HS2 is symbol of a Civil Service that is going nowhere, says Leo McKinstry

A section of the HS2 line, with delivery now judged ‘unachievable’ (Image: HS2 Ltd) Britain’s greatness and prosperity was partly built on our mastery of engineering. Yet that practical spirit is entirely missing from the construction of the HS2 rail link, now a byword for financial waste and managerial paralysis. The sole enterprising feature of the project has been the unending capacity of its bosses to keep extracting money from the disillusioned public. Indeed the whole scheme is now in danger of becoming a monument to political vanity and managerial incompetence. Only yesterday, a report from the Infrastructure and Projects Authority stated that the “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable”. Those words are a brutal indictment of HS2’s shambolic execution. One recent estimate warned that its budget could eventually reach £106billion – £307million per mile. What makes this saga so depressing is that the executives have been spectacularly well rewarded for their failure. According to HS2’s latest annual report, the Chief Executive Mark Thurston – who is quitting his job in September – had a total package in 2022/23 of £676,763, including a bonus of £40,000, while the Chief Financial Officer Ruth Todd took home £313,055 and Chief Financial Officer Alan Foster was on £370,449. Chief Executive of HS2 Mark Thurston (Image: PA) Defenders of Britain’s second-rate, poorly-run public sector always like to put the blame on “underfunding” and inadequate pay rates. Yet that is certainly untrue of HS2. Not only is Thurston Britain’s highest-paid civil servant, but also the top-heavy workforce of 2,031 staff has no fewer than 10 directors and 318 managers. Tragically the same pattern can be found throughout the state machine, where senior staff enjoy lavish pay rates that bear no relationship to their performance. Our railways, for instance, are beset with delays and poor industrial relations, yet four of the top 10 earners among British officialdom are employed by Network Rail – all of them earning over £330,000 a year. Only last week the Government’s own Cabinet Office revealed that the number of civil servants earning more than £150,000 has gone up by 6.4 percent in the last year, just at a time dissatisfaction with our public services is mounting. The scale of this vast culture of entitlement can be seen in other figures, such as the news that there are 118 civil servants on £200,000 and 2,759 managers in local government are on over £100,000. The construction of the HS2 rail link (Image: PA) The First DivisionAssociation, which represents senior employees in Whitehall, continually bleats that its members feel “under-appreciated” and “under-valued”. Well, perhaps the attitudes of ministers and the public might be more favourable if so many Whitehall departments were not such box-ticking citadels of inefficiency, where institutional sclerosis is matched by an obsession with fashionable ideology. The Civil Service likes to claim that it is a “Rolls-Royce machine”, but even in 2009 during the last Labour Government, the trade minister Digby Jones said of Whitehall that “frankly its job could be done with half as many staff”. But almost 100,000 extra civil servants have been recruited since 2016, yet productivity is low, absenteeism is high. At the Home Office – despite the colossal backlogs – staff on average process just one asylum claim a week. At the Ministry of Justice, which presides over our creaking court system, staff take an average of 12 days sick leave a year, a clear sign of weak management. In just the last year, Whitehall civil servants took 770,000 days off for “mental health problems”. Despite their job security, generous pensions and decent pay, the officials are so poor at actually doing their jobs that the Government now spends £2.8billion a year on management consultants in Whitehall. These departments have so badly lost their way in part because, like so much of corporate Britain, they have been consumed by woke dogma. That is reflected in relentless propaganda, like the ubiquitous rainbow flags, and the array of staff networks that cater for every kind of imagined oppression. The obsession with identity politics fosters a climate of grievance, introspection and division, where our civic institutions are more keen on indoctrinating the public than serving them and state employees are encouraged to see themselves as social justice warriors. It is shameful that our taxes are paying for this racket. Britain was far better run when real engineers held sway, not social engineers.