I’m shocked I tell you, shocked.
HS2 is officially ‘unachievable’ after being given red rating
Submitted 1 year ago by G4Z@feddit.uk to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
Comments
FlyLikeAMouse@feddit.uk 1 year ago
mannycalavera@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Jaysus H Christ. Can we not build any new infrastructure?
Syldon@feddit.uk 1 year ago
With a government that literally could not organise a piss up in a brewery, the answer has to be no. They are just grifters conning the country out of money for themselves and anyone who will support them. Nothing else has any importance. The covid inquiry outcome will be very telling just how little these scumbags actually wanted to help the people they serve.
sadreality@kbin.social 1 year ago
People make real money on government contracking and it is a good place for corruption where state actors and private sector fleece tax payers. Boomers are getting extra greedy tho, back in the day at least they delivered something, half the to now project isn't even delivered or delivered without poor condition or not fit for the use case.
mannycalavera@feddit.uk 1 year ago
The delay and spiralling cost seems to be a mixture of government failure, local issues, national anti HS2 campaigns, poor planning by the contractors building the thing.
What, in your opinion, could this government (or the next Labour government) do to enable 21st century transport infrastructure to be built across the country (north to south, and east to west)?
hellothere@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I try not to be all doom and gloom, but this is the exact sort and scale of project the UK needs to be successfully completing to combat climate change. The fact we can’t is legitimately terrifying.
li10@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Stuff like this just makes me wonder what’s the point of working and contributing to the country.
Things like this and funding the NHS are what people need, yet apparently it can’t be done.
How can every single thing that benefits regular people be too expensive, what else is there to spend money on??
sadreality@kbin.social 1 year ago
Best use of the money is to give it to the rich based on whoe governments are acting aroundthe world.
sijt@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s not, so far as I can tell, saying that the project cannot be done. The Red rating, equivalent to unachievable, is measuring against the goals set for the project, including financial.
So what this is saying (or rather confirming) is that it’s not achievable based on the current project goals. Or to put it another way, it’s over budget and cannot be delivered within budget.
So yeah, still not great that we can’t deliver something like this on budget, but if you look in to how it was originally costed for the business case there are holes in the logic large enough to drive several high speed trains through. Sideways. Hopefully the benefits are large enough that they still go through with it, but I suspect that’s largely dependent on which narratives take hold during the run up to the next election and whether the Tories can gaslight people in to thinking that country finances work the same way as personal finances.
YungOnions@lemm.ee 1 year ago
There’s growing evidence that the opposite may be true:
theguardian.com/…/will-hs2-really-help-cut-the-uk…
theguardian.com/…/halt-new-roads-and-developments…
wildlifetrusts.org/…/23JAN_HS2_Double_Jeopardy_FI…
hellothere@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That’s not exactly the case, your second link even states that HS2 would offset (via modal shift) more carbon than it emits during construction.
That ofcourse isn’t to say we should hand wave it away, construction is one of the worst industries when it comes to pollution. But, the problem is we will need to build things, because the structure of society needs to change to stop being so carbon dependant. If we do nothing, then we still have all the structural problems which caused the problem in the first place.
HS2 stops, some, people having to drive. Longer term, it would also help to move business concentration away from the south east. Decentralisation across the entire UK would mean that a lot more things are a lot more local to a lot more people. HS2 doesn’t do that alone, but HS2-type projects (my original comment) absolutely do.
Even if you support degrowth as a method, that still requires substantial change, which in turn means construction.