A Hong Kong Select Committee found Chew Tai-chong had deliberately covered up high-speed rail project delays with “startling and unacceptable” behaviour

The MTR Projects Director accused of a “deliberate cover-up” of budget, labour and construction problems with the Hong Kong Express Rail Link (XRL) has surfaced as a leading proponent of the UK’s rail and road transformation initiative.

Chew Tai-chong, who was Projects Director with MTR for the XRL project between 2010 and 2014, and is now Director and Global Rail Leader, Arup, is billed top of the review panel for the Labour Government’s Rail and Urban Transport Review, an ambitious masterplan claiming to put public transport and active travel at the top of the UK’s development agenda and double rail’s share of journeys.

Announcing the review, Chew is quoted as saying “Transformative approaches such as ‘Greener, Faster, Cheaper’ will ensure infrastructure projects are delivered on time and within budget.”

Yet just eight years ago, Chew stood accused of miscommunication, mismanagement and, according to a Legislative Council Select Committee, a deliberate cover-up of the delays and HK$10 billion budget overruns to the XRL project, which was eventually pushed back two years to 2017 from a target commencement of 2015.

The Committee found that both Chew and his CEO Jay Walder had deliberately covered up delays, with Chew blamed for keeping labour shortages and cost-overruns quiet for years and failing to inform the government or even his bosses about mounting problems in the early years of the project.

At the time, the Select Committee said it understood large infrastructure projects might overrun.

“However, it is a serious matter if the parties concerned have deliberately covered up the project delay when the target completion date of the Project was in jeopardy, bearing in mind at all times that the Project was publicly funded.”

A press release from MTR used a black rainstorm to bury news of delays which had been brewing since the beginning of the project: LegCo found this to be misleading

The Committee also found the MTR had used a 2014 black rainstorm and tunnel flood damage as a scapegoat to finally announce inevitable delays to the public, when in fact the rainstorm was just one small contributing factor.

“Before the black rainstorm on 30 March 2014, [Chew] had known that the target to complete the Project by August 2015 had become impossible to achieve,” said the committee in 2016.

“The Select Committee finds the failure of [Chew] to properly report the progress and the challenges of the Project to the Board startling and unacceptable,” said the final report.

Chew refused to appear before the Select Committee inquiry, claiming he had retired from MTR and had nothing to add.

While Chew’s bio page on Arup’s website details his work on railways projects in Hong Kong, including the West Island Line and Shatin to Central Line, it glosses over the XRL project, mentioning only “high-speed rail projects”.

Arup and review publisher Urban Transport Group were contacted for comment.

At the launch of the Rail and Urban Transport Review, commissioned by the Labour Government while still in opposition last year, Louise Haigh, the UK’s Secretary of State for Transport, said the UK public were “sick and tired of broken promises on transport infrastructure”.

“We are clear that we will deliver value for the taxpayer while turbocharging delivery of transport projects,” she said.

The Rail and Urban Transport Review’s main recommendation is to create a Transport Strategy for England (TSE) and develop a “transformative framework” to reduce project delivery costs by 20% and timelines 25%, it says.

UK rail expert Gareth Dennis reviewed the report on his RailNatter podcast last night, finding much to support but saying he wished it would be “punchier” in terms of explaining how some of the plans would be paid for.

He said the proposal to double rail’s modal share in 10 years was exciting to see. “I’ve been banging that drum for a little while,” he said. “That is big and good. And will Labour pick that up? No. Because to achieve that modal shift requires major capital investment.”

Dennis estimated the government needed to invest at least GBP100 billion to double urban rail use, while the Labour government had so far committed, Dennis said, “zero pounds of rail capital investment”.