While attitudes can change (the Green Party has supported HS2 since September 2024), works are still a long way from fruition. The latest person to highlight issues is HS2 Ltd CEO Mark Wild, who said the programme has become “discontinuous and uncoordinated” at the High Speed Rail Group’s (HSRG) annual conference yesterday (7 May).
Speaking to an audience of industry leaders at Millennium Point conference centre in Birmingham, overlooking the building site for HS2’s future Curzon Street terminus, Wild first highlighted some major milestones for the project. Civil engineering is at least half-finished, he said, with tunnelling “virtually complete”. Another tunnel breakthrough is expected this Friday (9 May), and workers recently completed the heaviest ever ‘bridge slide’ in the UK.
It was not all good news, however. “We have a problem – a big problem – that five years into major construction, we are quite behind,” said Wild, who has been in the role for five months. Work should have been 70-80% complete at this point, he said, but the figure is more like a third – and the exact percentage is unclear because “the project has become disconnected from the reality of the site works”.
Slow progress is largely because parts of the programme have fallen out of sequence, he said. “What's happened in HS2 is the civil engineering has [been] delayed, which means the system engineering – fitting the computers, the wires – is now waiting for the civil engineering to finish… things have become parallel that need to be put back into series,” said the former Crossrail CEO.
Three things went wrong on the programme, he said: work started without a mature design, with a “rush to start” making it unproductive at the beginning; too little risk was placed on the supply chain, with government holding too much of it; and there was a lack of focus on future operation of the railway.
Despite being frank about previous issues – which, he said, he might have made himself if he had been involved at the time – Wild stressed that his words were not meant as criticism, and he praised the work of the thousands of employees and apprentices on the project.
He aims to tackle the result of the missteps with an ongoing project ‘reset’, with a main goal of putting works back into their “logical sequence”: civil engineering, followed by installation of the track, the overhead line, mechanical electrical systems, and then testing of the trains.
Providing a ’reliable route to the finish’
Originally proposed to open in 2026, Phase One of the railway from London to Birmingham is now forecast to open between 2029 and 2033, with an estimated total cost that could reach more than £80bn. The project’s initial vision has also been curtailed, with planned legs to Manchester and Leeds cancelled by previous Conservative governments. Speakers at the HSRG conference, including organisation director Jim Steer and Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, called on the government to commit to extending the line further, either to Crewe in Cheshire or further on to Manchester.
In his keynote speech, Wild stressed HS2’s vital importance to rail network capacity, rather than simply faster journeys. He also emphasised the line’s ability to reduce inequity around the country, a key theme echoed by Burnham and other speakers.
Asked by Professional Engineering how the project’s schedule had become disordered, he referenced US president Dwight Eisenhower, who found “plans to be pointless, but planning to be essential”.
“What he meant was, you form a plan and then you have to adapt it as you know more, because some things happen faster. And the bottom line for HS2 is the civil engineering has just been more difficult to do. More consents have been needed, so things have become out of sequence,” he said.
“There isn't actually any fundamental change to the project. It's not like we've got a big disruption in technology, a failure; it’s simply the fact that the sequence of the work has become discontinuous.”
The reset is “laser-focused”, he said, and is happening incrementally over 18 months. “The point of the reset is to form a reliable route to the finish, at a time and cost the government could rely on… The output for me is to produce the schedule that everybody can be productive,” he said.
He told the audience: “I am utterly determined that when this reset occurs over the next year or so, it will be the last time we reset this, to give certainty to get to the end of the job. There's nothing more corrosive to trust than the continual cycle of bad news of cost increases or schedule delays.”
He added: “I do feel the great weight of responsibility. We are spending money that could be used for other very, very worthwhile projects in Manchester, in Glasgow, Edinburgh, in Birmingham. I know the responsibility of that. We've got to drive up productivity and safety now, and reset the programme at the same time. We get one shot at it.”
Asked by Professional Engineering if he thought HS2 would eventually reach Crewe or Manchester, he replied: “It's not my job, I simply am building Phase One… which gets as far as Handsacre Junction and the approach to Euston, and it’s for the government. I’m not just kicking for touch, it’s literally: I don’t have that job, so I've got no knowledge of it.” Asked whether he would like to lead HS2 further, he said to ask again once Phase One has been completed.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.