[willyt]

It’s different legal and contracting culture. Britain is also a common law legal system and our projects are typically way less efficient than mainland Europe. E.g the most expensive TGV the french have built was about 5-10 times cheaper than HS2. It’s not land acquisition costs that are causing the difference as these only account for about 3bn of the 80bn budget. It’s not difficult terrain either as the french TGV med has more bridges and tunnels. It’s not labour costs as we share the same labour pool as the french so we could attract loads of french digger drivers if we paid 5x more. My theory is that UK politicians and managers are more risk averse so the cost of the risk gets pushed down the chain of subcontractors and every time it jumps down a level it multiplies. I also suspect that the french will have a government department for building high speed lines with a continuous culture and body of knowledge stretching back to the 1960’s with engineers on staff. Whereas in the U.K. the team will be assembled from various consulting engineering companies and everything that is learnt on the job gets lost when the team disbands at the end.