No country botches big infrastructure quite like Britain. HS2 was supposed to be a symbol of 21st-century modernity: high-speed trains zipping across the spine of the nation, cutting journey times, levelling up the North. What we got instead is a bloated mess of delays, half-built platforms, budgetary sleight-of-hand and political cowardice—another Potemkin project sold on fantasy and sunk by reality.
Let’s be honest. This isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. From Crossrail to nuclear plants, from defence procurement to hospital builds, the UK’s approach to major projects is to promise the moon and then dig a very expensive hole.
“Britain doesn’t build for durability anymore. It builds for margins.”
It starts with optimism bias. Whitehall’s tendency to treat early projections as marketing brochures, not serious forecasts. Costs are deliberately lowballed to get ministers to sign off. “We can do it for £30 billion,” they say. Spoiler: they can’t. And never could. What follows is scope creep, spiralling costs, and the inevitable moment when someone pipes up in Parliament to say, “Well, it’s too late to stop now.”
Then there’s the fetish for consultancy. Britain doesn’t build things anymore; it manages their building. Projects are carved into chunks, handed out to an alphabet soup of contractors, overseen by a phalanx of consultants, and governed by a committee that meets quarterly to review a dashboard nobody understands. By the time it hits crisis point, nobody’s in charge and everyone’s billing by the hour.
Add in political vanity and the picture darkens. Ministers want photo-ops, not functioning railways. They redesign routes for marginal seats. They re-announce the same station twice. They cut corners on the boring bits—track, ventilation, basic engineering—but never on the glossy digital renders. It’s infrastructure as spectacle. Aesthetic capitalism with viaducts.
And when the project flounders, as it always does, the fix is not reform. It’s a press release and a reshuffle. HS2 is being “rephased”, not delayed. The costs are being “reviewed”, not inflated. A whistleblower won £320,000 for being sacked after revealing the real budget. That should be a national scandal. Instead, it’s a footnote.
“Modernisation in Britain has become a byword for cutting corners.”
This logic doesn’t just apply to megaprojects. It infects the everyday too. When it comes to retrofitting and modernisation, the race to the bottom is just as deadly. Modernisation in Britain has become a byword for cutting corners. Retrofitting isn’t about resilience. It’s about revenue. Contracts go to the lowest bidder, materials to the cheapest supplier, oversight to the consultant who promises least interference. The result isn’t just shoddy, it’s lethal. Grenfell was not a tragedy of fire alone, but of procurement policy, of deregulation masked as efficiency. A cladding system that failed safety tests was chosen because it shaved a few thousand off the cost. The system worked exactly as designed: protect the bottom line, not the people.
This is the logic that now governs our so-called green transition. Retrofitting schools with unsafe concrete. Upgrading council flats with insulation that ignites. There’s always money for consultants, for “delivery partners,” for PR campaigns boasting “world-leading” standards. But none for the fundamentals. The race to the bottom doesn’t just hollow out infrastructure. It hollows out the very idea of public safety. Britain used to build for durability. Now it;s all about the margin.
The truth is, Britain doesn’t have a delivery problem. It has a class problem. Projects like HS2 aren’t designed to work for the public. They’re designed to funnel billions to the consultancy caste, provide photo ops for ministers, and allow the Treasury to pretend we still believe in national ambition. When it crashes into reality—late, broken, over budget—they just move on. Nobody is ever held to account. Nobody resigns.
We are governed by a political class that talks in the language of “ambition” and “growth” while outsourcing its own incompetence to McKinsey and praying for good headlines. Britain can’t build anymore because Britain doesn’t know who it’s building for. The public? Or the portfolio?
Until that changes, expect more ghost stations, cancelled phases, and half-finished futures.
