Rishi Sunak is finally expected to make a decision on the future of HS2 before his speech to the Tory party conference on Wednesday – with the second leg of the high-speed rail network north of Birmingham, and potentially the final miles in London from Old Oak Common to Euston, at risk.
The prime minister has said he wants to tackle HS2’s “out-of-control” costs – but billions of pounds already spent risk being wasted if the line is not completed. So what are the big numbers that might sway his decision one way or the other?
£100bn
The figure – widely estimated as the total cost for producing the network – has never been confirmed, nor even officially been in HS2’s budget. But it appears to have been a threshold no minister ever wanted to hit.
The Oakervee review of the project commissioned by Boris Johnson came at a moment when costs were speculated to have hit £106bn, according to a top-end estimate leaked from the draft report. That led to the pruning of the eastern leg confirmed in the integrated rail plan, whose budget – including northern rail schemes – was kept under the line at £96bn.
Now, the official HS2 budget of £71bn at 2019 figures is due for restatement. According to some long-term critics, notably Lord Berkeley and the surveyor Michael Byng, the price is at least double that. HS2 dismiss their estimate. But rising construction costs, plus the yet-to-be-factored-in bill for the eastern stump to the east Midlands, would almost certainly break the £100bn barrier at 2023 prices – unless more is axed.
£24.7bn
The amount already spent in total on HS2, at 2019 prices, including about £2.3bn in preparatory works and land and property acquisitions for the second phases. That money is divided fairly equally between phase 2a to Crewe, 2b to Manchester and the not-quite-dead eastern leg, with the government still spending money drawing up new options for the ill-served rail corridor from Birmingham towards Leeds.
26%
Startling even in the context of rampant overall inflation, the annual rate of construction material price rises peaked at 26% in June last year, while HS2 was eating up steel and reinforced concrete for the civil engineering works between London and Birmingham. Labour costs have also risen fast. Those new price realities, of course, do not only affect HS2 but whatever other schemes the government decides on.
£3.4bn
The total amount spent buying up land and properties for the original route of HS2 – including £584m on the planned legs north of Birmingham, with more than 400 houses bought on the way from Crewe to Manchester alone.
£4.8bn
The revised price of rebuilding Euston station, up from an initial overoptimistic £2.6bn, is illustrative in several ways: the escalating budget and the temptation to save some of that money by lopping off the end of the route in London. It also highlights how government indecision has driven up the price.
Not only have delays led to far higher construction costs because of inflation over time, but HS2 has also had to write off £100m worth of initial designs as the specifications changed. In the words of a damning public accounts committee report, the government was still “not clear what it is trying to achieve” at the revised station. Meanwhile, hundreds of homes, as well as businesses and green spaces, have been bulldozed in the surrounding area.
£11.5bn
The budget for other rail schemes has also ballooned, not least in the north – supposedly where funds could be diverted. The TransPennine route upgrade to improve journeys between Manchester and Leeds – with all the disruption of working on a live railway rather than building a new line – is now four times its original £2.9bn budget, according to the National Audit Office.
28,500
The number of people in the construction industry now working on HS2, according to the Department for Transport, including more than 1,000 who have come through on apprenticeships, and more than 3,000 who were previously unemployed. Longer-term careers in the UK are now in question. The line from Crewe to Manchester alone was expected to directly employ 17,500 people.
43
The number of HS2 Ltd employees earning more than £150,000 a year, helping fuel criticism that the management costs of the project are excessive. Mark Thurston, the chief executive who left HS2 on Friday, was paid £676,000 last year and was by some distance the UK’s highest-paid public official.
14 years
The period for which there would need to be weekend closures on other mainline railways to upgrade existing lines if HS2 were scrapped, according to Network Rail testimony to ministers in 2020. Even if Sunak does give the HS2 leg to Manchester a stay of execution, the DfT expects its eventual opening to be delayed, with trains expected in the mid-2040s rather than the original 2033.
Redesigning and legislating for Northern Powerhouse Rail could result in further decades elapsing, if the work done to pass the bill enabling the high-speed route to Manchester is jettisoned, given that the core design of NPR depends on about 22km of HS2 track.
