Hammond’s Soviet-style rail policies

February 23, 2013

When Transport Secretary Philip Hammond announced last week that the government would procede with three big rail projects – High Speed 2, Crossrail and Thameslink – it was a bit like a Soviet commissar boasting how many new tractors he would be sending to favoured collective farms.

These schemes are almost entirely state-directed: taxpayers will pay for the infrastructure and officials will determine the details of the routes. And like so many socialist grands projets, the returns on the “investment” are likely to be negative, since taxpayers will in all likelihood have to provide substantial operating subsidies to support the new train services (as has been the case with High Speed 1). In addition to these direct costs, there will also be significant deadweight losses resulting from the associated taxation.

As well as imposing enormous costs on taxpayers to fund uneconomic rail schemes, it is also telling that the government has actively prevented major private-sector investment in new transport capacity through its airports policy and its prohibition of Heathrow expansion.

Students of Austrian economics will not be surprised that the misallocation of resources by the state is endemic in the transport sector. Transport is subject to a very high degree of central planning by politicians and bureaucrats, with new rail schemes representing just one example. And Austrians have explained why central planning authorities are incapable of making efficient resource allocation decisions.

In particular, central planners are hampered by the absence of relevant market prices and therefore find it very difficult to calculate accurately costs and outputs (see Mises, 1949, p. 696). While there are prices on Britain’s railways, these are severely distorted as a result of huge government subsidies, the regulation of many fares, the imposition of an artificial structure on the industry, planning controls and so on. A scheme that appears to have positive economic benefits may only do so as a result of other layers of harmful state intervention.

Moreover, since government decision-makers do not own the capital they are allocating they have less incentive to act responsibly or show initiative. They lack the “commercial mindedness” of entrepreneurs (see Mises, 1935). It is also worth mentioning the insights of public choice theory on the behaviour of politicians and bureaucrats – in particular how decision-making processes tend to be captured by concentrated interest groups such as the rail lobby at the expense of dispersed taxpayers.

If the government wishes the UK to have an efficient and competitive transport sector that does not burden taxpayers and which fosters prosperity by lowering the costs of trade, it should reject the central planning mentality, remove distortions, and shift the supply of infrastructure to the private sector.

1 December 2010, IEA Blog

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Time to pull the plug on Eurostar?

February 23, 2013

The dismal economic returns on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link are a stark warning to supporters of a high-speed line to Scotland and the North of England.

The total cost of the link, now renamed “High Speed One” (HS1), is close to £10 billion in today’s money, when all the hidden subsidies and extras are included. And this figure does not include the substantial “deadweight” losses from the additional taxation required to fund the line. A commercial business would expect to make an annual return well above £500 million on such an investment, particularly since railways typically need to be substantially rebuilt after 30 or 40 years.

In this context, the return on HS1 is pitiful. Last year, the “investment recovery charge” levied on Eurostar was reduced by more than half to about £2,200 for each train service using the route. By my calculation, this adds up at most to about £40 million a year – a return of less than half of one per cent on the government’s original investment.

But even this return is questionable. Eurostar has made large losses during its sixteen year history and it remains to be seen whether the hidden subsidy of cut-price access charges will enable it to make sustained profits in the medium term. In other words, not just the infrastructure but the service itself has been heavily subsidised by taxpayers, meaning the overall economic return on HS1 has almost certainly been negative – even before inflation is taken into account. The local “Javelin” services to North Kent now using the line are also subsidised.

Of course, advocates of high speed lines may point to “wider benefits” such as regeneration. Indeed, the expensive re-routing of the Channel Tunnel link through East London was supposed to boost the area’s economy (as well as to facilitate currently non-existent through trains to the North of England). However, state-funded regeneration tends to be a negative sum game. Resources are inefficiently transferred from some areas to others, while social problems are displaced rather than reduced. Moreover, if nebulous “wider benefits” arguments were used consistently as a rationale for taxpayer support, just about every business activity would be entitled to subsidies and almost the entire economy would become socialised.

After sixteen years of support, the government should stop subsidising train services to the continent. Taxpayers could receive at least some compensation if the high-speed line were sold off to the highest bidder with the proceeds used for tax cuts and (unlike in current proposals for its “privatisation”) no restrictions imposed on how the route is used. Perhaps an unsubsidised international service could just about cover maintenance costs, with the sunk capital effectively written off. But far better returns could almost certainly be achieved by shutting down the line and disposing of the assets – which include substantial plots of land, tunnels under London and the Thames, and large amounts of scrap metal.

22 July 2010, IEA Blog

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