumsy vanity project would be the solution to the UK’s energy needs? In what way does our participation in this project help the UK to be at the cutting edge of future business and get new orders when the technology is owned by others and the expertise is in an area that other countries are avoiding? How many more jobs would have been secured if the investment had gone into wind, tide, water, solar or heat exchange technology? Or better energy storage? How much more quickly and reliably could we have met our energy needs if the focus had been on cutting consumption by investing in insulation of buildings?
Trying to build a nuclear plant safely is harder than building a railway. More can go wrong. Contractors are difficult to control and they have a vested interest in skimping on the quality if the specifications or the supervision arrangements aren’t tight enough. Yet when a government has spent tens of billions on a project it needs that project to come on line and start producing electricity regardless of pesky thinks like standards. It is only necessary to think about how shoddy and weak the building regulation implementation and control system was at Grenfell Tower to realise how huge the risks are with Hinkley Point.
When risks are enormous and rewards are hard to spot the sensible thing for any government to do is to cancel a project. The least you expect from its main opposition party is to keep exposing the weaknesses in its arguments and keep bringing the issue back to public attention. Yet the Labour Party’s official positions are more pro this engineering gamble than against it. There are a lot of unions who want the jobs and the membership subscriptions from the people doing those jobs are important to the financing of the Labour Party. Investment in large numbers of small businesses producing energy in a variety of imaginative ways on a small scale doesn’t help the unions nearly as much. It does help the country. The Labour Party has allowed itself to put its own interests above those of the nation on Hinkley Point and there has been weak and disjointed opposition.
We are therefore stumbling into a larger, clumsier and less useful project than Crossrail with the potential for much worse cost over runs and much more serious consequences from delays. We are also courting a horrible risk of a nuclear accident and handing the future yet another clean up project that we don’t know how to manage but we do know will cost a fortune.
What could possibly go wrong?