MPs’ new scathing attack on mounting HS2 cost

FRESH doubts over the final cost of HS2 were raised last night after MPs warned the project’s bosses had been ‘blindsided by contact with reality’.

In a damning report, they warned the £100billion high-speed link had been blown ‘badly off course’.

Embarrassingly for Boris Johnson, the verdict from the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee comes just three months after the Prime Minister gave the project the green light.

MPs raised serious doubts about whether the Transport Department could deliver HS2, saying they were not convinced Whitehall and the project leaders had the ‘skills and capability they need, now or in the future’.

And they questioned why HS2 chief executive Mark Thurston was paid a £46,000 bonus in 2019, despite his £605,350 salary and the project’s expected cost soaring to what is now feared to be as much as £106 billion.

There was also a rebuke for the department’s top official, Bernadette Kelly, for withholding from the committee when giving evidence in 2018 and 2019 the fact that the scheme was ‘in significant difficulty’.

Committee chairman, Labour MP Meg Hillier, warned that both the Transport Department and HS2 officials ‘appear to have been blindsided by contact with reality’

She added: ‘The committee is concerned about how open the department and HS2 Ltd executives have been in their account of this project.

‘It is massively over budget and delayed before work has even begun.

‘There is no excuse for hiding the nature and extent of the problems the project was facing from Parliament and the taxpayer.’