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HS2 contracts which should have cost £19.5 billion in total have already risen in price by another £6.5 billion, according to HS2 CEO Mark Wild.

Mr Wild was giving evidence to the Commons Transport Committee. He said that there had been ‘optimism bias’ when projects were being costed, and that control of the scheme had been lost

He has been brought in to undertake a complete ‘reset’ of the scheme, which should have welcomed its first passengers next year but has now been put back to an unknown opening date after 2033.

Only 60 per cent of the civil engineering on the route has been completed, although it should have been virtually finished by now.

He told the Committee: ‘The bottom line is that, at the notice to proceed, the contractors could not price the risk. What we’re seeing is the crystallisation of risk: they should have cost £19.5 billion and we’ve already spent £26 billion and we’re just over halfway done.

‘If you lose control of the programme, you end up at the extreme end of optimism bias, which ends up in delusion. The problem with HS2 is we lost control of the programme.’

He predicted an eventual ‘overspend’ of between 50 and 100 per cent.

Rail minister Lord Hendy, meanwhile, questioned the need for trains travelling at 350km/h.

He said: ‘It is hard to understand why there was such zealotry about the highest-speed railway in a relatively small country.’

The maximum speed on HS1 is 300km/h, and high speed lines on the continent rarely offer more than 320km/h, even though they cover much greater distances than the remaining section of HS2.

Readers’ comments

From the outset HS2 was a politician's vanity project hung on a lack of capacity on the West Coast Main Line. Thames-side ports will always be problematic because trains have to cross London. Going north, the Midland line has connections to the West Midlands and, effectively, four tracks all the way to Rotherham. Shortening block sections, improving junction layouts and speeding-up the freight trains themselves could provide capacity enough. At the southern end, if HS2 is not to be joined to HS1, why waste money going to Euston? Euston has poor onward connections whereas Old Oak has the Elizabeth and Underground lines. Terminate HS2 trains at Paddington, it also has useful Underground connections. As for running 400m long trains, anyone who has experienced these in Europe will know that they are customer-hostile towards the casual traveller. Any existing station will need a complete rebuild to accept them.

Chris Kyaw, Barnsley

Time to name names. Plenty of highly renumerated executives were retained for their 'expertise'. Where is the audit trail of who signed what off and when? Never mind the revolving door of politicians in the previous government who clearly didn't set clear budget limits. Time they were made to own the embarrassment of the explosion in cost.

Chris Jones-Bridger, Buckley, Flintshire

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