Carry on reviewing

The Independent on Sunday has revealed (2 June 2013) that HS2 Ltd — the Department for Transport company charged with planning Britain’s high speed rail network — is trying to find further savings, having only just finished its first cost review.

HS2’s first cost-cutting exercise, known as Baseline 2, highlighted concerns over issues such as professional fees and VAT. In recent weeks, Baseline 3 has started, which is said to probe the more detailed design work and examine technical details that could be altered to help get costs under control.

[…] Joe Rukin, campaign manager at Stop HS2, said: “They’ve reviewed the costs and immediately started a review of the review of the costs. HS2 Ltd hasn’t been able to get a single figure right; there’s not a single figure that we trust.

“What really worries people is that in the end it won’t be construction costs that get squeezed but mitigation and compensation [for homeowners and businesses that are forced to move].”

Stop HS2 is holding a convention in Staffordshire at the end of this month, when around 600 protesters will be given what Mr Rukin described as a “crash course” in campaigning against the project.

[…] It is also believed that a row is brewing over how HS2 should be built. It had been thought that a large private sector organisation or consortium would be brought in to oversee construction, which is what happened at the London 2012 Olympics after it was discovered that the original budget was a wild underestimate of the real cost.

Instead, it appears that the DfT wants to keep control of the project itself. Last month Andrew McNaughton, technical director of HS2, said that the UK had become over-reliant on the type of multinational engineers that manage some of the country’s biggest projects.

The Channel Tunnel Rail Link (HS1) was designed to a French specification, and largely built by foreign multinationals. The government decided not to entrust Network Rail, the successor to Railtrack, with planning HS2.

Railtrack’s mismanagement of the West Coast Main Line modernisation cost billions, and the American multinational Bechtel had to be brought in to clean up. In January 2012, another American multinational, CH2M Hill, was appointed by HS2 Ltd as its ‘development partner’.