What HS2 are really doing.

This company was incorporated in 2009, and the word “completed” appears five times in the report.

”Progress” appears more often in the report, the KPI has nothing to to with delivery on time and within budget. 😱

At £40bn it was a waste of money (Manchester to London 25 minutes quicker?). At over £100bn (and still heading north) it's a complete fiasco

Yes, it's a legal requirement.

Not that it will actually take much time or money to produce. HR should have all the information to hand, so it's simply a bit of extra overhead for the same comms team that produce the financial annual reports etc.


I'm *really* not sure that the cost issues that HS2 is facing are due to the fact they have to publish a report on something any and every responsible employer should be monitoring anyway.

It's a damn sight cheaper to monitor than it is to pay out over breaches of equality legislation. And, as I already said, I'm *sure* we'd all agree that discrimination in employment is a bad thing, wouldn't we?

interestingly and I may have said this before there was a guy on the radio the other week, who said he was a contractor working on HS2,  he said he wasn't allowed to work in the rain so on wet days he sit's in his car for 8 hours, and is paid for it. 

Not really strictly correct though is it ?

Private Sector Employers with over 250 employees are required to report annually on their gender pay gap.

Yes there is a greater legal requirement on public sector employers with regard to having due regard to promoting/monitoring etc. etc., though I am not sure they have greater reporting responsibilities. 

BP's Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap report is a total of 6 pages, and since that includes ethnicity as well I think it goes beyond their legal requirement. The linked HS2 report is 52 pages. While they may have the information to hand, producing and polishing up such a tome is not a zero cost thing. I note it also includes a load of gumph about their "inclusive community programs" etc. They also include a load of "case studies": these all take time to put together, wordsmith, and publish. And are almost certainly well outside the scope of any legal or HR requirement. 

In and of itself, clearly it doesn't account for 10's of billions of overspend on a monumentally mis managed white elephant. However, one might posit that it is indicative of an organisational culture that has little or no regard for cost management and the public purse, and is devoid of a proper sense of getting value for money (our money). 

There should be a law against it!

Oh, wait. There is. The Equality Act 2010.

I'm sure you did read it. Probably in the Mail or Express, maybe the Telegraph.

That doesn't mean it was actually TRUE, at least this side of the early '80s or so.

www.met.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/force-content/met/about-us/stride/stride-action-plan-2022-2023.pdf
Section 3, Commitment 9, p45 of the PDF

"From 2021, we have been aiming for 30% of our new recruits to be from ethnic minority backgrounds (excluding White minorities) and 40% to be women.
In 2022, these aspirations rise to 40% and 50% respectively"

"The diversity of new joiners continues to increase. During 2021-22 our new recruits were 39% female; 23% were from Black and other ethnic minority backgrounds, and 4.4% were Black."

www.police.uk/pu/your-area/metropolitan-police-service/performance/workforce-diversity/
Asian/Asian-British - London population 17% vs 5.9% police.
Black/Black-British - 13.3% vs 3.5%
Chinese/Other - 5% vs 2.2%
Mixed - 5% vs 3.5%
White - 59.8% vs 85%
Not one police force nationally has an ethnic mix that comes close to representative of the population of their area...

And, of course, it's a basic fact of human biology that just over 50% of the population is female.

Do you think that a body like the Met should aim to be representative of the population?
Do you think that the Met have a very specific historical legacy that they need to move away from, when it comes to ethnicity and diversity...?

Indeed they should.

And that's exactly what equality and diversity legislation, monitoring, and reporting should be ensuring.

I think one of the big disappointments of this whole fiasco is this focus on "high speed". I was thoroughly sceptical of the whole thing from the beginning based on the 'need for speed' and the justifications for it. It's different if you are travelling long distances across France, or across european countries, but not so much here on shorter journeys. Especially so in this age of being able to work on trains (nominally: I have typically found the WiFi connections on train services here to be abysmal, but that is fixable). 

But the lesser promoted point of HS2 is simply adding capacity to the route. And that IS needed. But instead of a project who's focus is new line at a little bit higher speed adding capacity, and freeing up slots for freight, we've got something whose specification has been gold plated to support super high speed services the need for which is highly dubious. I mean for gawd sake, they have built it to cope with speeds that are somewhat significantly higher than those on Europes high speed network. And are building trains for it whose top speed is a reasonable way below that. 

A major UK infrastructure project going badly wrong, going way over budget and schedule, and probably only got the go-ahead because of a "conspiracy" between industry and politicians to bury the true likely cost. The amount of additional tunnelling and putting track in cuttings I see has been blamed for significant overruns. But heh, so that means basically there was an assumption at the start that there wouldn't be huge amounts of pressure to actually reduce the impact on the environment.