Huw Merriman’s ‘impossible to stop’ rail vision: delivery lessons for UK project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
High Speed Rail Group chair and former rail minister Huw Merriman is urging UK rail schemes to be planned with an “impossible to stop” mindset so they can withstand changes of government and policy reversals like the curtailed HS2 Phase 2. He argues for earlier land assembly, clearer long-term funding envelopes and stronger statutory protections in development consent orders to lock in route alignments and major structures. For designers and contractors, this points to front-loading optioneering, safeguarding corridors and integrating phasing so partially built assets retain standalone operational value.
Technical Brief
- Land acquisition is framed as a geotechnical and alignment‑locking tool, not just a planning formality.
- Contractors are expected to sequence earthworks, structures and systems so each stage yields usable capacity.
- Merriman links political reversals directly to stranded assets and abortive spend on partially completed structures.
- For future corridors, he implies early definition of grade separations, station boxes and major cuttings is essential.
Our Take
With Balfour Beatty recently joining the High Speed Rail Group (HSRG), the organisation now has direct access to one of the UK’s largest design-and-build contractors, which strengthens its ability to present ‘shovel-ready’ technical options that are harder for future governments to unwind.
Across our 881 Infrastructure stories, UK rail policy pieces involving HSRG sit in a small subset where advocacy groups are tightly linked to major delivery partners, suggesting that any long-term rail vision Merriman backs will likely be framed around continuity of supply chains as much as around political consensus.
Because this is tagged as both Op-Ed and Projects rather than pure policy, it signals that the debate around making UK rail schemes ‘impossible to stop’ is already being translated into project-level delivery questions, such as contract phasing and staged approvals that can survive changes in government priorities.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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