Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander announced fresh delays and soaring costs for the troubled rail project in the Commons. HS2 has been heavily criticised
HS2 has turned into a £102.7billion rail farce that will not even be up and running until at least 2036 and cost more than Nasa’s recent mission to the moon, ministers have admitted.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander announced fresh delays and soaring costs for the troubled rail project in the Commons. She glumly announced: “It gives me no pleasure to say the expected cost of completing HS2 is now between £87.7bn and £102.7bn, priced in 2025.
“Two-thirds of this increase is down to past misunderstanding of the work required, underestimation and inefficiency. The remaining third is linked to inflation, which was not factored into previous cost estimates regularly enough.”
Its trains are set to run slower than first promised on the stripped-back London to Birmingham line. They will now run at a maximum speed of 199mph instead of the originally planned 224mph.
Officials hope slowing services down will help cut construction costs and speed up the delayed scheme. For comparison, Nasa’s Artemis II programme is projected to cost around £70billion between 2012 and 2025, with the total expected to hit £78billion by 2028 when astronauts are due to land on the moon again.
A major review by former national security adviser Sir Stephen Lovegrove is expected to blast the “gold plating” of HS2. The report is set to accuse bosses of chasing the “highest possible speeds” with expensive bespoke designs that sent costs spiralling.
The line was originally supposed to open in 2026 and cost £32.7billion. But Ms Alexander said the first train services won’t begin running until at least May 2036 and possibly not until October 2039.
Full HS2 services from Euston to Handsacre junction won’t begin until May 2040 at the earliest and potentially as late as 2043, she added. She slammed the “shocking legacy” scheme, saying Labour have inherited a “litany of failure”, with billions of pounds “sunk” into a section that was “abruptly cancelled”.
She added: “Instead of signalling the country’s ambition, HS2 became a symbol of this country’s decline. After more than five years of construction and over £40bn spent, the country was no closer to having an operational HS2 railway than when construction first began.”
The budget ballooned after years of delays, redesigns and the scrapping of planned routes to Manchester and Leeds.
Britain Remade chief executive Sam Richards said HS2 had become “a case study in how not to build infrastructure”. He blamed “gold-plated design choices” and costly extras including the controversial £125million bat tunnel.
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