On 19 May, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander announced updated HS2 costs and timescales following a project reset led by HS2’s CEO, Mark Wilde. The headline figures were that:
HS2 will cost between £87.7 million and £102.7 million at 2025 prices.
Services between Old Oak Common and Birmingham will commence between 2036 and 2039 with three trains per hour.
HS2 services from Euston to Manchester, Glasgow, and other destinations via Handsacre Junction will commence between 2040 and 2043 with 10 trains per hour.
At a Transport Select Committee hearing, HS2 CEO Mark Wilde advised that he was confident about this cost and schedule as he had been given the time to do a proper reset which had been subject to thorough, independent checks. He also explained how HS2 Ltd had been reorganised to remove 300 back-office roles while strengthening and empowering delivery teams to ensure the project is built to cost and schedule.
The Transport Secretary’s statement also described the measures taken to bring HS2 under control. It also included various political comments such as that “the previous government spent most of HS2’s budget without laying a single metre of its track,” which shows a lack of understanding of how new railways are built.
She advised that to date £49 million had been spent on HS2. She also noted that two thirds of the cost increase was due to underestimation and inefficiency with the remaining third due to inflation.
Poor cost control
In Issue 215 (Jul-Aug 2025) Rail Engineer reported Alexander’s announcement of the HS2 project reset in June 2025. This feature also summarised the Stewart Review of how the Department for Transport (DfT) assures the delivery of major projects with reference to HS2. In summary, this showed that HS2’s costs had been driven up by a failure of cost control with a lack of a culture to reduce costs, schedule prioritised over cost, changing scope requirements, environmental decisions, and cost estimate optimism. Amongst his recommendations was the need to renegotiate HS2’s main works civils contracts.
A further HS2 review by Sir Stephen Lovegrove was published at the same time as the recent HS2 reset announcement. This endorsed the Stewart Review’s conclusions and specifically considered lessons for the Civil Service. In essence, this showed that HS2 did not have an effective client as the Civil Service did not have the required capability for this role and so “failed to recognise the scale of the remaining intrinsic risk in the project.”
Lovegrove was also critical of HS2’s weak control environment. He found that HS2’s board did not effectively challenge its executive, in part because the board was not provided with adequate information. Lovegrove also found that both the Civil Service and HS2 placed too much reliance on consultants.
2040s completion
With the main HS2 civil works commencing in 2020, it will have taken over 20 years to complete the 205km project to enable its trains to provide services to Manchester, Glasgow, and other destinations on the West Coast Main Line (WCML). This compares with eight years to build the 232km TGV Atlantique and 472km Madrid to Seville high speed lines.
In addition to the project control issues, the Stewart Review also shows how consents and political decisions have delayed the project. Other factors delaying the project include the Spending Review cap and Euston station.
The 2025 Spending Review capped the annual HS2 spend to around £7 billion per year for the next five years. As a result, the project will take longer to complete. This defers benefits and will increase in total project cost by an estimated £6 billion. The 28km section of HS2 from the Delta Junction outside Birmingham to Handsacre Junction has been paused because of this cap.
Work on HS2’s Euston station started in 2015 and was paused in 2023 to keep expenditure within the Spending Review cap. By then the station design had not been finalised despite multiple redesigns. It was then proposed that the station would be funded by private finance. The current intention is that HS2 Euston will be part funded by a tax increment financing-style mechanism.
While the initial HS2 service will be between Old Oak Common and Birmingham, operating a full HS2 WCML service from Old Oak Common would result in significant overcrowding on the Elizabeth Line which is unlikely to be acceptable. Hence, as indicated in Alexander’s statement, it is likely that HS2 WCML services will require the completion of HS2’s Euston station.
HS2’s scope
In her statement the Transport Secretary refers to HS2 being a vanity project with trains faster than passengers want. Hence, she wished “gold plating” to be removed from the project. Yet, as the Stewart and Lovegrave reports show, HS2’s high cost is primarily due to poor project control. Furthermore, significant costs were added to HS2 after additional tunnels and other requirements were added to the project during the Parliamentary Bill stage.
In response to her request, HS2’s Mark Wilde recommended that the maximum line speed be reduced from 360 to 320 km/h, that Automatic Train Operation (ATO) be removed, and that the ETCS specification be reduced. He estimates that these three measures will save up to £2.5 billion of project costs. In respect of the reduced speed, he advised that there would be no operational cost saving as additional staff costs from slower running would be comparable with energy cost savings.
Though HS2’s 360 km/h speed and ATO are said to be examples of HS2’s gold-plating, such decisions should be judged against the requirements of the full Y-network to Manchester and Leeds that was originally planned. It is disappointing to hear senior figures advise Parliamentary committees that they did not know why decisions were taken to gold plate the project despite there being various Government publications explaining these decisions at the time.
Furthermore, at the TSC hearing Rail Minister Lord Hendy advised that it was “astonishing that HS2 was predicated on ATO, a system that has not yet been invented.” This statement seems to relate to the use of ATO with ETCS which Thameslink has been doing since 2019. Hendy also advised that 320km/h trains could be tested on HS1 which is not possible as HS2 trains will have ETCS signalling which is not used on HS1.
ATO was specified to enable HS2 to operate 18 trains per hour to make the best use of its expensive infrastructure. It is now not needed for the current requirement of 10 trains per hour. In respect of speed, with only Phase 1 built, only 138km of HS2 will have 360km/h running. Hence, the decision to reduce maximum speed to 320 km/h only increases running time by three minutes.
To accommodate 10 trains per hour HS2 Euston station will have six platforms, though there will be passive provision for the construction of additional platforms for future expansion of services.
HS2 trains
Rolling stock was not mentioned in the HS2 reset statement. The £2 billion contract for 54 x 200-metre HS2 trains was awarded to a Hitachi/Alstom joint venture in December 2021. At the time it was expected that the first trains would be produced in 2027 with passenger services starting between 2029 and 2033.
It is understood that production of these trains has been deferred by a few years to take account of the reset HS2 programme. Yet it seems likely that all these trains will have been built well before HS2 WCML services start in the early 2040s. As there will then be more trains than those required to operate the initial Old Oak Common to Birmingham HS2 service, it is to be hoped that they can be used on the conventional network prior to then.
As reported in Issue 219 (Mar-April 2026), the eventual use of 200-metre HS2 trains on WCML services is problematic as they have fewer seats than the current WCML Pendolino trains. Yet this won’t now be an issue until HS2 trains join the WCML in the early 2040s. By then the Pendolinos will be life expired.
With only HS2 Phase 1 built, its time saving of around 20 minutes is comparable with the current time savings on Pendolino tilting trains on a London to Glasgow journey. A decision on the specification for a replacement fleet will be required in a few years’ time as these trains could provide the required longer trains and may need tilt to minimise journey times.
There has been speculation that the existing HS2 train contact will be varied to provide longer trains although as described above this will not now be an issue until the 2040s. The recent letting of a construction contract for Washwood Heath train depot indicates that HS2 train length will not be changed as longer trains would require a change to the design of the depot which is now being built. A recent TSC hearing was also advised that there were no immediate plans to vary train order. However, the train contract still needs to be varied in respect of the production delay and removal of ATO.
On track
When the HS2 train order was placed in 2021, it was thought that these trains would be carrying passengers to Manchester and Glasgow by 2033, and that only three out of 10 HS2 trains per hour would go to Birmingham. Now it is clear that it could be 2043 before WCML HS2 services commence.
The reasons for this delay and HS2’s cost increases are well documented. It is to be hoped that lessons about the management of major projects have been learnt by Government and the Civil Service.
Yet there are positive messages from HS2’s sad saga.
The Transport Secretary’s statement provides a firm commitment to complete HS2 from Euston to Handsacre Junction despite the high costs in the HS2 reset. It also seems clear that the HS2 project is now under control as HS2 CEO Mark Wilde uses his experience getting the Elizabeth line opened. This includes a staged approach to simplify the day one railway and a new HS2 organisation structure with improved delivery capacity, culture, and capability as well as setting HS2’s relationship with Government.
Hence HS2 is now at last on track. It is also delivering great railway engineering which, as earlier railway engineers did, will leave a lasting beneficial legacy.
Image credit: HS2