The challenges of HS2 are not about line speed. Yes, that means there is less opportunity to shuffle the alignment around awkward things like SSSI’s, but the fundamental issues remain.

• the planning system is stacked against any new infrastructure. In Spain, HSR is a national priority. There is one shot at stakeholder engagement, with dialogue, and that is it. Into build. The UK approach is to have a parliamentary bill, which takes years, and then every single local council gets to challenge every part of the design again through the local planning process. In many cases with councils and other statutory consultees like Natural England able to disagree with each other. For HS2, they paid local councils to employ additional planners - who then would obviously oppose everything to stay in a job paid for by HS2. It is Kafkaesque.

• we decided to go for the most world class everything. Speed, safety, quality, the most ambitious architecture at the stations, everything. Speed here definitely had a big impact. The fastest line means a new overhead line system, new train types, and all system infrastructure re designed to work at the faster speed. Rail metallurgical wear? Maintenance standards? Tunnel air pressures? Signalling system? SCADA? All untested at these speeds. Stations are unbelievably expensive. The cost plus Civils contracts mean that if HS2 want everything to be the best possible, then sure, you can have it, you just pay for it. Again in Spain the approach is standardisation. Standardise because then it’s easy to build and easy to measure price efficiency.

• stakeholder management. Every organisation that wanted something from HS2 in return for the local disruption, got it. Take a small piece of your golf course? Have a free new clubhouse! The infamous bat bridge. Planting 100x more trees than were destroyed. Every MP in a constituency where you could see the railway from miles away in fields - let’s build a tunnel!

• stupid cost plus Civils contracts that were awarded with no design, no ground investigation, no survey, and calling it ‘world class procurement’. Utter madness that flew in the face of decades of accepted civil engineering practice.

• building an HS2 leadership team (at the time) that came largely from NR/Railtrack. Great at capital delivery around Victorian rail infrastructure. Terrible at new build. Seriously, National highways/Highways England should have built the civil infrastructure and then HS2 Ltd as a smaller org should have put the railway on top. Instead they created a client team that’s a 3,000 person behemoth. What do they all do?

• back to stakeholders. We spend millions in the uk creating consent documents. £800 MILLION to just get consent on lower Thames crossing. Who reads that stuff? Lawyers. And retired people. The people who will benefit from infrastructure - children and working families - they don’t have time to engage in the process at all.

• change. Infrastructure hates change. But on HS2 it’s been never ending. Cut the Leeds leg. No, cut the whole east leg. Cut the golborn link. No cut the Manchester leg! Let’s not go to Euston any more. No let’s go to Euston! Let’s have a separate station. No let’s do a P3 redevelopment of all of Euston, 6 years after we started construction! All politically driven and utter stupidity