Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander gave a significant update on the costs and timetable of the High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project, which has suffered major delays and spiralling costs
The scandal-hit HS2 rail project may not be completed for another 17 years, the Transport Secretary has announced.
Heidi Alexander said the cost of finishing the scheme is now expected to be between £87.7billion and £102.7billion. The first services may not start running until 2039, while the full scheme may not be completed until 2043. Speeds of HS2 trains will also be lowered to 320km/h to save money and construction time.
In a statement to the Commons, She told MPs: “We now expect first services to run from Old Oak Common to Birmingham Curzon Street between May 2036 and October 2039, and where the previous government could not say when the full HS2 scheme between Euston and Handsacre junction would be delivered, I now expect that will happen between May 2040 and December 2043.”
The first phase of the railway was originally planned to launch in 2026. Ms Alexander criticised a “litany of failure” under the Tories for the delays and revealed the previous Conservative administrations “spent most of HS2’s budget without laying a single metre of its track”.
High Speed 2 – known as HS2 – was originally commissioned to run at 360km/h, which would have made its trains the fastest conventional high-speed trains anywhere in the world. Ms Alexander branded the focus on record speeds a Tory “vanity project”, warning that the UK is not the size of China and does not need trains that fast.
Lowering the speed of the trains to 320km/h will bring HS2 in line with high-speed models such as HS1, Japan’s bullet trains and France’s TGV network. Most high speed trains in Britain run at up to 200km/h. China and Spain have the highest design speeds of 350km/h.
Ms Alexander’s update came alongside a major review of HS2 failings, written by former National Security Advisor Sir Stephen Lovegrove. It criticises the damage to the project by “changing objectives and political priorities” over the years, as well as the relentless focus on achieving the highest possible speeds.
Ms Alexander told MPs: “It talks about the focus, and I quote, on the highest possible speeds, resulting in bespoke and highly engineered design. To translate, it was a massively overspent folly with the prospect of the fastest trains anywhere in the world tickling the fancy of Conservative ministers.
“If we were a country the size of China, I could understand it. But we are not. Passengers just want reliable trains that turn up when they’re supposed to. More services and more seats. They want a common sense approach that gets them the railway they deserve, not a vanity project with trains so fast that proper testing couldn’t be done until track and railway systems were complete.”
Ruth Cadbury, chair of the transport select committee, told The Mirror on Monday: “Everyone would like to see a new target date but it has to be one that is realistic and deliverable.
“I think there’s a general agreement that trying to be the fastest high-speed rail in the world was overly ambitious and at significant cost and isn’t particularly necessary in a country as small as the UK.”
She added that Lovegrove’s report is intended to help learn “lessons not just on HS2 but also other infrastructure projects”.
Constructing the high-speed line from London to Birmingham – plus the now abandoned onward legs to Leeds and Manchester – was initially estimated to cost £32.7billion (in 2011 prices), but the budget has spiralled. In January 2024, HS2 Ltd’s then-executive chairman Sir Jon Thompson said the estimated cost of building HS2 between the capital and Birmingham had reached as much as £66.6billion (in prices at that time).
The Financial Times reported that Labour ministers commissioned an internal review into whether scrapping the entire project would be better value for money than continuing with it. This found that abandoning the scheme – which has already cost an estimated £40billion – would cost at least as much as completing it.
HS2 Ltd Mark Wild warned the Department for Transport that cancelling a programme of the scale of HS2 is “unprecedented in the Western world”.
He wrote in a letter: “Our collective assessment of the current legal position is that land should be fully remediated, which would include demolishing all built assets, and returning land to the same condition as prior to construction to allow it to be potentially sold back to its original owners where appropriate.” He added: “There is little evidence that removing these assets would cost much less than creating them.”