Last week the six-monthly HS2 update to Parliament was published. There were three notable things in it: the Mark Wild reset plan was being delayed, they were considering making the trains run slower and HS2 has been badly mismanaged.
- DfT press release: Transport Secretary tasks HS2 with reducing construction time and cost to taxpayers
- Written statement to Parliament: HS2 6-monthly report to Parliament: March 2026
Heidi Alexander, Secretary of State for Transport, told Parliament that
“Mark Wild’s work on the reset has shown that HS2 Ltd did not have an accurate assessment of how much work had been delivered, or of how much was left to do. It is now clear that previous plans significantly underestimated the work required…
“…I am determined to explore every opportunity to remove the over-specification and complexity from this project to bring down costs and delivery timelines.”
She went on to write about the design speeds of HS2 compared to the rest of the world:
“On current specification, HS2 trains will run at 360 kilometres per hour (kph), which would make them the fastest conventional high-speed trains anywhere in the world.
“The definition of high-speed covers trains running at least 250 kph. China and Spain have the highest design speeds of 350 kph. The maximum commercial passenger speed on the UK conventional rail network is 200 kph, and HS1 runs at 300 kph.
“However, no railway in the UK, or globally, is currently engineered for 360 kph.”
For years the DfT have argued that if you are going to build a new railway you should make it fast, really fast. For example see this article from 2015.
Slowing the trains will have “negligible impact on projected journey times“, according to the press release, but we were told that slowing the trains would have a massive downgrading of the benefits of a new railway.
(And did you spot the reference to “conventional high-speed trains”?)
Justine Greening told Parliament in 2012
“A high speed line will deliver £6.2 billion more in benefits to the country than a line running at conventional speeds, at an extra cost of only £1.4 billion.”
Those figures are laughably out of date, but they prompt the question of what will happen to the supposed benefit cost ratio if HS2 is slower. Given that the last government had by 2024 “accepted that delivering only Phase 1 will not be value for money, as its total costs significantly outweigh its benefits”, it becomes increasingly farcical to argue that a slower version of HS2 should be built at all.
However the articles in outlets like the FT (paywall) and the BBC published before the report came out actually understated the timing of Wild’s report, saying it would come out after the May elections.
In fact Heidi Alexander says she asked Wild to “report back to me before the summer recess”, whilst the press release says ‘in the summer’. Technically, this is after the May elections, but months later than implied. (And astronomical summer ends at the autumn equinox, which this year is the 23rd of September.)
Alexander told Parliament she is
“eager not to make this decision prematurely… and I will be considering his advice carefully”.
In other words, don’t expect an announcement soon after she gets the report. It won’t be there for the party conferences, it probably won’t come this year.
It’s rare that politicians publicly warn people of slow decision making, it usually seems to happen by accident.
HS2 is a complete joke. We’ve said before that reviews of HS2 end with some combination of delaying the project, increasing the budget or dropping parts of the project. They are now running out of ways to reduce the scope of HS2, and are now on the verge of slowly dropping the ‘High’ from High Speed 2.
Here’s an alternative: just cancel HS2 entirely as soon as possible.