If I worked in the DfT my first challenge to NR would be to explain in very fine detail why our schemes cost more than the EU average, in a line by line basis. It is entirely normal for infrastructure funders/sponsors to rely on benchmarks for an indication of what something should cost. Any variance then has to be justified on a line by line basis. The variance is then interrogated to establish whether the gap can be closed without adversely affecting whole life costs.
In public, NR and many commentators always just refer to a bucket of types of problems apparently unique to our not that unique railway. The more detailed analysis might be taken place in the background but I am not convinced.
Any competent funder/sponsor should also be undertaking this exercise when a project goes outside the tramlines. I very much hope this happened with GW electrification but I fear not. We are in an era of extremely passive and often badly educated project sponsors, particularly on the public side. Government loves to say, 'that's not us, it's down to the experts like NR'. If you are procuring something, especially using public money, your procurement team needs to have sufficient in-house expertise to interrogate absolutely everything. The other tendency is to use external advisors to do this but that doesn't work either as they will never be sufficiently motivated. They also struggle to advise properly where the sponsor's internal project development team does not contain sufficient internal expertise.
