The Government's independent adviser on infrastructure, Sir John Armitt, has suggested that the desire to "meet every concern and objection" over HS2 is causing delays and additional costs for the high-speed railway project. The chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission told MPs that a "private sector approach" would have been to say "Sorry, I have not got any more money".
He expressed his belief that keeping HS2 Ltd – the company in charge of the project's construction – within the Department for Transport (DfT) can result in excessive oversight, as ministers being involved in too many decisions inevitably leads to delays. Speaking to the Commons’ Transport Select Committee, he said: "It’s bound to lead, I fear, to at times too much desire to actually meet every concern and objection and requirement for extra facilities within a scheme.".
He added: "I think it’s 12,000 local agreements which HS2 has had to make after the hybrid Bill.". He continued: "So you think ‘We’ve got the hybrid Bill, we can now get on with it’. I’m sorry, guys, no, you can’t. You’ve now got endless local negotiations to take place, and there is, of course, then the risk that in order to just make progress, you say ‘OK’.".
"Every time you say ‘OK’, then unfortunately that’s potentially more delay, but certainly extra cost. There is a natural inevitability that when the whole machinery of government is doing something, there is a desire to actually please people rather than a more private sector approach which says ‘Sorry, I have not got any more money, that is all we can afford’. I think Government is not very good at saying that.".
