Cancelling the northern leg of High Speed Two (HS2) will cost the government up to £100m and take around three years to complete, it has been revealed.
A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed the cost of cancelling the section between Birmingham and Manchester could reach £100m, largely due to remediation works along the route.
The spending watchdog said the government had already spent £592m buying up land and property along the now-ditched route.
HS2 has battled soaring costs and delay for years, culminating in the former government’s controversial decision to axe the scheme’s northern leg to Manchester in October. There is doubt that the line will even reach Central London, as works on its Euston terminus continue to face delay, forcing officials to use West London’s Old Oak Common as a temporary final stop.
Total cost estimates from HS2 Ltd, the private company responsible for developing the project, are currently between £49bn and £57bn at 2019 prices, wildly ahead of initial forecasts.
Yet the NAO said it was unlikely HS2 would even meet a key goal of improving capacity on the West Coast Main Line, which runs from London to Glasgow and hosts the likes of Avanti West Coast.
Following the slashing of swathes of the route north of Birmingham, the NAO’s report concluded the embattled railway line would not “resolve capacity issues” on that section.
Ministers are planning for HS2 trains to run from the southern section of the track onto the West Coast Main Line, in place of conventional trains. But these will have fewer seats than existing services unless changes are made to the existing infrastructure and stations so that they can accommodate longer trains.
It means the government might have to look at encouraging people away from travelling on that section at all, creating a fresh set of problems for the north’s transport system.
A spokesperson from the High Speed Rail Group, representatives of the UK’s high-speed rail network, said: “This report makes clear the plan the incoming Labour government is inheriting – a truncated HS2, and a West Coast Main Line operating at capacity – is not going to help grow the national economy, nor is it going to allow train performance on the West Coast to return to acceptable levels.
“A line which fails to reach central London, and which worsens the bottleneck north of Birmingham is an inheritance that needs amendment.”
The spokesperson added: “High speed rail is essential to increasing capacity across our transport networks. Yet this report shows that current plans would cause the West Coast Main Line to be full up within a decade. What’s needed is extra capacity, not new bottlenecks.
City A.M. revealed last week that HS2 Limited, the private company overseeing the development of the railway line, is consulting over a series of sweeping job cuts and a major restructuring aimed at streamlining the business.
The restructuring was confirmed in the NAO’s report, which said the organisation had implemented a “new operating model and executive structure” to improve coordination.