Private Island: Why Britian Now Belongs to Someone Else (12 page)

Away from the WCML, in October 2000, at Hatfield, a Great North Eastern Railway express from King's Cross to Leeds derailed, killing four people, when a broken rail that Railtrack had failed to repair shattered into hundreds of pieces. It was only a year since the Paddington disaster, where thirty-one people were killed and more than 400 injured after a badly trained driver went through a wrongly positioned red light. By the spring of 2001, the railways were in chaos and the estimated cost of the WCML project had gone up to £8 billion. In October, after a last attempt by Railtrack to go behind the backs of the other users of the line and renegotiate the Virgin deal, the government pulled the plug. Railtrack was finished.

As the Strategic Rail Authority, Railtrack's successor Network Rail and, eventually, Bechtel began to investigate the wreckage, the estimated costs of the WCML continued to rise. Twenty billion pounds was even mentioned as a final price tag. Only the
retreat to the compromise of a 125 mph west coast line by 2008 brought the price down to £9 billion.

Those who came into Railtrack in the early days, John Edmonds' team, like to blame the fiasco on the Corbett-New Labour era. Dithering over plans, slack financial controls over contractors, political interference, the ever tightening grip of safety regulations – these, they say, added billions to a project that should have cost far less.

Yet all the key decisions that doomed Railtrack were taken before Corbett arrived, before Labour had fully established itself in office, and before the terrible accidents at Paddington and Hatfield: the folly involved in choosing an untried new technology and selling it to the public, the taking over of the WCML by Railtrack instead of letting an experienced engineering consortium handle it, the arrogance displayed in negotiating the Virgin contract.

Throughout Railtrack's existence, the management showed persistent traits – a contempt for engineering wisdom and a steady refusal to confront the decrepitude of the railway they were running into the ground. Even if moving block had come along in time, the rest of the infrastructure would have taken many billions to set right.

‘The more we get into it – and facts are still emerging – the more we know the existing infrastructure is completely and utterly worn out,' said the SRA's Stuart Baker. In an imaginary world, if Railtrack had rejected the consultants' advice in 1995 to go for moving block, if it had taken time to investigate the true state of the railway, what would the actual price of WCML modernisation have been? Enough, certainly, to scupper Railtrack's privatisation. And there can be few in Britain today who think that would have been a bad thing. Without privatisation, would the money have been forthcoming to modernise the WCML? Not immediately, perhaps, but sooner or later the Treasury would have had no choice but to put in the billions it is putting in now; and a commercially run, state-owned Railtrack would
have been able to borrow more cheaply than the £3.8 billion it paid shareholders and lenders in dividends and interest payments over five years.

One of the disturbing facets of the west coast saga is the failure of democratic government that it represents. Not just of a particular party, but the whole system of government. The administration of John Major created the Railtrack monster. Yet within less than a year of the privatisation of Railtrack, the Conservatives were punished at the polls – and Railtrack, and the WCML project as originally misconceived, went steaming on. No one has answered the question of how governments with five-year terms can be held to account for their stewardship of projects whose lifespan is measured in generations. In the dozens of interviews I carried out for this chapter, it was striking how few rail industry figures mentioned transport ministers or political parties. The only government they recognised was the only government that endures: the unelected Treasury.

And yet it would be wrong to say Britain's elected representatives looked the other way. In mid-February and early March of 1995, after the consultants had delivered their report but while Railtrack and the government were still mulling over it, members of the House of Commons transport committee questioned Edmonds, Horton and the heads of some of the big signalling firms about the WCML project.

The MPs did their job well. Gwyneth Dunwoody, the hard-nosed Labour interrogator on the committee, had been briefed by Richard Hope, an expert railway writer, and knew exactly what was at stake. Accordingly, when their report was published that July, the committee gave an uncannily prescient warning of the risk Railtrack was running.

It warned: ‘The renewal of the west coast main line is urgent, and reliance on an as yet unproven train control system to underpin the financial case for investment may lead to unacceptable delays in upgrading the nation's principal inter-city route.'

Members of parliament had done what they were elected to do, conscientiously and thoroughly scrutinising a big plan by an unelected organisation with power over the lives and purses of the public. It had pointed out its weaknesses. And nobody paid any attention.

In 1837 Charles Greville, the racehorse owner, political diarist and intimate of the Duke of Wellington, described his first railway journey – on the west coast line between Birmingham and Liverpool – as a ‘peculiarly gay' experience. ‘The first sensation is a slight degree of nervousness and a feeling of being run away with, but a sense of security soon supervenes and the velocity is delightful,' he wrote. The train travelled at about 20 mph. Greville knew it could go faster. ‘One engineer went at the rate of 45 miles an hour,' he recorded, ‘but the Company turned him off for doing so.'

It seems unlikely the west coast line will ever become a 140 mph route, unless High Speed 2 – intended to take passengers from Manchester to London at 250 mph, but not till 2033 – is cancelled. When I met Chris Green in 2004, not long before he retired, all he was able to do was take invited guests out on short practice runs in Branson's new red expresses to show them what might have been. ‘I went on the 145 mph test run last August and it rode beautifully,' he said. ‘It was doing 125, and we said, “Please accelerate to 145,” and it shot forward like a sports car … we've got this greyhound train which is going to be running around like a labrador for the next ten years.'

Out in the winter rain on the shut-down Crewe-to-Cheadle line I met a British engineer, Roy Hickman, junior to the Americans from Bechtel but with decades of experience on the railway. He was working for Network Rail: the slogan of antiengineering Railtrack's successor is ‘Engineering excellence for Britain's railways'. It was spending £3 million a day on the WCML project.

‘Bechtel are bringing a level of planning we've never seen
before,' Hickman said. ‘I think Railtrack, in fact the industry, never really fully understood or anticipated the sheer scope or challenge of building the west coast, and only when work started did we begin to understand just what a huge task it was. It takes twenty years to wreck the infrastructure, and nearly as long to set it right.'

Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There's Pavey, a sixty-six-year-old retired electrician in a hooded Manchester United top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He's holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist. The olive-coloured Avon ripples away, three or four metres further below. In the background is an arched pedestrian bridge, a willow tree with its lower fronds stroking the water, and the massive red brick wall of a derelict flour mill. In the next picture, Pavey is standing next to the freshly whitewashed wall of the White Bear pub, looking more agitated, as if he's afraid I still haven't got the point. It's the same stance, except that this time the hand has risen above his head. It hovers about two metres above the road; it comes three-quarters of the way up the casement of the pub window. I did get the point. If you'd tried to stand where Pavey was standing on Monday, 23 July 2007 – the day water levels peaked in Tewkesbury – you'd have been treading water.

At first there seems nothing in the pictures, apart from Pavey's hand, to hint at the fury of the flood that turned the old town of
Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, at the confluence of the rivers Severn and Avon, into an island on the banks of a vast brown waterway resembling the Mississippi Delta. There are clues, though. In the first picture, you can see two jetties that were mangled by the torrent and haven't been repaired. The wooden boards were sucked off and swallowed by the flood, and only the metal skeleton remains. In the second, the new paint on the pub indicates that the insurance has paid out and the flood damage has recently been put right.

There are a couple of A4 sheets of yellow paper stuck in the pub window. One reads: ‘gl20' – the local postcode – ‘new houses no insurance'. The other has a picture of a house, with a wavy line representing water cutting off its bottom half. The slogan is ‘stop building on flood plain: no more' and then in tiny letters ‘please' and – back to big letters again – ‘mr shaw.' This is a reference to Chris Shaw, then Tewkesbury Borough Council's director of planning.

Pavey, an activist in the Severn and Avon Valley Combined Flood Group, a band of concerned citizens who believe that flooded Tewkesbury was the victim of a greedy, callous government, is one of those people you feel you could trust in a tight spot. He's a saintly man who is forever a-doing, volunteering, raising money, inventing practical solutions to concrete problems and helping people out. So it was during the floods, when a water treatment plant in Tewkesbury belonging to the regional water company Severn Trent was overwhelmed. It turned out that the Mythe waterworks was the single, irreplaceable source of supply for 350,000 people. For ten days, much of urban and rural Gloucestershire was pushed back in time by a couple of centuries. It was without running water.

Pavey commandeered a food trolley from Marks and Spencer and set himself the task of pushing it around the sodden, cracked streets of central Tewkesbury, delivering hundreds of litres of bottled water to the aged and infirm, for no reward but thank yous. ‘All that week, when we ran out of water, I delivered water
to all the old people's places who couldn't carry it,' he said as he took me on a tour of his old clients. ‘Sometimes they brought you water in little tiny bottles and little old ladies could carry that. But sometimes they brought five-litre bottles that little old ladies had no chance of carrying.'

He introduced me to Gladys Mills, a former farm worker, now eighty-six and living in sheltered housing. ‘They said to use bathwater for flushing the loos,' she explained. ‘You can't carry much at my age. A little pint bottle is quite heavy.' He introduced me to John Russell, an eighty-eight-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,' Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.' He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs kidney dialysis three times a week; at the height of the floods she was pushed out of Tewkesbury in a wheelchair along a disused railway line. Bufton's husband suffered a stroke after it was over. ‘I just think it was the trauma of all this,' she said. ‘And he's not the only one … unless they do something it will happen again, I don't care what anybody says.'

As we walked and talked, Pavey would adopt a scolding tone in his reminiscences: towards the businessman who kept filling five-gallon water containers from the town's emergency supplies until he got ‘thumped', for instance. He praised others. He didn't seem angry, whereas Dave Witts did. Witts, a fellow Combined Flood Group activist, was calm and polite as he spread documents, reports and evidence out on his kitchen table, but he seethed with victimhood. His house, which is not on the Environment Agency's at-risk flooding map, was flooded the previous July. It took five months to repair. He believed the government had starved Tewkesbury of money for flood protection, while encouraging development in flood-prone areas. The government, he pointed out, was planning to build three million houses by 2020. And why, he asked, did they want so many? ‘If you believe the
Daily Express
,' he said, with a look that suggested he was being bold to raise the idea that
I might not, ‘we're going to have 600,000 immigrants a year from now on.'
^*

Ken Powell was sitting with us, listening. He was mayor of Tewkesbury at the time of the floods, though not the only one. The town has two mayors: one representing the borough of Tewkesbury, which covers a number of other communities, has a multi-million pound budget and heavy responsibilities, and is based in a large modern building in Tewkesbury's southern approaches; and one representing the town council of Tewkesbury, which has almost no money, virtually no formal responsibilities and sits in an eighteenth-century town hall on the high street. Powell was the lesser mayor, and it rankled. Being mayor number two, he had to stand behind the borough mayor at municipal events.

‘The second-fiddle aspects,' he said, as he drove me back from Witts's house. ‘They opened a new heritage centre down the bottom of town. I had to play second fiddle there. We have a thousand years of history with the Mop Fair, and every year it has to be opened by the mayor, but it's the borough mayor, not the town mayor. It just sticks in there a little bit, but there's nothing you can do about it.'

What united Powell, Pavey and Witts? If a visitor from eighteenth-century France had spent time in early twenty-first-century Tewkesbury, and been asked to describe a new Three Estates for the town and other English towns like it, he might reasonably have concluded that Tewkesbury was divided between public servants, private servants and localists. Powell, Pavey and Witts were localists: locals, for sure, in the sense of being long-time residents, but also localists, convinced that local people know better than outside experts – even on highly technical questions – what happens in their town, and what is best for their town; convinced that public servants, the bureaucrats
and Westminster politicians, are being especially mean to Tewkesbury, and doing it on purpose.