HS2 would be a top project in the Swedish plan

One conversion makes HS2 and the Swedish plan comparable

Yes, with one conversion. Britain scores projects with a benefit-cost ratio, BCR: monetised benefit divided by cost, so 1.0 is break-even. Sweden uses the nettonuvärdeskvot, NNK: benefit minus cost, divided by cost, so break-even is zero. A BCR of 1.2 is an NNK of +0.2. The two systems price the same things, travel-time savings, traffic safety, emissions, and discount them over decades. The results fit on one ruler.

The Swedish reading comes from Innovationsföretagen's report 1 200 miljarder skäl att tänka nytt (Fredrik Bergström, May 2025), which weighted together Trafikverket's own impact assessments for every named object in the national plan proposal for 2026–2037. The portfolio lands at NNK −0.3: each invested krona returns monetised societal benefit worth about 70 öre. We take that number apart in what −0.3 actually means. Here is how it looks next to everyone else.

Not cash: an NNK measures monetised societal benefit, the value of saved travel time, fewer deaths on the road, lower emissions. It is not money back to the treasury. Effects that are not priced, such as defence readiness and resilience, sit outside the ratio, but that holds in every country on the ruler, in both directions, so the ranking stands. And the −0.3 covers the named new builds only: maintenance and minor upgrades, roughly half the plan, are profitable and not part of the figure.

Note the contrast. HS2, cut back in 2023 and treated as a national embarrassment in the British press, sits half an NNK step above the entire Swedish portfolio. And Sweden's own definition of a profitable project, NNK above 0.1 in Trafikverket's assessment guidance, sits four tenths above the plan.

Sweden is not worst in class; Norway is

No. Norway is, by a margin. The Norwegian government's fiscal policy council went through the projects in Nasjonal transportplan in its 2026 statement and put unprofitable transport projects at the top of its list of savings. Teknisk Ukeblad summarised the finding:

80 prosent av prosjektene i Nasjonal Transportplan har negativ samfunnsøkonomisk nytte, minus 142 milliarder kroner til sammen.

Denmark runs the other way: Nordic comparisons by TØI and the Concept research programme place Danish project profitability clearly above Norwegian and generally above Swedish, with the calculation carrying real weight in decisions. Sweden sits in between: better methodology and documentation than Norway, a larger share of profitable projects, and a portfolio that is negative anyway. A study of Swedish and Norwegian road investments by Eliasson, Börjesson, Odeck and Welde found that in Norway neither benefits nor costs affect which projects are selected; in Sweden, civil servants' rankings respond to benefit-cost ratios while politicians' decisions barely do.

Britain lets the appraisal number gate the project

Not the arithmetic. The appraisal methods are close cousins. The difference is what the number is allowed to do. The Department for Transport sorts every scheme into value-for-money categories: BCR 2 to 4 counts as high, and schemes below roughly 1.5 struggle to get funded. The calculation is a gate. It decides whether money moves.

In Sweden the calculation is an attachment. Trafikverket computes an NNK both for the objects that make the plan and for the candidates that are sorted out, and both groups land at −0.3; a lottery would have picked the same projects. The plan fixed in April 2026 commits 1,200 billion kronor, with a portfolio of named objects four tenths below the agency's own profitability bar. Nobody in that chain is doing the maths wrong. The system just never asks the maths for permission.

It was not always this way

No, and that may be the ruler's most important reading. The Norwegian council has documented the trajectory plan series by plan series: clearly positive net benefit per invested krone in the 1980s and 1990s, negative and sinking for roughly the past fifteen years. Sweden tracks the same curve one step behind: −0.2 in the 2018–2029 plan, −0.3 in the proposal for 2026–2037.

Part of the slide is structural. The most profitable links were built first, and a mature network yields less saved travel time per new kilometre. But structure does not explain the cost side: the average Swedish infrastructure project ends up 76 percent more expensive than planned, and most of that growth arrives during planning, before construction starts. Costs sit in the denominator of the ratio. Every krona of escalation in the planning years pushes the portfolio further below zero without a metre of railway being built.

Which is also why the ratio is not fate. Innovationsföretagen calculates that the sector's productivity slide costs 225 billion kronor in lost benefit over the plan period, a what-if, not a forecast. The lever is the planning years themselves: cheaper investigation and design iterations, calculations that keep pace with the documents beneath them, and more alternatives examined with the same scrutiny, not less. Lift the portfolio from −0.3 toward zero and projects that are unprofitable today become profitable. Same krona, more railway. On that ruler, HS2 is less a punchline than a benchmark: the scandal is not that Britain built it, but that it would have topped the Swedish plan.