Originally conceived by a Labour government in 2009, the plan for a high-speed railway network connecting London with the north of England has evolved almost beyond recognition in the intervening years.
The line, which was meant to cost less than £35bn and run all the way to Manchester and Leeds, is now set to cost more than £100bn and stop in Birmingham.
The Government has even suggested it might not run at the record-breaking speed initially promised, meaning journey times might not be much shorter.
Here, The i Paper takes a look at the maps and charts which show exactly how HS2 was scaled down, rolled back and cut away to what is promised today.
The original planned HS2 route – December 2010
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government continued to work with HS2 Ltd, which had been set up by their predecessors.
They published a route for consultation in 2010, which extended from London to Birmingham, before splitting off in a Y-shape to Leeds and Manchester.
After the public consultation period, which saw many Conservative MPs face backlash from their constituents in rural areas over the impact on their homes, the then-transport secretary, Justine Greening, announced the government would go ahead with the scheme in January 2012.
The project was meant to deliver “direct, high capacity, high speed links between London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, with intermediate stations in the East Midlands and South Yorkshire”.
It was expected to cost £32.7bn (in 2011 prices) and was due to open in 2026.
The initial rollback – November 2021
By the time construction began in September 2020, HS2 had already suffered delays and public scandals, with the resignation of the chairman in 2019 amid criticism of mismanagement.
The budget had already been increased under former prime minister Boris Johnson’s government in 2020 to £44.6bn (in 2019 prices) for the London to Birmingham leg only.
In November 2021, the Government announced it was scrapping the leg between the East Midlands and Leeds, with the eastern leg terminating near Nottingham.
The Government estimated at the time that this would save £18bn.
The second rollback – October 2023
Two years on, costs had continued to spiral, with the Government forced to pause construction at Euston in March 2023 as spending topped £4.8bn, far exceeding the £2.6bn budget.
Part of this cost came from removing tunnels dug by environmental activists in Euston Square Gardens in 2021.
Trains were instead planned to terminate at Old Oak Common, a West London station, until the 2040s.
Then, in October 2022, Rishi Sunak used his conference speech to announce that the western part of the Y-shaped route, between Birmingham and Manchester, was to be axed, just as its eastern counterpart had been two years earlier.
Former transport secretary Grant Shapps announced a plan to “direct spending away” from HS2 and into other regional transport schemes in the north of England soon after.
He said the pandemic and construction delays had “weakened the economic case” for the railway line.
There was backlash from across the political spectrum for Sunak’s scrapping of the scheme, including from MPs whose constituencies lie on the route and Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.
The official ‘reset’
The Labour Government committed to continuing with HS2 when it took office in 2024, but commissioned a review into spending and progress, and appointed a new CEO, Mark Wild, who oversaw the delivery of London’s Elizabeth Line.
The report, carried out by Sir Stephen Lovegrove, cited “gold-plated” engineering solutions as one of the major flaws in HS2, leading to expensive and unnecessary additions such as the £100m bat tunnel in Buckinghamshire.
Trains will start running between Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street between 2036 and 2039, extending to Euston and Handsacre Junction in the Midlands between 2040 and 2043.
Trains will also run at 320kph, rather than 360kph as previously announced, bringing it in line with other European high-speed trains.
This will reduce the time saving on the part of the route still going ahead, which was estimated in 2023 to be 36 minutes – from one hour 21 minutes to 45 minutes.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said this week that HS2 will now cost between £87.7 and £102.7bn in today’s prices, including connecting it to Euston.
This is around £80bn in 2019 prices, so twice what Johnson had allocated in 2021.
She condemned the soaring costs of the project and said the previous government had “spent most of HS2’s budget without laying a single metre of its track”.
The cost had already been raised in 2013 and 2015 before work had started, to account for the cost of the trains and rising construction costs.
Alexander told the Commons that further cost increases were down to “past misunderstanding of the work required, underestimation and inefficiency”.
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