The UK's high-speed rail project, HS2, is now expected to cost up to £102.7bn, with trains running slower than originally planned and arriving up to six years later than the most recent official target of 2033. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander announced the grim new figures in the House of Commons, framing them as a "reset" of what she called a "litany of failure" inherited from the previous government.
"Instead of signalling the country's ambition, HS2 became a signal of the country's decline," Alexander told MPs, delivering the kind of brutally honest eulogy usually reserved for a beloved pet or a failed startup. The project, originally forecast to cost £50.1bn in 2011 prices (about £75bn today when adjusted for inflation), is now pegged at between £87.7bn and £102.7bn in 2025 prices. "If it seems like an obscene increase in time and costs, it is because it is," she added, in case anyone thought the numbers were a typo.
To save money - and who doesn't love savings of up to £2.5bn? - the top speed of HS2 trains will be dialled back from the originally planned 360km/h (224mph) to a more pedestrian 320km/h, which the government notes is in line with high-speed services in Europe and Japan. The slower speed may also allow the project to be delivered a year earlier, though "earlier" here is relative: the first services between Old Oak Common in west London and Birmingham Curzon Street won't start until between 2036 and 2039, and the full service from London Euston to Curzon Street, plus a connection to the West Coast Main Line, is expected to run between 2040 and 2043.
Alexander attributed two-thirds of the cost increase to an underestimate of costs by the previous government, inefficient delivery, and works being missed from the original plan. One-third is due to inflation. Despite the eye-watering numbers, she vowed the government will deliver the project "to completion," adding: "We will get the job done but we will also take every opportunity to save time and money in the process, getting a grip on delivery, controlling costs, and stripping out the complexity that's plagued the project in the past." The original 2013 forecast, by the way, was based on the line going all the way to Manchester and Leeds; it now ends at Birmingham. Progress, of a sort.