HS2 ‘badly off course’, warns damning report by MPs

HIGH SPEED 2 is “badly off course” and it is unclear that the firm building the £100billion rail line has the necessary “skills and capability”, according to a damning report by Parliament’s most influential committee.

The public accounts committee accuses the Department for Transport (DfT) of withholding information about HS2’s spiralling costs, as its members said they were “unconvinced” that the budget would not rise further. In a highly critical report, MPs suggest that

Bernadette Kelly, the DfT’s most senior official, may have broken the Civil Service code, after her “failure to explicitly inform the committee of the programme’s delays and overspend”, when questioned in Parliament.

It will fuel calls for the scheme to be scrapped, with critics calling for the money to be directed to services such as superfast broadband, after Covid-19 caused a collapse in rail use.

Last night, Andrea Leadsom, the former business secretary, said: “The way we travel will change after coronavirus, and HS2’s economic and social benefits should now be reconsidered.”

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Sir Bernard Jenkin, a member of the committee, says the DfT’s “lack of transparency further undermines public confidence that HS2 is necessary or subject to accountable governance.”

Lord Berkeley, the Labour peer who was deputy chairman of the review of the scheme, said: “Billions of taxpayers’ money has already been wasted, and much more will be in the future unless Parliament and ministers get a grip.”

Meg Hillier, the chairman of the committee, said: “There is no excuse for hiding the nature and extent of the problems the project was facing from Parliament and the taxpayer.”

It comes after The Sunday Telegraph disclosed in March that MPs on the committee believed Ms Kelly withheld information from Parliament.

DfT denied she breached the ministerial code.

Ms Hillier said the DfT and HS2 Ltd appeared to have been “blindsided by contact with reality”, as she pointed out

that one set of official costs rose from a predicted £245million, to £1.2billion, in just a few years.

The report, described by Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the committee’s deputy chairman, as the most critical in his nine years on the panel, states: “The [HS2] programme has gone badly offcourse and is now estimated to cost up to £88billion, significantly more than the original budget of £55.7billion (both figures are 2015 prices).

“We are unconvinced that there will not be further cost increases. We are not yet convinced that the Department and HS2 Ltd have the skills and capability they need now or in the future.”

It adds: “The Permanent Secretary withheld from us that the programme was in significant difficulty when she appeared before the previous committee in October 2018 and May 2019, even in response to specific questions about the programme’s delivery timeline and budget ... Failure of an Accounting Officer to provide accurate information to Parliament is potentially a breach of the Civil Service Code.” Boris Johnson approved the project in February, conceding that its final cost would “probably be north of £100billion”.

A DfT spokesman said Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, made clear that the scheme would now involve “clear transparency, strengthened accountability to ministers, and tight control of costs”. The spokesman added: “The Permanent Secretary acknowledged in May 2019 that there were cost pressures that the department and HS2 Ltd were working to address... Those discussions were active and commercially confidential.”

£100bn

Boris Johnson has said the final cost of HS2 was likely to be north of £100 billion as he approved the project in February