The boss of the HS2 rail project has admitted the budget has doubled in five years, calling the increase in costs “terrible news”.
The expected cost of completing the high-speed railway is now between £87.7 billion and £102.7 billion in 2025 prices, the government announced on Tuesday – almost £60bn more than originally expected.
Chief executive Mark Wild told the Transport Select Committee on Wednesday: “Let’s just acknowledge this is terrible news, and we have to really think about the reasons for that.”
The new target opening schedule for HS2 is between May 2036 and October 2039, 13 years later than planned. Mr Wild told MPs he is “very confident that these bookends of time and cost are robust”.
The “reset” of HS2 has “taken a whole year”, he added, and he was given “the time and space to go through this job with a fine-tooth comb”.
He told the committee that after five years of HS2 civil engineering, he knows “how much it costs to move a cubic metre of earth” and cost and schedule ranges have been subjected to “a very, very thorough assurance”.
Mr Wild, who began his role in December 2024, added: “I’m not here to criticise what was done in 2020. I wasn’t here.
“What I do know is that these ranges have been subject to the most detailed scrutiny from people who really know how to build these projects. For those reasons I really do think these are robust.”
Mr Wild said the “singular root cause” of the project’s huge cost increase was that work started onsite “with immaturity of design”.
Asked about the need to use ranges to estimate the cost and schedule, he said his previous role at Crossrail – building the infrastructure used by London’s Elizabeth Line – taught him “best practice is to use a range” when dealing with “things in the future that are uncertain”.
He added: “There is still a great deal of uncertainty in this programme,” and warned: “Mistakes projects have made in the past, including Crossrail, was becoming hostage to fortune of unrealistic forward-leaning dates.”
Rail minister Lord Hendy told the committee: “Anybody listening to this would be rightly horrified.”
He explained when he started in his role in July 2024, HS2 Ltd presented him with figures which had “no substance”. He added: “This is a disastrous place to be with the project at this stage.”
He said the government is “confident” about the process now in place, but “you wouldn’t half have liked this process to have started quite a long time ago”.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander also revealed on Tuesday that trains will run slower than planned, with the maximum speed of services being 320kmh (199mph), down from the original design of 360kmh (224mph).
Earlier this year, it was reported that HS2 bosses would explore the possibility of making the trains slower as ministers consider ways to cut spiralling costs on the embattled scheme, in a move branded “unwise” by unions.
Ms Alexander said the cost increase was mostly because of “past misunderstanding of the work required, underestimation and inefficiency, issues within the control of HS2 Ltd, some of its suppliers, and previous governments”.
She told MPs in the Commons she was “angry” about the “obscene increase in time and costs”, which she blamed on “the failures of successive Conservative governments”.
Constructing the line from London to Birmingham – including the now-abandoned onward legs to Leeds and Manchester scrapped by the Conservatives, as first revealed by The Independent – was initially estimated to cost £32.7bn in 2011 prices, but the budget has spiralled.
Mr Wild also pleaded with ministers last week not to cancel the project altogether in an extraordinary letter to the government.
In a letter sent on Friday and published on Tuesday, he said the cost of cancellation and remediation works to areas where building has already started could range from £33bn to as high as £58bn.
“Cancelling a programme of the scale of HS2 is unprecedented in the Western world. Accurate estimates are impossible to benchmark,” he wrote.
He said removing the assets already built could be “more complex”, as the structures “are designed to last for 120 years and not to be dismantled”.
Reacting to the increase in project time and costs, former Tory minister Sir Gavin Williamson, whose Staffordshire constituency has been heavily impacted by work on the line, said: "The cost and lack of control of HS2 is having an enormous impact not just on my constituents in terms of disruption but in terms of the pockets of everyone in this country.
"This is a busted project that has caused misery and just needs to be brought to a close as quickly as possible."
