Report Blames HS2 Failures on Political Pressure and Narrow High-Speed Focus

In October 2023, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the cancellation of HS2's northern legs — Phase 2a to Crewe and Phase 2b onward to Manchester and Leeds — citing uncontrollable costs. What had begun as a £17.2 billion project in 2012 had, by then, ballooned beyond £66 billion for Phase 1 alone [1]. Two years later, a stack of official and academic inquiries has produced a remarkably consistent diagnosis: HS2 was not simply expensive, but systematically broken by political interference, institutional weakness, and a design philosophy that prized speed above all else.

The most significant of these is the Stewart Review, an independent governance and assurance review commissioned by the Department for Transport and published in June 2025, which found that "the top-down vision of building a railway that would be the best and fastest has been a major factor in undermining attempts to introduce a culture of cost control" [2]. The government accepted all 89 of its recommendations.

The Cost Spiral: £17 Billion to £67 Billion

HS2's cost trajectory is the starkest measure of failure. When the Phase 1 business case was submitted in 2012, the London-to-Birmingham line was estimated at £17.2 billion. By the 2015 Spending Review, that figure had risen to £21.4 billion. The 2017 Thurston review pushed it to £27.2 billion. The 2019 Oakervee review — itself commissioned because of mounting alarm — recorded £40.3 billion. By 2022, the estimate stood at £49 billion, and by 2024 it reached approximately £66.6 billion in current prices [3]. That represents a 134% increase in real terms over a decade [4].

Source: House of Commons Library / NAO

Data as of Jul 1, 2025CSV

On a per-kilometre basis, the numbers are even more striking. HS2 Phase 1 costs approximately £250 million per kilometre. Spain has built its high-speed network — now the most extensive in Europe — at roughly £15 million per kilometre [5]. France's average is around £17 million per kilometre, and even Italy, whose high-speed lines pass through more mountainous terrain, averages £43 million per kilometre [6]. The international median sits at approximately £32 million per kilometre [5]. HS2 costs nearly eight times that figure.

Source: Transit Costs Project / Britain Remade

Data as of Jun 1, 2025CSV

Some of the gap is explicable. HS2 runs through one of the most densely built-up corridors in Europe. Land acquisition, environmental mitigation, and tunnelling through the Chilterns all add genuine cost. Ferrovial's boss, whose company has built high-speed rail across Europe, noted that UK planning requirements, utility diversions, and environmental obligations impose costs that continental projects simply do not face [6]. But density and regulation cannot account for a sevenfold premium. The Stewart Review, the National Audit Office, and the Productivity Institute have all pointed to structural and political factors as the primary explanation.

Political Pressure: When Ministers Overrode Engineers

The Stewart Review identified a recurring pattern: political decisions overrode engineering and procurement recommendations at critical junctures, compressing schedules and forcing contracts to be signed before designs were mature [2].

The most consequential intervention came early. Ministers treated 2026 as an immovable deadline for Phase 1 completion, a target set more by political ambition than engineering reality. HS2 Ltd was pushed to award major civils contracts before adequate ground condition data existed, effectively converting fixed-price contracts into cost-plus arrangements where taxpayers absorbed every risk [4]. The Productivity Institute's February 2025 report, authored by Graham Winch, identified this "schedule compression" as one of two root causes of the cost explosion, noting that the perceived immovability of the deadline "drove a number of project governance failures" [4].

The pattern repeated at each political transition. The project was conceived under the Labour government of Gordon Brown, championed by Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis from 2009. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition inherited it in 2010, and successive Transport Secretaries — Philip Hammond, Justine Greening, Patrick McLoughlin, Chris Grayling, and Grant Shapps — each imposed shifting priorities [7]. Chris Grayling's tenure was marked by the decision to proceed with a full hybrid bill for Phase 2b before Phase 2a construction had even begun, stretching HS2 Ltd's already-thin resources [8]. The Oakervee review, commissioned by Boris Johnson's government in 2019, was widely seen as a mechanism to provide political cover for whatever decision Downing Street ultimately made [7].

The Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society published an academic analysis in 2024 titled "What killed HS2?" that traced the loss of political support to a combination of rising costs, shifting regional policy, and the absence of a stable cross-party consensus — unlike in Spain, where successive governments of both left and right built on each other's high-speed rail commitments [7].

The 'High-Speed Focus' Critique — and Its Limits

The Stewart Review's central claim — that an obsessive focus on maximum speed drove costs — deserves scrutiny. HS2 was designed for 360 km/h operation, faster than France's TGV network (320 km/h) and Spain's AVE (310 km/h). The review argued that designing for this speed required wider curves, longer tunnels, and more land acquisition, all of which inflated costs without proportionate journey-time benefits [2].

But was a lower-speed, higher-capacity upgrade of the existing West Coast Main Line (WCML) ever seriously evaluated as an alternative? The evidence suggests it was — and rejected on capacity grounds. The Department for Transport commissioned a formal "Review of Strategic Alternatives to High Speed Two" which concluded that neither of the proposed WCML upgrade packages would "provide sufficient capacity to meet forecast demand" [9]. A separate analysis found that addressing capacity constraints on the existing line would require approximately 220 km of new high-speed bypasses costing £17–19 billion, presenting "sustainability and engineering challenges similar to those for a new line" [9].

The Greengauge 21 think tank, in a March 2025 response to the Winch report, pushed back on the "high-speed focus" narrative more directly, arguing that the specification was not inherently flawed and that the real failures lay in delivery, not design [10]. Their position amounts to a counter-case: that absent political interference and institutional dysfunction, the original HS2 specification was technically and financially achievable, and that blaming "speed" is a post-hoc rationalisation that conveniently shifts attention from the political decisions that actually caused the cost explosion.

This counter-argument has some force. France built its LGV Est line at 320 km/h for a fraction of HS2's cost. The speed itself was not the problem; the problem was pursuing that speed within a governance system incapable of controlling costs while doing so. The "narrow high-speed focus" critique and the "political interference" critique are not mutually exclusive, but the evidence suggests the latter was more consequential.

A Revolving Door at the Top

HS2 Ltd has had four chief executives in its history: Alison Munro (2009–2014), Simon Kirby (2014–2017), Mark Thurston (2017–2023), and, following an interim period under Chief Financial Officer Alan Foster, Mark Wild (appointed late 2024) [11][12]. A new chair, Mike Brown, arrived alongside six new non-executive directors, and the organisation cut 300 corporate roles in a push toward what it called a "less bureaucratic model," with half of those staff redeployed to construction sites [13].

The Winch report characterised HS2 Ltd as "a start-up organisation" that "was never given enough time or resource to establish itself properly" and was "clearly struggling from as early as 2015" [4]. The Stewart Review echoed this, finding that both HS2 Ltd and the Department for Transport's sponsor team were "consistently underpowered" — the delivery body lacked the capability to manage a project of this scale, and the DfT sponsor team lacked commercial and delivery experience [14].

Mark Thurston's departure in July 2023, after six and a half years, came as the project's cost and schedule problems were reaching a political crisis point. His tenure spanned the period of greatest cost escalation, but whether this reflected personal failings or systemic dysfunction is contested. The Stewart Review placed the weight of blame on the system — on governance structures, ministerial interference, and institutional capacity — rather than on individual executives [2].

Who Pays: The North Bears the Cost

The cancellation of Phase 2 was framed by the Sunak government as fiscal prudence, accompanied by a promise of alternative investment through a programme called "Network North." The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), in its February 2025 report, was blunt in its assessment: the truncated HS2, running only from London to the West Midlands, "offers very poor value for money to the taxpayer" [15]. The committee noted that the Department and HS2 Ltd "do not yet know what it expects the final benefits of the programme to be" [15].

The economic consequences fall disproportionately on the Midlands and the North of England. The Federation of Small Businesses estimated that HS2 together with Northern Powerhouse Rail would have added £9 billion annually to Greater Manchester's economy and unlocked nearly 100,000 jobs [16]. The Department for Transport itself acknowledged that the West Coast Main Line will reach capacity by the late 2030s as a consequence of not building Phase 2 [17].

Written evidence submitted to Parliament warned that the cancellation damages business confidence and "puts off potential investors," telling them "the UK is not a reliable nation" for long-term infrastructure commitments [16]. Local authorities in Manchester, Birmingham, and along the proposed route have been left unable to plan strategic development because the infrastructure assumptions underpinning their growth plans have been withdrawn [16].

The distributional impact tracks existing inequalities. Communities in the North of England — already characterised by lower productivity, lower wages, and greater reliance on public transport — lose the connectivity gains that were central to the "levelling up" agenda. No independent modelling has been published quantifying the precise 20-year economic divergence between North and South attributable specifically to Phase 2's cancellation, but the PAC's verdict that the truncated scheme represents "very poor value for money" implicitly acknowledges that the project's benefits were always concentrated in the phases that no longer exist [15].

Governance: Why Britain Cannot Build

The institutional question raised by HS2 is whether the UK's structure for major infrastructure — the interplay between HM Treasury, the Department for Transport, and arm's-length delivery bodies — is fundamentally ill-suited to projects of this scale.

The Institute for Government, in its analysis "HS2: Lessons for Future Infrastructure Projects," found that the failures "spanning across its lifecycle from conception through to delivery and from governmental sponsorship through planning and consenting" [14]. The Stewart Review recommended a new governance structure including a shareholder board, a programme board with independent members, specialist sub-boards, and five-year funding cycles with flexibility to move money between years [2].

The contrast with continental Europe is instructive. Spain's ADIF (Administrador de Infraestructuras Ferroviarias) operates as an integrated infrastructure manager with continuity across political cycles. High-speed rail in Spain became what one analysis described as "a national project supported by governments across the political spectrum, with each administration building on the achievements of the previous one" [18]. France moved from direct state delivery to Public-Private Partnerships from 2006 onward, where contractors took on financing, design, construction, and maintenance responsibilities — distributing risk more effectively than HS2's model, where contractors bore little risk while taxpayers bore nearly all of it [19].

HM Treasury has since announced reforms, including seconding qualified civil engineers to scrutinise departmental cost estimates and implementing the Office for Value for Money's recommendations on governance for mega-projects [14]. Whether these reforms are sufficient, or merely the latest in a long line of post-mortems that change little, remains to be seen.

What Remains

HS2 Phase 1 — London Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street — continues under construction, though the March 2026 six-monthly report to Parliament confirmed further civils slippage [20]. The Euston terminus itself remains subject to a separate redesign, with cost and scope still unresolved [15]. Mark Wild, the current CEO, has been pushing HS2 Ltd toward a leaner operating model, sending head-office managers out to construction sites [13].

The PAC's most recent report urged the government "to set out what benefit can be salvaged for taxpayer" from the truncated project [21]. The question is no longer whether HS2 went wrong — the evidence on that point is overwhelming and consistent across multiple independent reviews — but whether the UK has learned enough to prevent the same pattern from repeating on the next major project.

The Stewart Review's 89 recommendations are a start. But recommendations are cheap. What HS2 needed, and what Britain's infrastructure system still lacks, is a governance model that insulates engineering decisions from electoral cycles, holds delivery bodies accountable without micromanaging them, and treats cost control as a design principle rather than an afterthought. Until that changes, the UK will keep paying multiples of what its European neighbours spend to build less.