HS2 will provide more track, more trains, more seats and faster journeys to improve performance and reliability across Britain’s rail network.” So says the hitherto dysfunctional organisation that has squandered billions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash with precious little to show for it.
A more accurate claim might be: “We have an unlimited pot of taxpayers’ money and we are going to spend it.”
New chief executive, Mark Wild, says the position he has inherited is “unacceptable” and that HS2 has “failed in its mission to control costs and deliver to schedule”.
“We must intervene to regain control of the programme and reset it to deliver at the lowest feasible cost, while maintaining safety and value for money.”
Since taking office, Labour has spent almost a year assembling evidence to pin the blame for the shambles on the Tories; now it must pick up the pieces and deliver at least something.
Heidi Alexander on Wednesday told the House of Commons she is drawing a “line in the sand” over the beleaguered rail project, which she called an “appalling mess,” and admitted there is no chance it will open by its most recent delayed target date of 2033.
These are the key questions and answers.
What is the history of high-speed rail in the UK?
High Speed One is the 68-mile fast railway line from London St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone in Kent, which opened in 2008. It cost less than £7bn, roughly £100m per mile.
High Speed Two is a much more ambitious rail project, originally involving 345 miles of new high-speed track. HS2 was designed to relieve pressure on the West Coast and East Coast main lines, to move intercity passengers to a dedicated network, reduce journey times and increase capacity.
The existing West Coast main line is the busiest intercity route in Europe, handling a mix of express passenger services, commuter trains and freight. There is no room for expansion, and the system has little resilience.
HS2 began as a dream in 2009, gathering all-party support for a project that would unify the nation with proper 21st-century rail connections from London to the Midlands and northern England, with improved journeys to Scotland. Trains were due to start running in 2026.
Sixteen years and about £40bn later, there is now no prospect of any high-speed trains running for another decade – after tens of billions more have been spent on an embarrassing stump of a line between London and Birmingham.
The total cost, estimated in 2010 at £33bn for the whole project, is now expected to reach as much as £100bn for a much-reduced line: the 140 miles of Phase 1, which will include stations at London Euston, Old Oak Common in west London, Interchange Station in Solihull and Birmingham Curzon Street. The cost per mile? About £700m.
What went wrong?
Wild says: “Construction commenced too soon, without the conditions to enable productive delivery, such as stable and consented designs. From the start, the cost and schedule estimates were optimistic with inadequate provision for risk.”
After signing nonsensical construction contracts that left taxpayers on the hook for spectacular overspends, a succession of ministers – in particular, transport secretaries – have wrought further expensive havoc by repeatedly changing their minds.
The most essential parts of the scheme – a northwestern leg to Crewe and Manchester, and a northeast leg to Sheffield and Leeds – were scrapped in an attempt to save money amid ballooning costs and to try to drum up votes from motorists.
In a crowded field of contenders for the most egregious act of vandalism against desperately needed national infrastructure, one figure stands out: Rishi Sunak, who scrapped the link to Manchester in a speech delivered… in Manchester. Britain’s then prime minister pretended the money saved would be spent on piecemeal transport improvements collectively called “Network North” – which turned out to include projects in Kent and Devon.
Did anybody notice?
Not HS2. As recently as August 2024, the organisation’s annual report claimed: “The forecast for initial services between Birmingham and Old Oak Common remains in the range 2029-2033.”
In July 2023 Mark Thurston resigned after six years as chief executive, during which he earned a total of £4,495,408. The-then transport secretary, Mark Harper, praised Mr Thurston’s work, saying: “I want to thank him for his work over the last six years on progressing Britain’s most transformative rail project.
“He successfully oversaw the start of construction and drove the project to full scale.”
But the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, which reports to the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury, concluded in 2023: “There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
The Department for Transport (DfT) now says: “The long-running failure to manage the programme effectively, along with repeated de-scoping under previous governments, means that the programme will not achieve its original mission and has undermined the remaining delivery.”
Through all this, HS2 Ltd has demonstrated “insufficient capability and capacity in key commercial and technical functions” – according to current CEO Wild.
One example quoted by the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander: “Between 2019 and 2023, HS2 Ltd provided initial designs for Euston station, coming in almost £2bn over budget. When asked for a more affordable option, they offered one costing £400m more than the first attempt. The word ‘affordable’ was clearly not part of the HS2 lexicon.
“Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been wasted by constant scope changes, ineffective contracts and bad management.”
When HS2 finally opens, how much faster will the journey be?
The current claim is that the trip from London Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street will take 45 minutes, compared with 77 minutes at present on the conventional line. Initially, though, trains will run only from Old Oak Common in west London. And, says Wild, the line might open at “slightly reduced running speed”. So let’s call it 50 minutes.
HS2 claims: “Our high-speed trains will continue to Manchester, the North West and Scotland using the conventional railway network, cutting journey times.”
But the originally planned trip from London to Manchester of 67 minutes – almost halving the current journey time – will be much longer. With the new line northwest to Crewe and Manchester scrapped, the final section of HS2 will be a link running north from Birmingham to Handsacre Junction, where it will join the existing and heavily congested West Coast main line.
Is there any hope for the northern section?
A lower-cost, “quite high speed” link from Birmingham to Crewe and Manchester could provide some connectivity. The transport guru Thomas Ableman says: “The purpose of HS2 is an investment to transform the economics of this country. At the moment, Britain is one of the most unequal countries when it comes to productivity: London, incredibly high; cities of the North, some of the lowest in Europe.
“This is about equalising that and it’s absolutely the right thing to do. Does that mean it needs to be a 200mph or 225mph railway? Almost certainly not. Putting in place the capacity to make that transformational change possible is far more important than the precise specification that was developed for the original HS2 project.
“Quite frankly, HS2 has become something of a toxic term. A more conventional railway that provides the connectivity, provides the capacity could be exactly the way of unlocking what would otherwise be a very knotty political problem.”
