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Britain’s new HS2 high-speed railway line offers “very poor value” for money and neither its managers nor the government are able to explain its benefits, a cross-party committee of MPs has warned.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak argued that it was worth continuing to build the first phase of the line between Birmingham and west London when he axed the northern leg of the project last October. But MPs on the House of Commons public accounts committee said in a report published on Wednesday there were “uncertainties in this assessment and we were left with little assurance over the calculations”.
The estimated cost of completing the part of the line that is still being built is now £59bn in 2019 prices or £67bn if adjusted for inflation. The price of the entire line to Leeds and Manchester was put at £32.7bn when it was approved in 2012.
The project has been unable to constrain costs in its main civil engineering contracts despite the committee calling for this to be addressed four years ago, the MPs said.
The poor cost management indicates a “failure of governance and oversight” at both HS2 Ltd, the arms length body running the project, and the Department for Transport, and follows years of warnings by the committee, the MPs said. They called for answers within six months as to how the management could improve.
Dame Meg Hillier MP, the committee chair, said: “Here we are after over a decade of our warnings on HS2’s management and spiralling costs — locked into the costly completion of a curtailed rump of a project and many unanswered questions and risks still attached to delivery of even this curtailed project.”
HS2 is still searching for a new chief executive after Mark Thurston left after six years in the post last July. Sir Jon Thompson, a senior civil servant, was appointed chair last February.
The decision to cancel HS2’s northern leg has left the DfT with many unresolved issues, including how to dispose of the £600mn of land and property that is no longer needed along the part of the route that has been cancelled, the MPs added.
In addition, Hillier expressed incredulity that passengers will get slower services than they currently do on the west coast mainline north of Birmingham as the new trains will have to travel slower than existing trains when they move on to the older tracks, the MPs said.
“How can the government now ensure that HS2 deliver the best possible value for the taxpayer?” she asked.
There are also urgent decisions to be made on funding the development of the HS2 station at Euston in central London, which is now dependent on attracting private finance to pay for it.
The committee said DfT did not yet have a “plausible or detailed proposition” it could take to the market and by stopping and restarting work at the station, the government risked adding to the costs.
HS2 said: “We’ve been clear about our cost challenges, which have been compounded by significant levels of inflation. HS2 Ltd is now under new leadership and implementing changes across the programme aimed at controlling costs and learning the lessons of the past.”
DfT did not respond to a request for comment.
