Soaring prices, as soon as inexperienced fields turned to mounds of earth and staff scrolling on their telephones for hours – how HS2 turned a £640million per mile nationwide humiliation

The 120-mile-long construction site that is HS2 has become such a muddy wasteland that it shows up on satellite images far more prominently than any motorway. 

Nowhere is it more of a mess than between Steeple Claydon and Calvert, Buckinghamshire. Some roads are closed, others lead to depots filled with lorries. Great earth mounds rise skywards where green fields used to lie.

Locals living near what used to be cherished countryside complain of deafening noises on the rare occasion when any work seems to be being done, which some liken to a Chinook helicopter taking off, and constant diversions.

One of the joys of living in the area used to be walking around the Calvert Jubilee Nature Reserve yet earlier this month a padlocked gate appeared, with a sign reading ‘path closed’.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ says Phil Gaskin, chairman of Calvert Green parish council. ‘They already have a ten-foot high fence separating their works from the nature reserve, so the only explanation for this is that they don’t want local people to see what they are up to.’

No wonder. This is the site of the infamous £100million ‘bat tunnel’, which has been widely derided, even by Keir Starmer. What adds to locals’ exasperation is that when they do manage to sneak a look, they often see construction workers doing very little at all.

‘When they were putting in the temporary road they had to put in pedestrian crossings and they had seven men doing it, five of whom were standing around doing next to nothing,’ says Mr Gaskin.

Frank Mahon, a councillor who runs the Prince of Wales pub in Steeple Claydon, similarly recounts tales of inactivity. He says: ‘I typically see a dozen guys standing around in high-vis, scrolling on their phones.’ He claims they can be doing that for ‘eight hours… Weeks will go by with nothing going on.’

Locals suspect there may be serious problems.

A nearby bridge that has been completed is rumoured to be sinking, and another one built for the line had to close because of cracks. ‘It really is one thing after another,’ said Mr Mahon.

‘The bridge at Twyford has taken two years so far and the road closures are due to last until November of this year.’

How much longer this tract of rural England will remain in this state is anyone’s guess. The trains were supposed to be running by now, earning Britain the bragging rights of having the fastest railway in the world. 

Instead, HS2 has become a national embarrassment, and an object lesson in how not to conduct an infrastructure project. The only records broken relate to the cost.

On the day in March 2010 that the HS2 project was officially launched by Gordon Brown’s government, Michael Crick, BBC Newsnight’s political editor, leant on a gate in the Chilterns and told viewers: ‘By 2026 trains could be shooting along a cutting in this very spot at 250mph.’

On the same day, the Prime Minister visited the site of the proposed station in Birmingham, where passengers could be sped to London in just 50 minutes, and told the world: ‘This is the transformation of the possibilities for rail travel.’

Then-transport secretary Andrew Adonis, meanwhile, described it as ‘the great infrastructure project of the 21st century’. The cost of the first leg between the cities was put at up to £17billion – a price tag that shocked some critics. 

The full project, with branches to Manchester and Leeds, was costed at £32billion.

Even then, some complained that the project was already suffering from five years of dither, having originally been proposed in 2005.

The Conservatives, still two months away from returning to government after Brown’s general election defeat, wanted to know why it was going to take until 2017 for construction work to begin. They promised to start the bulldozers by 2015.

How naively optimistic it all looks now. As it turned out, work on HS2 didn’t start – under the Tories – until 2020. We are still the best part of a decade away from having any track or trains.

The company recently announced the completion of the two-mile Colne viaduct over a marshy area to the west of London. It looks impressive, yet only two of 52 viaducts that will have to be built have so far been finished, along with 19 of 169 bridges. 

While four tunnels have been completed and 105million cubic metres of earth have so far been moved, this is only 70 per cent of what will be required.

As for £17billion seeming too much money in 2010, up until April last year HS2 Ltd had already blown £40.5billion building the partly-completed line.

A further £25.3billion has been allocated to the project by the Government until 2030.

Yet the line is not now expected to open until 2033 at the earliest, and HS2 is reported to be once more on the point of revising its estimate of the final cost upwards to more than £100billion.

Even allowing for inflation, the truncated line to Birmingham looks like it will cost four times as much as was originally estimated, and twice as much as the full ‘Y’-shaped line to Manchester and Leeds was supposed to cost.

According to the Transit Costs Project, an initiative by New York University to compare the cost of transport infrastructure around the world, HS2 is by far the most expensive high-speed rail project in the world, ever.

At £640million per mile, it is three times as expensive as HS1, the Channel Tunnel rail link through Kent, completed in 2008. Apart from a tricky line through the Japanese mountains, no other high-speed line has cost more than £150million per km.

What has gone wrong with a project that was supposed to transform rail travel, regenerate the North and showcase British industry? After all, it is hardly as if Britain is new to building railways – 200 years ago, we showed the world how to do it.

The original London to Birmingham line was built by Robert Stephenson in just four years in the 1830s – and that was without modern earth-moving equipment, just 20,000 Irish navvies working with pickaxes. 

In September 2024, the Government commissioned a review from James Stewart, former head of infrastructure projects at the Treasury, into why HS2 has proved to be so expensive and so delayed.

He confirmed what many critics had been saying for years: that HS2 was misconceived from the start. The insistence on building the fastest railway in the world ‘dramatically increased cost’, he said. The faster a railway line, the straighter it has to be.

That means that HS2 has had to plough through rather than go around obstacles. It has required far more bridges, embankments and tunnels than would have been required for a railway line designed, say, for speeds of 186mph, which is standard on many French TGV lines.

Stewart found that there had been an obsession with coming up with ‘iconic designs and state of the art civil engineering solutions’ rather than standardised designs, which could have cut costs.

The bat tunnel – a 900m-long structure designed to prevent the killing of bats by high-speed trains – is just the tip of a sprawling and vastly expensive iceberg.

Showing that the company has learned little, HS2 Ltd’s head of natural environment David Prys-Jones last week said the bat tunnel delivers ‘value’.

That was a rather different opinion than that of HS2’s former chair, Sir Jon Thompson, who told a conference in 2024 that there was no evidence bat colonies were in any danger from HS2 trains, anyway. 

In many places, construction began before the design work was even complete, leading to a lot of chopping and changing as modifications have had to be made.

In spite of HS2 taking an age to build, Stewart found that some work was rushed as a result of ‘pressure from politicians to maintain momentum’ on the project, as well as by a fear that the project would be cancelled – spend enough money quickly, in other words, and the government would be less likely to pull the plug.

But worst of all is the way in which construction contracts were drawn up with a perverse incentive for contractors to increase costs. This is now admitted by the new CEO of HS2 Ltd, Mark Wild, who wrote to the Transport Secretary last year to explain what had gone wrong. 

Construction companies, he confessed, had been employed on a discredited form of contract called ‘cost plus’ – which pays contractors whatever they claim it cost to do the work plus a thick slice of profit on top.

‘The commercial strategy put almost all risk on HS2 Ltd,’ he wrote – by which, of course, he meant the taxpayer. There have been accusations of outright fraud, too. 

Last July, the Department for Transport announced an investigation into allegations of inflated invoices and improper PAYE charges.

It is astonishing that in spite of labour-saving construction equipment, which would have been unimaginable in the 19th century, HS2 employs more workers – 33,000 – than were employed by Robert Stephenson on the first London to Birmingham rail line. What are they all doing?

Confirming what locals have been saying about idle workers, the Daily Mail visited the Calvert Green construction site. We observed that one steamroller driver spent the best part of an hour just scrolling on his phone.

Another worker leant over some barriers staring at his own screen for 30 minutes, and a lorry driver wearing a white helmet came out of his vehicle to have a cigarette and look at his device.

HS2 Ltd says it is now concentrating on a section of track between Birmingham and the Wendover tunnel in the Chilterns, in order to provide somewhere to test the trains. 

That might explain why some construction sites either side of this section are quiet, yet Calvert Green is bang in the middle of the section that is supposed to have been prioritised and where work should be racing ahead.

Another reason for the high cost of HS2 has been the price of property. While the terrain of the route is not especially challenging, it is peppered with some very expensive homes. Moreover, homeowners were offered more generous arrangements than is the case for other infrastructure schemes such as motorways.

HS2 Ltd hasn’t just bought properties that needed to be demolished for the line; it has bought dozens on either side, which would have been ‘blighted’ by the project. 

Those whose homes were up to 120m away were offered the chance to sell their properties at the full market rate. 

Those up to 180m away were offered £24,000 in compensation and those 300m away £8,000.

As a result, the Government paid a little shy of £4billion to acquire property along the line, and has built up a portfolio of over 1,700 residential, commercial or agricultural buildings, which are still standing. Some were bought even after the section of line for which they were needed was cancelled. These had been lined-up by the Tories to be sold, but the Labour Government stopped the sales while it considers an alternative, lower speed line between Birmingham and Manchester.

Just under three quarters of them are tenanted and are thus at least earning some money for the taxpayer. The rest are lying empty yet still have to be maintained at public expense.

One of them, Stanthorne Hall near Middlewich, Cheshire, where Charles Dickens is reputed to have written Great Expectations – something of an ironic title, given the history of the infrastructure project – was bought by HS2 Ltd for £3.8million in 2023, just months before then-prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that the putative Manchester leg of the line on which it stood was going to be axed.

An HS2 document from 2024 revealed that the company was planning to spend £500,000 on works including fixing the chimney and roof. Yet in spite of two members of the Georgian Society wanting to rent the property, it still stands empty.

In Whitmore Heath, Staffordshire, HS2 purchased six homes for a total of £5.9million. Three were later tenanted but three were left empty, one of which, its former owner was distressed to learn, had been broken into and used as a cannabis farm.

The Old Rectory Cottage in the village of Swynnerton, Staffordshire, is another which lies empty. The elegant Georgian home was bought by HS2 Ltd for £1.5million just weeks before the cancellation of the northern leg in 2023.

‘Security come at least once a day and they’ve also had tree surgeons in the grounds,’ says one local resident. ‘Why are we paying to keep homes empty when they say there is a housing shortage?’

Sunflower Farmhouse in Chetwode, Buckinghamshire, lies in disrepair having been spared demolition. A neighbour told the Daily Mail the £1million property ‘has been abandoned to the elements, but gardeners go in there regularly to maintain the grounds. God knows why!’

These homes and dozens like them stand empty and unloved, living monuments to the upended lives of their former owners and the hubris that has driven the HS2 project since the beginning.

Additional reporting by Nick Fagge and James Fielding