The fate of HS2 will soon be decided and news of the much-hyped Oakervee Review has started to leak. It seems to recommend that the project should go ahead in full (onwards to Manchester and Leeds from Birmingham) but concedes that potential costs are too high. HS2 now cannot be delivered within its £56bn budget, and £88bn is the more pragmatic figure. I’m the editor of RAIL magazine and we’ve been covering it for over ten years and I’ve noticed how much people aren’t being told. So here’s my attempt to distil the costs story into a few paragraphs.
In the beginning, HS2 costs were estimated at about £34bn. To guard against cost overruns, HM Treasury loaded heavy contingencies – I recall a figure of at least 40 per cent – which helped drive estimates to around £56bn.
In 2010, the Treasury stirred in a further assumption that bedevils HS2 still. It assumed construction would achieve 20 per cent efficiencies through new techniques and technologies.
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