Whether a country's way of doing things becomes the international standard depends entirely on whether that country succeeds. Winners write the rules; losers get cast aside. It's that simple.
A recent news story stopped me cold. On May 19, UK Labour Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told Parliament that the projected total cost of High Speed 2 (HS2) had surged from the original 2009 budget of £37.5 billion to as high as £102.7 billion. Full operational service has been pushed back to beyond 2043. Alexander called HS2 an “appalling” and “shambolic mess”.
HS2 is the largest and most controversial infrastructure project in recent British history. Originally planned to connect London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds with a high-speed rail network capable of 350 km/h, spiraling costs have forced the government to cancel multiple segments. The current plan focuses solely on the London–Birmingham leg.
To cut costs, the maximum operating speed has been reduced from 360 km/h to 320 km/h — a move projected to save £2.5 billion. Factor in the drastically reduced route and the lower speed cap, and HS2's budget isn't merely three times the original estimate. The cost per kilometer may be ten times what was first proposed.
What makes this project truly remarkable is how it gestated for 11 years before construction finally began in 2020 — surviving a revolving door of British governments. To this day, only some civil engineering work has commenced. Not a single rail has been laid.
This staggering cost overrun scandal has prompted the British government to commission study after study into what went wrong. Three main culprits have emerged: a fundamentally flawed planning process, persistent management failures, and chronic government inconsistency.
On planning failures, the UK National Audit Office's January 2020 report delivered a blunt verdict: the DfT and HS2 Ltd had "not adequately managed risks to taxpayer money," and “underestimated the complexity of the programme”, allowing years of delays to compound unchecked. At the time of publication, the government's budget ceiling was still fixed at £56 billion — far below the true estimated cost. That gap left contractors in an impossible position, knowing full well there was simply not enough money to build the railway.
On management failures, a joint report by Professor Jon Shaw, a transport geographer at the University of Plymouth, and Professor Iain Docherty, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, found that British transport planning is obsessed with abstruse econometric analysis. This fixation reflects a management culture that pursues precise errors rather than approximate correctness. Such an approach rationalizes poor strategic decisions and causes many worthwhile projects to be derailed by political opposition born of mismanagement.
On government inconsistency, frequent changes in administration caused HS2 — a project with multiple strategic objectives — to be repeatedly revised beyond recognition, wasting enormous resources. In 2020, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson approved the project to proceed but scrapped the eastern leg to Leeds. In 2023, amid soaring inflation and a fiscal emergency, then-Transport Secretary Mark Harper announced delays to key works. Construction of the northern Birmingham–Crewe section would be pushed back by at least two years, while the London Euston terminus was shelved indefinitely.
That same year, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced at the Conservative Party conference the cancellation of HS2's remaining northern section — the Birmingham–Manchester route. The government had already sunk billions into planning and land acquisition for that route. All of it went down the drain.
Constant policy changes drove costs ever higher and shattered the confidence of contractors and local communities alike. The budget for London Euston station alone has ballooned by £4.8 billion — nearly double its original estimate — partly due to unrelenting design changes, and partly due to changes in government. Britain's core problem is a problem with its political system.
Consider this: China possesses the world's largest and most modern high-speed rail network. By the end of last year, China's total high-speed rail network in operation had surpassed 50,000 kilometers — firmly the world's number one. Europe's entire operating high-speed rail network is only around 15,000 kilometers.
Comparing HS2's estimated cost with China's high-speed rail costs, expressed in RMB, the numbers are staggering. The surviving London–Birmingham section is just 225 kilometers long, and Britain's cost per kilometer runs to RMB 4.15 billion. China builds high-speed rail for only RMB 150 to 200 million per kilometer, with flat terrain sections coming in at just RMB 150 million. For comparable terrain, China's construction cost is just 3.6% of Britain's. China's high-speed trains also average 350 km/h — 30 km/h faster than HS2's revised top speed.
Britain's construction period, counting from the 2020 groundbreaking, is estimated at 23 years — and that is not even the safest guess. China builds high-speed rail in three to five years. On average, Britain takes six times longer than China to build high-speed rail — and that's before counting the 17 years HS2 spent being talked about before a single shovel hit the ground.
To put it vividly: HS2's projected cost of £102.7 billion converts to roughly RMB 937 billion. With that same budget, China could build 6,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. In European terms, the straight-line distance from Lisbon — the westernmost point of continental Europe — all the way to Moscow in the east is only about 4,000 kilometers. With the money it takes Britain to build a 225-kilometer railway, China could bring about a high-speed rail empire spanning the entire European continent.
The truly laughable part of all this: while Britain makes such a mess of high-speed rail and China makes such a success of it, Hong Kong people used to look to Britain as their model. To address rail cost overruns, Hong Kong set up the Project Cost Management Office (PCMO) under the Development Bureau in June 2016. Then in April 2019, following the Sha Tin–Central Link overruns, PCMO was elevated to the permanent Project Strategy and Governance Office (PSGO), with a broader mandate to strengthen oversight of government public works projects.
According to one retired senior engineering official, back in 2016 he attended a one-day seminar organized by PCMO featuring Professor Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, brought in to speak on how to control project costs and reduce overruns. The official recalled that Professor Flyvbjerg offered no particular insights. He essentially told attendees to build in large budget contingencies and leave plenty of headroom to avoid overruns.
Looking back at Britain's track record in building HS2, one can only say that the previous SAR Government was seeking wisdom from the blind. The British were so authoritative — hosting seminars to teach others how to guard against black swan events, how to analyze project risks, how to strengthen project management — and yet they couldn't practice what they preached. They were unable to manage their own country's railway.
Just recently, a notable development caught my attention. The Hong Kong Institution of Engineers has developed the "MiMEP" Best Practice Manual, advocating its widespread adoption across public and private projects. The manual is said to align closely with the country's new quality productive forces development direction and represents a "Hong Kong Standard" jointly established by the government and industry. This is a meaningful development.
China is a nation in its ascendancy. We will no longer, as we once did, follow British standards — paying a premium to buy mere screws they make.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
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